We have talked about how to represent a real location
in your stories
but you will probably
almost certainly, at some point or other
have to create a place that isn't real.
To create a world is a bit of a challenge
but it is certainly not beyond your capabilities.
Just remember that your world that you're creating
should have internal consistency.
It doesn't matter whether it is nothing like our world at all
it can have even different physical rules.
But those rules should be self-consistent.
Whether you're talking about a world
like Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.
Whether you're talking about a world
like Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea.
Or whether you're talking about the fabulous
horrifically overgrown Eden
of Brian Catling's extraordinary Vorrh trilogy
where you've got a forest
that has somehow spread to…
through space and time
to be in every conceivable country in the world at once
and to also somehow be in different time periods.
This is a fantastic piece of imagining
and even with all of that fantastic imagination
you can keep it consistent.
One way to create an imaginary world
is by considering its texture
because this is one of the first things
that the reader will be looking for.
They will want this to feel like a real world.
And what I mean by texture is all of the trappings
that we find around us in society
that we barely notice
advertisements, scraps of news broadcasts
television programmes, scraps of songs on the radio
all of these things that make up the texture of our lives.
If you want to create an imaginary place
try faking some of that.
I have done it in a number of my works
because it is very successful.
In the feature film The Show, we decided that, yes
this was going to be set in Northampton
but it wasn't going to be our Northampton.
We decided that we would make up all of the songs
that are heard on the radio.
I would write those songs with musicians
so that we could make the whole musical backdrop of the world
keyed in to the ideas that we were discussing.
We came up with imaginary television shows
for the characters to be watching on TV.
For example, there was a popular
EastEnders-like serial
called Wittgenstein Terrace, which was quite like EastEnders
but with more of a focus upon German philosophy.
That was quite amusing.
And we would have products.
We would have… What was it?
"Pet Noodles."
This was packets of Pot Noodles
that had got sinister pictures of missing pets
on the actual containers.
We came up with different names for newspapers.
We came up with headlines for those newspapers.
I came up with a celebrity magazine
called "Clammy".
I had written all of the contents
of that magazine about imaginary celebrities
and the things that they were doing.
You can absolutely create
a genuinely real experience
that is just like reality
by simply
coming up with your own versions of these things.
When I was doing the…
the Halo Jones comic strip
where I wanted to immerse the readers in the reality
of this 50th-century world that I was imagining
and what I did was to dump the readers
what is called "in medias res".
It's where you dump them
right in the middle of everything
without explaining it.
So, they arrive in the story halfway through a news broadcast
that is talking about unfathomable things
using unfathomable slang.
It's talking about celebrities like Algae Baron Lux Roth Chop
who you have never heard of
but this will give you the sense of being dumped in a real place
and having to figure it all out.
Which is actually
quite a satisfying experience for the reader.
It's not necessarily alienating
because if they've got a chance of figuring things out
they will delight in doing that.
It's what human beings do. We like to figure things out.
When it comes to creating places
that may be very, very different
to any place that actually exists in the material world
I suppose the best example I could give from my own work
would be one of the comic books
that I wrote…
10, 20 years ago.
It was a thing called Top 10.
This was ostensibly a superhero comic.
I had originally thought
"Yeah, that sounds like it could be a superhero group
of some sort, a superhero team."
However, in my experience, they don't work.
They never work
because you've got seven or eight characters
you can't really pay enough attention to any of them.
So, they all become kind of bland and interchangeable.
It's not really functional.
I thought, "How could you make a superhero team functional?"
I thought, "Well, possibly
you could make them
maybe a police squad."
Because I'd noticed that a lot of the American police dramas
seemed to handle quite a large cast of characters
and you never forgot who any of them were
and it all worked perfectly, dramatically.
Maybe something like that would work with superheroes.
Yeah, you've got a team of super policemen.
But no, that wouldn't work, would it?
Because it would just be like a team of superheroes
who were calling themselves police.
The only way that that would work
like an American crime drama or a police drama works
is if they were working in a city
where everybody else was a superhero too
or a super villain or a super pet
or a super associate.
