Read an interesting, thought-provoking, lengthy blog post by Austin Kleon from last fall in which he equates storytelling with “world-building.” His argument reminded me of my musings from a few weeks ago in which I questioned whether digital storytelling is a genre or form of applied storytelling as opposed to a medium for rendering storytelling. When Kleon says, “my argument is that the artist can see written fiction, comics, and film as multiple disciplines on the spectrum of storytelling,” it sounds as though he’s saying that fiction, comics, and film also are tools for telling stories rather then genres of storytelling themselves.

But Kleon’s real point is even more interesting. Now, granted, he’s talking about fiction, comics, and film — a bit outside the main applied-storytelling focus of A Storied Career — but it’s fascinating to think about whether this world-building concept connects to applied storytelling. Again, his piece was quite lengthy (as blog posts go), and the final paragraph that I’m excerpting below probably doesn’t do the full post justice, but here it is:

Although [artists] all have different ideas about what a story is and how you build and present a story, if we accept that what each discipline does is world-build, then we can use the term “world-building” to move fluidly between disciplines. When we have the world-building tools and processes mastered from multiple disciplines of storytelling — whether it be drawing in the case of comics, or writing in the case of fiction — we can use these tools and processes across disciplines to generate the worlds that we imagine.

This concept was reinforced when my best friend e-mailed me recently to say: “Once in awhile I get really carried away by a movie or TV show or book and can’t stop thinking about the fictional world.”

To what extent do applied-storytelling practitioners create worlds with the stories they tell? Think about stories you’re worked with and consider what “worlds” they may have created. Discuss.