Building an Integrated Universe

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King is a major influence on me as a writer. It is up there with Lord of the Rings, in my mind. But, story aside, what has interested me for a long time now was how it became the hub of all King’s work. It started out small, I think in Wizard & Glass, when he made reference to The Stand and Captain Trips. What it eventually grew into was a universe that held all of his other books and characters, and did it all in a very organic way. He even ended up in the story himself, as himself, in a very meta fashion that served the plot well.

The only other example of something like this that I can name offhand was Robert Heinlein’s ending of Number of the Beast, another favorite classic. At the end, the protagonists have gathered their favorite people from many universes into one place for a sort of convention/reunion, including Lazarus Long, and Valentine Michael Smith, the hero of Stranger in a Strange Land. I think Heinlein himself also makes a cameo. Heinlein’s expanded universe and future history did provide a framework for a significant part of his work, furthermore.

With those influences at play, it’s no wonder that I found myself working along similar lines as I developed my stories.

I think the first time it happened, I had written a character that briefly appeared in my sci-fi/fantasy novella Hurricane Regina. Her name was Renee Hollander, and she was ballsy, brash, funny, and hot. She deserved her own story. And has one, although I haven’t even typed up what I wrote about her, so far. Her novel Reduction of Forces is an industrial construction murder mystery of sorts, and details her early life as well as her time as the head of the world’s largest construction outfit, Zen Construction.

Radar Love has always existed as a standalone story. But when I was writing it, my fiancée at the time, and this is hard to explain (there may have been drugs involved), felt that Janique was becoming too powerful. We roleplayed with her, we enacted things that we later put into the book, and she was becoming a force to be reckoned with.

So, we invented the character Prail. She was calculated to be the opposite of Janique in every way, and would serve to counteract her. Her novella, Perfect Me, flirts with Douglas Adams’s universe directly (and I have paid dearly for that…), but it also incorporated stuff from my musical career, such as it was, and includes parody versions of me and my little brother, as High-C and O.D. Drugwar. High-C, the non-space, non-glorified version, is also a primary character in my Zombie Killa novella.

But when I got around to writing the sequel, Cure for Sanity, I found Prail and Janique working together. That is when things really began to get weird. Janique, my character, makes numerous attempts to kill me, the author. Not only that, but she takes a crack at King, as well. In a strange sense, the series not only ties into my works, but into King and Adams’s, as well. Multiverse stuff is fun like that. That book also makes reference to the third novel involving Janique, Penultimate Hustle: L.A., which parallels that point in its own story. I just stumbled upon that line in my re-read before I attempt to finish it, and was enormously pleased with myself and the way it turned out.

Pageburner also existed in a bubble, for a long time. While some people have asked for a sequel, and I have even mused over the idea numerous times, it has never happened. Until it kind of did. Forever Daddy, another untyped, uncompleted work, sits at some forty-thousand words, with a lot left to say. It ended up being the prequel to Reduction of Forces. Renee is in it, of course, but so is Paige and Jean from Pageburner, and Janique Turner makes a cameo in it as well. It is now somehow the hub of all my stories. All the integration feels very good and natural, and that pleases me to no end.

With very little prompting and prodding, I now find myself having written a good 12,000 words in the past few days on an entirely unforeseen project. My narrator of Radar Love felt that perhaps someday the character Tokio could have his own story. Whatever writing logjam I had in me broke loose with that idea, and seven chapters in, we meet little Maxine Jackson, who we know as Maxxy from Pageburner. The real meta stuff about that novel, though, is that it is written by one of my characters, Janice Livingston, about another of my characters. I’m no longer sure what role I play in the creation of these stories, other than moving my fingers on a keyboard. They all seem to have lives of their own, independent of me.

I guess the point of this column is that you can add an entire layer of richness and complexity to your stories if you approach them in this fashion. I don’t suggest you try and shoehorn things like this in. If it don’t fit, don’t force it. But if you’re aware of the technique and approach, what you end up with after several novels is an entire universe for the reader. They might not explore every aspect of it, but the ones they do will be a little more familiar to them each time, and it all adds up to a more enjoyable experience overall. Or such is my perception of things, anyway.