Taylor Swift is the OG world-builder
Lessons from Madison Square Garden and Where the Crawdads Sing
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce didn’t get married at Madison Square Garden because of the privacy (I mean, maybe that was part of it).
I am convinced they got married there because Taylor Swift is nothing if not an all-star world builder.
From the crumbs of information we have, the interior looked like a basketball game had never been played there. Taylor and her team turned MSG into a once-in-an-era immersive, magical world.
I’ve always admired Taylor Swift for her concerts, engineering total immersion where thousands of strangers feel light for three and a half hours, trading friendship bracelets. World-building, done right, isn’t about fooling anyone. It’s about creating something so complete that people forget to look for the seams. It’s a talent for building trust and authors should be taking note.
Fiction authors, we should be taking notes.
It’s not how much detail you pile into the world you’re writing. It’s about the harmony between the details and the story it tells. One thing forced or out of place and your reader remembers they’re just reading a book.
Two books come to mind as ‘what good world-building looks like’.
Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. This is perhaps the most building world-building I have ever read. That North Carolina marsh was practically a character.
The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. I could almost taste the sand in my mouth.
I am writing my second novel now and I can almost imagine closing myself into a Madison Square Garden dome and thinking: how would I decorate this scene so that the guests, my readers, feel like the one thousand guests at MSG immersed in the* peach and white / garden / countryside / castle of Taylor Swift
*speculative as this is written before we have any photographs.