Fiction Writer’s Toolshed | Practical Tools for Authors
You want to try another version of a character or world. Some of its familiar pieces still interest you, but you want to give them a different history, a different setting, or a different way to work together.
Does every version need to fit the same canon? Do you need a multiverse that connects them all?
Writer and editor Matt Click joins me to explore an approach we’re calling polycontinuity: multiple distinct continuities built from the same fictional property. Gundam and Batman give us starting points for thinking about what stays recognizable, what can change, and how a reader finds their way into a new version.
Listen to the episode
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed
Write This Instead of a Multiverse (with Matt Click) | ep 019
Follow the podcast (opens in new tab)
What I mean by polycontinuity
A continuity is the history and established facts that belong to a version of a story world. With polycontinuity, several versions can have their own histories while sharing enough recognizable elements to belong to the same fictional property.
The connection can be in the creative ingredients. You don’t have to make travel between those worlds, or an explanation of how they coexist, part of the story you’re writing.
This is the possibility I’m exploring with Matt. What makes a property recognizable when its history, characters, factions, or tone can change? And could we plan for that freedom when we begin making something?
What makes Gundam Gundam?
Matt describes Gundam’s continuing Universal Century setting alongside other settings that tell different stories with familiar elements. What caught my attention was that those stories could differ so much and still feel like Gundam.
His examples include mechanical designs, masked antagonists, and themes involving war and young people. We’re looking at recurring patterns that a fan recognizes. They aren’t an official checklist that every production has to follow.
For Matt, part of the pleasure is seeing what a new series does with those ingredients. What will the central machine look like? Who are the characters? What kind of story will this version tell?
Familiar pieces give him a reason to return. Different choices give him something new to discover. Even when a particular version doesn’t work for him, he can appreciate an idea in it and remain interested in what comes next.
Build a franchise spec you can play with
I start thinking of those recognizable elements as a franchise spec: the ingredients that give a fictional property its identity.
Matt imagines sitting down to write with some constraints already available. You have a starting point, and you get to decide what to do with it. That appeals to me because core worldbuilding can be both fun and grueling.
Once you know which pieces matter, you have room to arrange them differently. You might change the setting, shift the tone, or use a familiar role in an unexpected way while keeping enough of the property’s identity to recognize it.
We describe this as a menu with room for a wild card. The numbers we toss around are examples. There isn’t a required list of twelve ingredients or a rule that choosing seven makes your version work.
The useful question is what your choices preserve and what they open up. What still makes this your world or character? What new story becomes possible when some other pieces change?
A recognizable character can support a different take
Batman gives us another way into the idea. Matt mentions The Long Halloween as a story he could hand someone without first explaining everything about Batman. Familiar character elements can help a reader enter a relatively self-contained story.
We also discuss Absolute Batman, which reimagines familiar material. I disliked the idea when I first heard it. Its execution won me over, and I felt conflicted about how much I wanted to keep reading.
Those examples do different things. A self-contained story can still belong to a shared history. A new take can change familiar circumstances and relationships. The part that interests us is how much recognition can carry across those choices.
Batman is an example of recognizable reinvention here. DC’s wider story connects the Absolute Universe to its own cosmology, so it isn’t evidence that the publisher has abandoned multiverse connections.
Think about what a new reader needs
Recognition can help someone enter a story. It can also make us assume they know more than they do.
Matt describes watching a Gundam series with his partner and realizing how many moments referred back to material she hadn’t seen. Something that excited him as a fan could leave a new viewer without the context that made it interesting.
I had a related question while reading Absolute Batman. Some of its reversals were clever because I knew what they were reversing. I wanted to know how those moments would feel to someone who hadn’t read Batman before.
My inclination is to let a reference add something for the person who recognizes it while keeping the story enjoyable for someone who doesn’t.
But we also acknowledge a tradeoff. An artist may deliberately write for an existing audience and use its expectations to make a reversal land. Knowing the earlier version can be part of the intended experience.
That leaves a choice for the writer. Who do you want this version to welcome, and how much earlier knowledge are you asking them to bring?
Try the recognizable pieces in a new arrangement
Matt proposes a creative exercise: make your own version of Batman or Gundam. Keep the pieces that make the property recognizable, then turn the dials. What would the world look like with those pieces in place and different choices around them?
You can apply that idea to a fictional property you’re making. Think about the ingredients that give it its identity, then explore a version with a different history or setting. Notice what still feels like your property and what the changes let you do.
This is a way to explore creative choices. It doesn’t need a timer, a score, or a fixed number of ingredients. An exercise using a familiar property is also separate from permission to publish work using it.
Could a shared spec invite other writers in?
Near the end of the conversation, I wonder about creating an original world that deliberately welcomes other writers. A shared spec could give them something recognizable to work with and room to make their own choices.
It’s a possibility we’re considering, rather than a program we’ve launched or a set of license terms. The creative appeal is the combination of a useful starting point and room to play.
Another way to leave room for stories
Matt and I also explore modular continuity through Conan the Barbarian: self-contained adventures at different points in one character’s life, with space between them and a shared continuity.
Polycontinuity opens room for versions whose histories can differ. Modular continuity opens room for adventures within a history they share. Each gives a writer a different kind of freedom.
About Matt Click
Matt is a writer, editor, and one of my longtime creative collaborators and closest friends. We’ve written together through Absolute Tabletop for close to ten years. He edited my work when it was at its roughest, and he’s still my editor today.
This conversation is my current best approach to a possibility I want to explore. The starting question is what makes a property itself. From there, we can decide what a new version keeps, what it changes, and what kind of story those choices let us make.
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed: Practical Tools for Authors is a Make Exist podcast hosted by Tim Kearney. It offers hands-on training for fiction writers to diagnose writing problems, build their skills, and finish more work.