Define the world of your fictional story. Who is Charlie Holiday and what is the scope of his world?
As my character develops, I need to define the boundaries–and the escapes–of the world he exists in.
Charlie Holiday is evolving. He’s growing and learning and experiencing life as he knows it–and as he has never known it before.
What are the boundaries of the world he inhabits? If he has (or is to acquire) magical powers, what are they and what can they do? What are their limits? What are their rules?
Does he know them? Can he influence them? How does he know what can and cannot happen? Is that just up to the author, the one channeling this story from wherever it’s coming from?
These are his questions. Let’s define some answers.
The World of Charlie Holiday
Ah, he smiles that we’re even here talking about this, writing about his world. He is honored and humbled. Just that we’re writing about him at all–for better or worse–tells him that he has somehow made a splash, a tiny ripple in the greater universes that validate his existence. Life is good.
Even if he might be a fictional character.
Might be.
He flitters on the fringes of reality. Since his first encounter in Florence, he’s not sure what is up or down, what can and cannot. Even he doesn’t know the boundaries of his world–but that’s a good thing.
In fact, that’s just it.
He’s open to a new set of boundaries. What used to be the limit for him no longer exists. He doesn’t know where the boundaries begin or end and he’s OK with that. He no longer needs the rulebook behind it all, the law, the paragraph seven, article nine where it says that what might happen might happen.
He’s rolling with it. He’s OK with it. He even embraces it.
That’s the world Charlie Holiday inhabits.
Whereas I, just the messenger here, thought that I would write this out and describe what can and cannot in his world, the truth is, I don’t know either.
Charlie’s world as I see it, for the reader to understand it, if the reader is perhaps the one who needs the rulebook, the instruction manual, or the playbook, is a world that is just slightly, a teensy bit outside of the world he knew.
I know, I know. “Yeah, great, but does that mean he can fly? Can he make objects appear? Can he read into the minds of others or better yet, influence the minds of others?
Here’s your answer: I don’t know.
Here are two questions I’d like readers to ask when experiencing Charlie’s world:
- Wow. Is that really possible?
- Is that possible for me?
A bit of excitement (Wow.), but then a bit of wonder. If you’re looking for cold, hard examples: what might we “accept” in our worlds right now? Dragons and flying vampire warthogs? Well, not me anyway. But the power of the mind to influence our bodies, how the power of our thoughts have more influence than we once believed? That certain “frequencies” of energy that our bodies resonate on have more to it than meets the eye. Ha, little joke there: it’s not what meets the eye, but what is beyond the eyes, beyond what we can see with just our eyeballs, retinas, and all of that other goo that lives in there.
What else might we see? What exists maybe for others that we still think is crazy or fantastical or even, dare I use the word: magic?
That’s it.
Is it really possible for the reader to believe that it might happen at all, to someone else? Then if it might happen to the reader. That maybe, possibly, in the off chance that all of this wasn’t just in a novel but if it might really be happening to others in the real world, might it be possible that it could happen to them?
That’s what I’m after.
