Building the Multiverse for Shuttlers was, in hindsight, a much bigger undertaking than I realised I was signing up for when I sat down to write about a young man smuggling forbidden books between realities. Here’s how it actually came together, which is to say, mostly by accident, as so many of my stories do.
Starting With Rules, Not Maps
As a Pantser, I don’t draw maps before I start. What I do, almost without realising it, is start establishing rules: what a Shuttler actually is, what it costs to move between realities, and why some people can do it while most can’t. Those rules became the real skeleton of the Multiverse, far more than any geography did.
The Sidewise Directorate arose as a direct consequence of those rules. If shuttling between realities can be dangerous and disruptive for the civilisations involved, then, logically, someone would have set up an organisation to police it. I didn’t plan the Directorate in advance; it was simply the natural answer to a question the story itself had raised.
Then came the question: if the Directorate has Shuttlers, what other people with special abilities does it have on tap? This led to the Telepaths, Teleporters and Healers who also make their appearances.
Letting Each Reality Have Its Own Logic
One of the trickiest parts of the worldbuilding was ensuring that each alternate Earth Justin and Pol encountered felt genuinely different, not just a reskinned version of our own world with the serial numbers filed off. That meant thinking through, for each one, what had actually diverged and how far those consequences would have rippled by the time the story reached it. Even in Impact, I had to make things feel a little different. At the same time, they had to be familiar enough that readers would feel comfortable walking into them.
If the worlds are different, it’s very likely that the people in them will be different too, especially in how they react to things unlike anything they have ever experienced before. Conversely, the Shuttlers will encounter strange things that strain their credulity.
Let me let you in on a secret about some of the worlds’ names: some of them mean ‘world’ in one of our world’s languages, but not all do. The others are simply a bunch of letters I put together. Try to work out which are which the next time you read the book.
The Editing Caught What the Drafting Missed
Inevitably, with a Pantser-built multiverse, there were inconsistencies. A detail established in an early chapter quietly contradicted something introduced later, simply because I hadn’t been keeping a master document of every rule I’d invented along the way. This is where the editing process earned its keep more than almost anywhere else in the book. Worldbuilding errors are the kind readers notice immediately, and rightly so.
Unlike many other writers, I love editing and revising. There are various advantages to doing this:
-
- There are the obvious ones, of course, like correcting spelling and grammatical errors. Not to mention my use of ‘Britishisms’!
- You get a chance to polish the flow of your story.
- You can add in bits, such as an extra interaction between two characters that highlights their relationship, or a scene that is absolutely vital to explain something that is about to happen or has already happened. You might even add an entire chapter, as I did when Annalisa pointed out that I had no interactions with really alien aliens.
- Adding foreshadowing and backlinking. You often don’t know where they must go until you have finished writing.
- In foreshadowing, you give a clue about something that will happen in the future, but in a way that isn’t obvious to the reader at the time. Readers feel very clever when they catch on that someone or something was foreshadowed, thinking, “Ah yes, I remember that!”
- With backlinking, you remind the reader of something that happened earlier. This is vital, in fact, when dealing with books for younger people, including Middle Grade (MG) and Young Adult (YA).
What I’d Do Differently
If I’m honest, I probably should have kept better notes from the start. I’ve since started keeping a slightly more organised record of the established rules for the sequel, if only to spare myself from contradicting my own Multiverse a second time. Old habits being what they are, I make no promises about how well that discipline will hold.
Still, there’s something rather fitting about a Multiverse built the same chaotic way Justin himself moves through it: one reality at a time, with no map, discovering what’s there by simply arriving.