Worldbuilding (20 minute read)
Happy Friday!
For the first five years after I broke in I looked forward to this holiday dead zone because it meant a break from pre-production on both seasons of EXTANT, the writers room on THE STRAIN, and a brief respite between production and post-production on REVERIE. This year the idea of a month with nothing going on makes the inside of my skull itchy.
This reminds me, in mid-December of 2017 I wrote and covered set for the final episode of REVERIE. While we were shooting on the Universal lot I got run over by a golf cart driven by one of the executive producers from WORLD OF DANCE. I had to go to the lot’s emergency room to make sure I didn’t have a concussion. When I got back to set later that evening someone on the crew had drawn a chalk circle where I got laid out.
Good times.
Because we’re entering the dead zone I’m spending time on the crime novel and just starting to experiment with putting short stories on Kindle. I did a brief experiment with self-publishing a middle-grade novella in 2012 and the whole ecosystem has changed since then. What excites me about things like Kindle Vella is that you can come with an idea, write it, and start reaching out to an audience the moment you think it’s ready. It seems like a good way to test the stickiness of an idea. If someone reads your piece and reaches out to tell you they enjoyed it, or better yet, they share it with someone else, then hey, maybe you're on to something.
This first short story is called “The Billboard." It's about a rural Midwestern town plunged into chaos following the appearance of a mysterious billboard that has the ability to broadcast the deepest, darkest secrets of its citizens. It’s pretty dark, one of the ideas that I came away with after visiting Binghamton and immersing myself in THE TWILIGHT ZONE again. The link is below if you want to check it out. In terms of a content warning, there is violence and death, as well as mentions of drug abuse and suicide.
Amazon.com: The Billboard eBook : Fisher, Mickey: Books — www.amazon.com Amazon.com: The Billboard eBook : Fisher, Mickey: Books
Worldbuilding
As I’m going back to the drawing board for development I’m starting to think about some of the ideas on the back burner that will require a bit more worldbuilding. It’s one of the questions I get asked a lot in podcasts and Q&A’s and I still haven’t come with anything resembling a personal “core tenets of building the world of your story” but there are a few simple guidelines I keep coming back to.
The most obvious one is that the world of the story has to be inherently tied to the themes and the emotional journey of the characters. The world of EXTANT was a near-future world where space had been privatized and we were on the brink of creating a new race of entirely lifelike androids. The pilot sets up the idea of first contact and that Molly may have brought an alien entity to Earth, setting off a fight for survival among humans, aliens, and humanichs.
Some of the early research that I did was reading about people like Ray Kurzweil and his predictions regarding the singularity,” when the growth of technology would be beyond our point of control, leading to an inflection point that would change the course of human history. A fairly common target for these predictions was around 2045. My shorthand answer when people asked when exactly EXTANT took place was “In about 30 years.” This became an in-joke for the production team who made it the fictional name for our show on the yellow signs pointing cast and crew to the locations. If you were driving around LA in 2013/2014 and saw signs for “30 YEARS” that was us.
From there I did a lot of research into what technology might be like then. I put in things like self-driving cars, projection screens on refrigerators, and a recycling compactor that crunched all your stuff into a tidy little cube which then would get picked up by a drone in the alley. Some of it was just thinking about how we would continue to innovate for convenience and adding them as grace notes to the characters’ daily lives. One of our rules in the writers room was “Cool shit gets thrown away,” meaning the gadget or the service could never be the point of the scene. It had to be part of the fabric of the show, in service of story and character.
The thesis at the heart of EXTANT was that part of being human was our connection to each other, that the highest form of that connection was love, and that the highest expression of love is sacrifice. That was what our little humanich boy, Ethan, had to learn. In order for him to be invested in our survival he had to learn to “love” us. The way he learned that was through his parents and finally forging a real bond with his mom, which would in turn help her save our species from extinction.
All of the little details of our world had to support that story and to keep the audience anchored in our thirty-years-in-the-future timeline. We wanted to maintain the illusion of the future and occasionally make the audience go, “I wish we had that.” I remember one of the really fun small details, I think it was from Peter Ocko, was a flat-bottomed egg. You know how eggs are roll around on the counter, right? What if they had a flat bottom and you could just stand them up? It was a quirky, fun little detail that added to the illusion.
So many of these little worldbuilding details came from conversations in the writers room and the production team. Some of them came from questions from executives at CBS. At some point somebody asked us why Ethan had to eat. We knew we wanted him to eat because sitting down and breaking bread together is a basic human activity and place of connection. John would have wanted him to be part of that and not feel out of place, but was there a practical reason? We got on the phone with a roboticist who talked us through a bunch of reasons why it might be helpful. I took a lot of these thoughts and created a document called “The Care and Feeding of an Android Boy” that I gave to the writing staff as a way for us to form a base of working knowledge.
