Most fiction authors imagine a world as a setting for their creations, then populate this world with characters who act out their stories. This is not an easy exercise. Authors have faulty memories, and there can be discrepancies in descriptions: for example, in the first chapter, the car was red with chrome bumpers, by chapter eight, the chrome had magically become black. Also, it is often quite hard to imagine scenes in detail. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to experience worlds we create in our minds? Would it not be amazing if we could check details and share our created worlds with someone else? That is what we have done to help us create the world of The Convenient, our first novel. We built a virtual world.
The world of The Convenient is in The Great Canadian Grid https://www.greatcanadiangrid.ca/, which is a community you can join free as a member and purchase virtual land to build on. It is very much like the better-known alternative called Second Life https://secondlife.com/. Over the course of a year we built the virtual town of Torrport in the Great Canadian Grid as a setting for The Convenient and made avatars to represent the characters in the book. We did this while writing the book. It was fun to do both, and the building of the virtual world gave us many plot ideas.
Another advantage of creating with a virtual world is that people can more easily collaborate on a project. They can “see” the same scenes, react to the same situations and characters, etc. It helped us considerably. It was if we were there together, living our book as we wrote it. In these virtual worlds, you can take pictures of scenes to download for easy reference and even role play scenes before writing them. Your virtual world can not only be used as an aid in writing books, but also screen plays, stage productions, and in the creation of visual arts. In our case, we built a town. Perhaps your virtual world will be a space craft, a theatre, or an enchanted forest. You can build almost anything you can imagine.
There is always a downside, isn’t there. Sometimes more than one. For many, creating virtual worlds will be too much to learn, for others, the costs per month may make it unaffordable. Don’t be discouraged! Start slow, take some courses, find some free land. If you enjoy it, keep going. It will cost you nothing but time at first, and you may find that building is half the fun. We did! If you would like any more info about getting started, contact us. We are glad to help.
Here are a few pics from Torrport. The first is a scene from the town and the second of our two main characters, Elspeth MacLeod and Malcolm Forrester.
Albert Marsolais 
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