If you spend enough time with a story, it will reveal all of the secrets of its construction.

Aaliyah Bilal

“Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.”

Tobias Wolff

It was over. Grace leaned back in her chair and stared through the solid wall into her imagination: giant seas, tiny rafts rising and falling on them, rain or snow or sleet, howling winds. If they were not all dead, what would they be doing? How long could they survive in the cold, with just the resources in those rafts?

Elizabeth Moon, Cold Welcome

The world was their orphanage.

Lorrie Moore, “Wings”

I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees.

The National, “Bloodbuzz Ohio”

A little later, remembering man’s earthly origin, “dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return,” they like to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying “We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!”

Flora Thompson, Lark Rise

“It was time at last for a full renunciation of the way I had been living, fast then slow, the blood and brain, the inner dynamo.”
—Edward McWhinney, “Down the Harbor”

You can use world-building to distract yourself during a never-ending catastrophe. But that same process can also help you (and others) imagine a path to liberation.

The best world-building contains the seeds of change, and allows us to see how things could be different. And conversely, a lot of mediocre world building contains the unspoken message that “This is the way things are, just because. And there’s no point in questioning any of it.” How things work is often not as interesting as how they don’t work. And the ways that they should work, if things were better. And the way things used to work, until something went wrong (or right).

Charlie Jane Anders in Never Say You Can’t Survive

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Jack London

My best stories are usually the ones where I had a clear idea in my head of what I was exploring. Those are the stories where the plot and the story, and the concerns of the characters, are tightly bound up with the narrative’s thematic concerns. Likewise, as a reader, I get more wrapped up in a story that seems to have something specific on its mind.

Conversely, stories that I can tell were written without much introspection on the part of the author often feel mechanistic to me – things happen because they happen. The characters go through the motions, but none of it has much weight beyond the stakes of the plot.

Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can’t Survive