Here’s an excerpt:
“How does Molly see Ethan? It’s clear from the pilot that she’s having trouble reconnecting to Ethan, especially once she learns that she could possibly have a baby of her own. But, she’s striving to connect with him and I firmly believe that as an audience member, we have to root for them to connect. There may be plenty of members of the audience who will never wrap their heads around how a human could love a machine. But, we also have to take into account the millions of sci-fi fans and the century of sci-fi books, films and television where this isn’t going to be a leap at all. We have to remember that some of the greatest storytellers of the last hundred years have already laid some of this groundwork for us. Arguably the most beloved robot of all time, R2-D2 isn’t even humanoid, he’s a rolling trash can, but people view him as a distinct, real, personality, imbued with human traits.
How does the outside world view Ethan? The answers are as varied and as vast as there are people. There are people who will accept him and people who won’t. There are people who may think he’s a freak and people who will be curious and people who will find him fascinating. I don’t think we should limit ourself to any one viewpoint, but rather use each circumstance and encounter to find a new angle on it.
How does he eat and why? Ethan has two systems that power his existence. The first is a “battery” pack that powers his locomotive movement and most of his processes. The battery panel is located in his back and every few days or so (depending on how much energy he’s exerted) he needs to change it out in a process he and his dad nicknamed “the flip.” There are always a few backups running on the charger and there is always enough residual power to keep him going while the flip is happening.
The second energy system he has going is a food based system that delivers nutrients to keep his synthetic skin healthy and hydrated. The food he eats is broken down into just enough energy to keep his skin from cracking and drying out and the rest is compacted into compost pellets. Even though he doesn’t necessarily have highly developed taste buds he does have sensors for heat and cold and is into textures. So things like ice cream or gummy worms are fun for him to eat. What food doesn’t do is help him grow in any way. That’s for John and his partners to do when they upgrade him.”
For BARBARELLA I created a section of the pitch called “Our Future History” that talked about how the Earth of our future came to be and how that sets up Barbarella’s emotional journey:
“In our future history, hundreds of years from now, humanity has suffered through an age of environmental cataclysm and violent war brought about by our insatiable appetites and living to excess. Facing extinction, we launched into a new Golden Age of Interstellar Exploration.
In the process, we put down roots on other planets, and we made a shocking discovery — we were not alone in the universe. In the end, the ingenuity of a handful of our best and brightest scientists saved us from certain doom. (At least that was the public story. We’ll get to the ugly truth in just a bit.) But afterward, Unified Earth became the power center of THE MULTI-PLANETARY COALITION, ruling over our closest member planets.
Having learned their lesson, Earth began imposing strict guidelines for its citizens. They placed far less value on emotions and far more on logic, and rationality. Moderation and self-restraint became our highest virtues. At the same time…
Innovation in technology and abundance of resources meant people lived far longer lives. Because of the longer lifespan, a person might have three or four significant relationships and raise multiple sets of children with different partners in their lifetime. Relationships became more casual. Sexuality became more fluid. But, this evolution came at a cost. Over time, our deeper connections eroded. Losing our ability to feel emotions meant losing our foundation for empathy. This is true for pretty much all of humanity… except for BARBARELLA."
In both of these cases the worldbuilding spun out from the character and the emotional story at the heart of the show. As I was writing the pilot I kept coming back to those ideas and asking the “what if” questions to mine them for more detail. For instance, in the pilot Barbarella cuts loose at a club that was built in the catacombs under Paris, a place where people can indulge in the hedonism they're denied up above. On the way in she passes a street preacher who is railing against all who enter. He tells Barbarella, “This place will only lead to the destruction of mind and body,” to which Barbarella replies, “I’m counting on it.”
Once you have the thematic foundation for your world you can mine it for everything from ongoing storylines to the smallest little throwaway details. My personal favorite grace note that never made it to screen on EXTANT was a scene where Ethan goes to a bakery with his dad to pick up a cake. He notices a sign on the counter that says, “Made by moms, not by bots,” with a little robot with an “X” drawn through it. It was a small detail but it said a lot about the world. It came from writing up that background on him and then thinking about different ways to dramatize those ideas.
REVERIE centered around a company that created a fully-immersive virtual reality world of the user's design. There were hours and hours of discussion about how people pay for it, how many people are using it. Is it wide-spread or exclusive? Are there subsidies that make it available for low-income users or is it just for rich people? Are there psych-evals or do they just let anyone do it? If people are being denied the chance to use it, presumably there's a black market. Some of those discussions drove me crazy but in the end those hours led to some great new ideas for stories.
If you’re creating a new story world or magic system, ask yourself why this and not something else? Your first answer may be, “Because it’s cool,” and that’s okay. But you’re going to get hundreds, if not thousands, of questions about this world in success. The more time you spend figuring out why you were subconsciously drawn to it and how to make it work to support your characters the better off you'll be.