I’m a big fan of animation. Yeah, cartoons, if you want to put it simplistically. All kinds of cartoons. Classic Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, anime, some of the cartoons that came out in the 1990’s and 2000’s (Teen Titans, Pinky and the Brain, etc).

One of the things I love about cartoons, regardless of animation style or genre or country of origin, is they’re not bound by the same rules we are. Any of them. If you drop an anvil on a coyote’s head, he’s fine the next frame, aside from being a little hungrier and more frustrated. If a boy loves a girl and she loses her memories, he can cross time and space with the help of his pure devotion, just to get them back.

You know what I love about writing? I’m not bound by the same rules as I am in real life. That’s not to say the worlds I create don’t have structure. Even Wile. E. Coyote, regardless of his unlimited line of credit through ACME and ability to be smooshed and dropped more times than I can count, still had some structure to his world. It was never randomly decided that he would buy a magic wand and just abracadabra that bird into his belly.

But as a writer I get to create those rules. I can bend and fold reality into whatever makes the most sense for my story, or in some cases whatever amuses me the most. I know, I still have to follow my own rules…I guess that goes hand-in-hand with becoming a creator.

I like spending time in those worlds. Toeing the line of plausibility. Walking on the edge of the furthest reaches of my imagination and seeing everything I can see, whether it’s the deepest depths or the highest hopes.

Even in standard fiction I can do that. I can make my characters 28 year-old CEO’s of software companies, or brilliant hackers, or, or, or…I can do anything.

But only if I’m willing to reach outside of what I know and allow myself to create the unknown.

How have you stepped outside your world lately with your writing?