All Along the Watchtower

[unbibium]

"All Along the Watchtower" is coming up again in my life, this time on a blog.

A blogger argued against fiction's obsession with worldbuilding, and one response states:

For me, three-decker fantasy worlds became obsolete the day Bob Dylan wrote “All Along the Watchtower”, & got the worldbuilding effect in 130 words. For that, you can bet he didn’t “construct” a whole world then pare it down to a couple of perfect indices.

I confess: I don't quite understand the nature of the song.  I've seen the lyrics online, they don't really strike me one way or the other.  They stick in my brain, but don't do much else.

Comments

[skyknyt.livejournal.com]

I don't see an autobiographical song really relates to a "three decker world" but I think that creating a giant world and then allowing that understanding of it to filter into a story is really the preferred method of storytelling. At least, in my mind.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

When effort is spent on worldbuilding at the expense of the story, that's bad. But good worldbuilding helps prevent moments in the story where the reader has to work at suspending disbelief. In the end, the worldbuilding should be part of the story, and not the other way around.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Worldbuilding may not manifest in the stereotypical manner. One of the books that, for me, gave the greatest sense of a real, lived-in world was Frederik Pohl's Gateway, and it's not a giant fantasy brick but a thin little book with a story that moves right along. For that matter, some things about the world he portrays might not stand up to prolonged analysis, but nevertheless when reading the book I get an overpowering feeling of looking through a peephole at an entire society full of human beings dealing with their own little problems. Maybe it's just the pages he inserts that excerpt documents from the fictional world--academic lectures, want ads, newswire articles, flyers pasted on walls.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Yay! I so heartily agree that worldbuilding is not necessarily represented by that one book about how the Star Trek universe works. It's like any other pattern-implying bunch of information: can be done artfully or exhaustively, and the results are completely different.