Story world questions

About a week ago, I was at a concert with a great group of people. During the very first song, the people sitting in the seats in front of us told us to keep quiet. Of course, this had the complete opposite effect than what they intended. But it made me wonder what type of reality they were living in to be upset over people singing at a concert.

In one of the side streets close to my work, lives a person who doesn’t like it when people park in front of her house. She lives in a beautifully renovated cottage, built at the turn of the century, with a Beamer parked in the driveway and a Mercedes taking up space in the garage. I’ve often wondered – What type of reality is she living in when people parking on council property (be it in front of her house), can affect her so much as to yell and carry on whenever the opportunity presents itself?

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time lately thinking about the story world of my next novel.

When considering a story world for a novel, how much emphasis should be placed on the point-of-view character and how she sees the world?

Naturally, there are fixed story world characteristics that can’t be changed.  If a character lives in the everyday world that most of us know as normal, her reality would be completely different when compared to someone who lives in an alternate universe (more on that in future blog posts). And a character living on another planet would have a noticeably different reality to that of someone living in a fantasy land.

But the way in which a character perceives her reality, is what interests me most.

If thoughts can obscure a world so much, that a view of it becomes obviously warped, is this not more powerful than an objective view of the same world?

I will be exploring this a bit further, once I finally let go of my current novel.

In the more immediate future, I will be hanging out for the Christmas break to start this Friday afternoon, which, depending on how you look at it could still be three long working days away, or really short casual days that come in threes (like many good things in fiction).