I’ve collected Legos on and off since I was a kid, castles mostly, although I dabbled in the town, space, and pirate themes a little. When I was a kid my favorite thing to do was build castles and spend hours playing with them, inventing stories as I went, playing out new “episodes” with none of the adult terror of losing a good narrative to the ages. I didn’t need to write it down. I didn’t need to preserve it. Play was the end goal.

Now, as an adult, I enjoy building the sets and posing the mini-figures in battle scenes, but I don’t invent stories with them the way I used to. For one, it feels a bit silly to do the voices, but also there is this strange sensation that giving the mini-figures names and back stories somehow limits their possibility. It gives them a mythology that I’m either forced to preserve or continually revamp. I am never satisfied.  So I refrain from that. I resist the temptation, though sometimes it’s difficult. It’s a bit awkward to admit strong opinions and feelings about little plastic blocks, but there it is.

Lego Diorama Plan - click for full version

What I do enjoy, though, is building a world with them, creating a scale that allows for many different possibilities. Two years ago I planned a huge Lego Diorama, an epically scaled display that would incorporate my favorite Lego castles and something akin to war gaming terrain: Styrofoam mountains, rivers, and fields, covered in plaster of Paris, and painted. The thing was epic – 3 feet by 12 feet, with very rough plans for expansion into a 6 foot by 18 foot version.

Sorry for the awful iPhone picture, this is the only picture I have of it.

I even started building the first section of the thing, but decided to abandon it when I moved from one apartment to the next – aside from feeling very “adult” at the time, which always causes a purge in everything but “serious” creative things (which is a shame), this type of hobby is simply unsuitable for apartment living. I need a house with a basement, which is still a number of years away. So when I moved I tossed the thing into the dumpster. All I have left is a few pictures of my progress.

Still, I often think about it, with conflicted emotions, almost like one would think about an old girlfriend or missed relationship. It’s bittersweet, in an awkward way that you can’t really share with anyone else.  Certainly you can attempt to explain it, but no one ever understands. It just comes out sounding dumb or overly sentimental.

But lately I’ve been wondering, trying to sort out why this idea, this world building, these little plastic figures and bricks and castles matter so much to me. As a rule I hate the fantasy genre. It seems so stale and predictable to me, all those swords and spells that just can’t evoke any narrative magic. But Lego castle is still my favorite genre. There’s that quandary, too.

A long time ago, when I barely started writing here, almost two years ago now, I wrote about “universes.” Not the star-filled thing we live in, but universes in the world-building sense, the kind of universe someone would mean when they said something like “the Star Wars universe” or the “Lord of the Rings universe.” My complaint was that there is a certain point, once a story had been mythologized into “cannon,” that imagination and possibility is severely limited. After that, I had no interest in reading yet another story about Luke Skywalker’s adventures. I knew what he was capable of, and what the “universe” was configured to support, plot-wise.

That idea translates into my fear of giving my Lego mini-figures back stories or a permanent narrative arc. I don’t want to think of the gold-crowned king who came with my big grey castle as “Harold, the King of Mystasia.” Or whatever. I don’t want to know his personality, because it makes it less malleable. I would rather build the little plastic dudes a world where they could be anything I wanted them to be, at just that moment. Capture scenes, rather than characters and “lore” (god, I have such a powerful distain for that word as applied to the fantasy genre).

But could this characterlessness, this world building idea, still be applied to written narrative somehow? Could you write a good book or story with this as a driving force, building a loose structure but no specifics? I’m not sure. Good stories are usually about tying down the details of who the characters are, providing them with limits in hopes that they can overcome those limits. Would a story that was all action and no character be incredibly dull? Hemingway seemed to pull it off, sometimes, writing stories that were mostly just facts, but there was still some characterization there, too, not to mention that his stories took place in our world – he didn’t need to define the countries for readers. We understand the factions.

Okay, so my buddy and I might have actually played Brikwars one time. http://www.brikwars.com/

Now, mini-figures are pretty small. They have little painted faces and limbs with a single joint and holes in their feet so you can stick them to things. They are viewed by us as though they are small, insignificant things. To them we are gods. It’s funny, because some writers consider themselves gods of their own worlds, as well, but these writers still learn about their characters lives, create details for them, humanize them. Writers bring themselves down from heaven to interact with their characters.

But could it be done another way? Could the scale of the story be pulled backwards and upwards until the level of characterization was no more than mini-figures? Would that ruin the story? Could you write adventure or tragedy without major characters or “universe” building?

I don’t know.

But I’m curious to see someone try to tell a story without characterization, from a high, top-level view, with an emphasis on limiting the amount of details that removed possibility from the world. Is a story about “a knight” less interesting, inherently, than a story about “John Fighammer, Champion of the Kingdom of Nostro, Slayer of the Giant of Kroth, Weilder of the Basalt Battleaxe”?