So I started to conceive of a world where
in the 1930s or the 1940s
America suddenly realised
that it was getting far too big a population
of comic book characters.
That all of these superheroes
were actually really socially disruptive
and that nobody wanted to live next door to any of them
because there'd always be a space invasion
or some insane, superpowered tyrant
trying to take over the world
which would be disrupting the whole street.
Your kids wouldn't be able to get to school.
So, the solution is, let's put all of these people
in a city that's specially built for them.
And so, this was the beginning of the idea of Neopolis
where everybody is a failed superhero
or a superhero who is no longer allowed to be a vigilante.
The only people enforcing the law in Neopolis
are the police department, who are all superheroes.
The rest of the population…
If you think about it, most superpowers are useless.
If you have, say, heat vision…
how is that going to benefit you in any way?
What, you can set fire to things?
If you've got a box of matches, you can set fire to things.
The only thing that heat vision would be good for
is if you became some sort of short-order chef
somebody who could grill those hot dogs
just by looking at them.
Or superspeed.
If you could run really fast
what is there that's that important
that you have to get there that early?
What good would that power actually be?
What job would you get with super speed?
I'll tell you what job you'd get.
You'd be in pizza delivery.
There'd be all of these super-speed characters
flashing around the city, delivering people's pizzas.
Basically, any super power that you can think of
you can think of a really mundane job
that would work with it.
And so we were able to build up
the whole of Neopolis from the ground up.
We were able to think of things like
"OK, so how does society work?"
A lot of these citizens, a lot of them are aliens
from other solar systems.
They're strange supernatural characters
with all sorts of appearances.
I don't see how racism would work in a city like that.
I don't think there'd be any racism
because if you're surrounded by aliens
and things from other dimensions
people of another colour
it's not really going to register.
However, there would be bigotries, wouldn't there?
And I thought
"So, if there's not antagonism to other races
who will be the receptacle
for all of that social anger and bitterness?"
And I thought, "Probably the robots."
The robots in Neopolis are second-class citizens.
They are referred to, contemptuously, as "clickers".
And they have their own form of music
which is called "scrap" music.
They live in a ghetto
that is known disparagingly as "Tin Town".
And you have fantastic dramatic things
that you can do with that.
By taking all of these things
that you've introduced to the story
you can then think, "OK, what would happen…?
We haven't got any robot policemen, have we?"
"Why don't I introduce a robot policeman
who is actually much more capable
than anybody else on the squad?"
He can solve all of the crimes all by himself
and handle them all by himself.
And the problems that that would have
for whatever new partner he was given
who might have lost a partner of their own
and don't much care to have this machine
that is suddenly supposed to be partnering them.
You can get some incredibly touching things
out of a situation like that.
And it's just a side effect
of one of these things that you have imagined
for this imaginary city that you're creating.
It will lead to great story ideas
if you start to think about all of the different parts of it.
What about the super pets?
There would be hundreds of super dogs
super cats, super mice, all of those creatures.
So what is vermin control like in the city of Neopolis?
We did a storyline where one of the policeman's mother
has got an infestation of super mice.
So she calls in the pest control officer
the Exverminator, as he calls himself
because everybody's a superhero
and he decides that the best solution for super mice
is Atom Cats.
So, he releases all of these superpowered cats.
Unfortunately, it turns into a huge crossover event
where animal deities
are facing off against each other.
Eventually, it ends with one of them
actually changing the whole of reality
and changing the whole of time
so that, in fact, the initial infestation
that has led to all this
didn't actually happen
which is fine for everybody, except for the Exverminator
who has done all of this work
only to have it cancelled out of existence.
This is the kind of thing that you have to think about
if you're going to think seriously
about these absurd places and these absurd situations.
Basically, with creating a place
it is almost a godlike experience.
You create every element, every atom of that world.
Every person in it, every interaction
is all being created by you.
And it can be a very exhilarating
very heady, and importantly, a totally immersive experience
for you and for the reader.