Today is a writing day. I'm part time in my job, so I get two of these a week. I'll soon have a half day on Sunday too now that a certain secret project has come to an end.

I'm about two weeks away from finishing a major draft of my second book. Once I've sent that off to the Ficklingites (editors), I'll have a bit of time to get in more reading or tackle a few short stories that are moping around in my subconscious.

There's a story I once heard about the famous director, Peter Brook. I have no idea if it's true, but it goes something like this. When he was in India to direct his masterpiece, “The Mahabharata”, he took his jeep down some dirt track of a road and came up against a religious procession marching in the opposite direction. It was part of a festival in honour of the death goddess, Kali. You know the one, all those arms and weapons, the collection of human skulls. As with most celebrations of this type in India, a young woman led the villagers dressed up as the goddess.

When the jeep came along, she stepped politely off the road along with everybody else. “I knew then,” said Brook, “that the spirit of theatre in India was long dead.”

You see, Kali would never have stepped aside. Her stare should have been enough to send the snivelling foreigners crawling off on their bellies, praying that she would ignore their presence and pass them by. But the girl didn't believe she was Death incarnate. In fact, she knew she wasn't. And because she knew this, all the villagers and the tourists knew it too.

World building, is an essential part of all stories, including the nonfiction ones. And it won't work without belief.

On a board, far far away, there is a discussion about maps in fantasy books. One of the contributors, DB18, made the following comment: “I'm a writer first, and a worldbuilder second.” By this, I'm sure he meant something along the lines of “Character and plot and style are more important than years spent inventing languages and drawing detailed maps.” Most sane readers could have no argument with that. But, in my mind, world building is something that goes far deeper than such trappings.

Upstairs, I have a book called, “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini. Here is a man who grew up in Afghanistan and who has written two novels so far set in that country. World building is as fundamental to his work as it was to the writings of every fantasy author since Homer. His Afghanistan is an invented one. Not because the writer is lying to us, or trying to exaggerate, but because he has chosen what to show us, and when he made those choices, he did so from the tiny subset of knowledge about that (or any other) country that one individual can know. It doesn't matter that he lived there; it doesn't matter how much research he may have done: it is a limited recreation of the original, and its success as an illusion depends on the skill of the artist and the desire of the reader to believe.

Both writer and reader know that the world is no more real than the set of a stage play. But that's OK, because in theatre there is an agreement: the audience will ignore the fact that the King's crown is made of plastic, so long as the actor playing the part seems to feel the weight of it.

World building is all about belief. The author has to take his setting seriously. He might choose the Tolkien method, or go for a more impressionistic approach like Margo Lanagan seems to do in her short stories. He might cobble together a few off the shelf components, such as bits of European history or Chinese culture. It doesn't matter. Even if the map stops suddenly just after Mordor, there must be no indication this is the case. The author has to inhabit his own world, run simulations of it so that it makes sense and feels vast. By the time he releases his creation to the reading public, it must be robust enough that none of the characters will betray the illusion through their actions. They know it's real.

I once read a book set in ancient Rome where everybody acted as though they were 20^th century New Yorkers. This was not done on purpose, I hasten to add. I didn't get further than 20 pages. I'd been hoping to spot Kali, instead it was just a bunch of peasants stinking of dung. I drove on.