My fear is yes.  My hope is no. Because I think there is something to this idea, that the addition of all those names and details and ridiculous “lore” takes something human from the characters that can’t be brought back, no matter how epic the world.

Of course, it could just be that most fantasy writers are hacks.

Hard to tell.

However, it does have its drawbacks. Fear of failure is the top of the list, as well as social comparison. But those things are well documented (by better writers than me), so there’s no sense retreading old ground. Instead, I want to talk about one of the minor drawbacks to being a writer (though it might be a boon, if you’re the half-full glass sort), and that’s something I call writing the self. Hold on to your hats, we’re about to get all deep and shit (ha!).

The thing about writers is that they are both creators of culture and also perhaps those most easily swayed by it. The reason for this is that writers exist in the realm of ideas more than non-writers, if for no other reason than we spend long hours thinking up stuff that doesn’t exist and pretending it does. It means that other stuff that doesn’t exist can hold great sway over us, since imaginary stuff is very real to us.

This is fine and all well and good – it allows writing to happen – but it also makes us more susceptible to powerful ideas that we didn’t imagine, ideas that someone else imagined, like social concepts. Justice and love are just as imaginary as the characters in a novel, both are ideas and can have an effect on our lives, but have no physical location in the “real world.” (I don’t want to get into a debate here about love and justice existing or not existing here: show me a handful of justice and you’ll prove me wrong. Until then, just chill and listen to my armchair philosophizing. These things are ideas. The fact that they are so pervasive just makes them POWERFUL ideas.)

There are many social ideas we’ve given cultural power by adopting, but the one I want to discuss here is the idea of being an adult, and why it can be problematic. The thing is, writers believe so strongly in the power of imaginary ideas that we have no problem taking an imaginary idea and believing it has a bigger effect on our lives than someone who didn’t spend so much time imagining things.

The idea that I’ve become an adult is something I’ve done my best to adopt, but because I didn’t know what exactly being an adult entailed, when it seemed like it was time for me to be an adult, I reached for cultural markers, imaginary standards, and did my best to emulate them.

This involved two things: the completion of common adult milestones (college, real job, paying bills, etc.), and a reach into the religious mythos of the past, specifically Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 11.

Both the milestones and the biblical advice are imaginary ideas, but because I am a writer (someone who entertains imaginary ideas on a regular basis), it was easy for me to accede to the cultural power of these ideas. I made them my own. In effect, I took ideas and wrote my self.

I’m not sure if other writers have struggled with this or not, but it seems my experience that my association with imaginary things has made commonly accepted social concepts very easy to adopt without knowing it. They just sort of sneak their way in, and invoke very powerful feelings, because I take imaginary things seriously. The problem with that is that adopting ideas without knowing it can lead to some very strange results.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved Lego blocks and comic books. If I had to guess why, I’d say it was because I love the power of imagination contained in the mediums. Building a Lego castle is very similar to writing – blocks of ABS plastic can be arranged in countless different forms, but the blocks stay the same. I feel like words are similar (even though words do change, over many years).

I wasn’t a poor kid growing up, but I wasn’t rich, either. So when I got a new Lego set, or a new comic books, I would have fun with it, but also spend hours flipping through the included Lego catalog, or list of comic book back issues I missed, and tell myself that when I grew up I would buy all the Legos and comic books I wanted.

Then, of course, I did grow up, or at least, I got older. It happens to everyone. But beyond that, I wrote myself as an adult, adopted all the ideas that I thought would make me an adult. But I still wanted Legos and comic books. So I bought them.

It’s funny: I avoided Legos and comic books for so long because I’d written onto my self that adults don’t want those things anymore. But then, once I saw that the whole idea of an adult was just a cultural ideal I’d adopted, it was imaginary, and I’m susceptible to imaginary things, I bought a bunch of Legos and comic books and enjoyed the hell out of them. I rewrote what I thought an adult was, or maybe just said to hell with it, and didn’t worry about being an “adult” anymore. I’m not sure which it was.

Either way, it frightens me how easy it was, once I started thinking about it, to rewrite things I thought I knew about myself. Thinking about it further, the ease I had, rewriting my adopted idea of what an adult is, I wonder if that’s the reason that writers and artists seem like they are always on the forefront of “causes” and why they sometimes seem to be the strongest proponents those causes, only to switch to something else 15 minutes later.

I guess you could call that wishy-washy. I think I’d call it rewriting the self. The thing is, the imaginary is so strong for us, and we develop such fluency with it, that trying on multiple ideologies like suits or hats (or pick your favorite clothing simile) is easy. This rewriting of the self is probably why I love the internet so much, because without physicality, it’s easy to rewrite who I am to the rest of the world.
I don’t know, myself by talking about writers doing this I’m grouping in more people than should be lumped in. Maybe it’s not writers. Maybe it’s just my generation. Maybe it’s just me. I’m not sure.

I’m just surprised by how it is to rewrite the self, when the rest of the world seems to struggle with it so much.

-m.