In the Incredibles, Honey Best is Frozone’s wife. There is an event that she had spent two months planning when Syndrome’s Omnidroid attacks. We will never know what that event was, or ever know anything more about Honey. She was simply a character in a scene intended to give us a laugh.
But what if when reading Incredibles (yes, just go with me here) when we got to Honey’s part we could divert off and read her entire story. Imagine if every character you read in a story had a complete character arc.
Now imagine a world with a thousand characters, all living their own lives, all interacting with each other, all sharing and collaborating in each other’s stories.
Now imagine ten thousand characters.
This is the dream of Open World Stories. To create a vast world for writers to fully realised characters. To create a world that is simply too large to read everything in so that every reader has to find their own path through the stories. They have to find their own characters to love and hate.
A reader would enter the world by browsing the in world newspaper. This would list active storylines. Births and deaths and articles written by in world journalists. Or they could enter the Hall of Records, and browse characters, places, and police reports.
There would be a multitude of paths to choose, but this just touches on the depth that is offered. When finding a story that they are intrigued by a reader would be able to see the entire edit history of the piece. To see how the original author wrote it, how editors improved it. Whether screenwriters had incorporated that scene into any screenplays. Behind that, there would be the underlying plot that the piece was written into, and the discussion that happened around bringing it into being.
Open World Stories would also be a place that encourages experimental writing, readers should be exposed to styles, characters, formats and ideas that they’ve never experienced before.
We want to give readers worlds that are unique, exciting and compelling. So they will be happy giving financial support to the people who created those worlds.
If you are interested in helping to create this — come and have a chat
