The Disney Essays, One of Three

My first semester at my MFA program in creative writing, I made the mistake of going to Disney World for the first time. By the end of the semester, this new hyperfixation had become an obsession. I joked that I had studied the Disney parks more than I’d studied creative writing. “Maybe I’ll end up with an MFA in Disney,” I har-harred, feeling guilty and like I had wasted a lot of time in my program.

But somehow, learning how to write while discovering my profound and insufferable love of theme parks smushed into this weird amalgamation. Now that I’m ten years into going to the parks and knowing way too much about the color of paint they use on the walls, I teach at an MFA program, and I get to spend the next few months talking about how theme parks teach us a lot about writing.

Today we start with our first topic: worldbuilding.

It’s time to strap in and keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle, because we’re all going on a ride.

 

Structure

When creating a new world, you’re throwing a lot of new information at your audience. The cool thing about discovering the fantastical in SF/F is how vast and imaginative the setting is. Who are these people, where are we, when are we, how are we going to get to where we need to go…and where are we going?! One of the biggest issues I feel my students run into is how to still ground us in the unknown. And that is when I say, “Look up, can you see the castle?”

Imagineers are the creative team behind the Disney parks. Artists, engineers, architects…are experts at sightlines. Wherever you are in the parks, whichever park you’re in, you can see a castle. It’s going to be sticking out from behind a tree or a rocky mountain or a flying elephant. It’s designed so if you get lost in the multitudes of magical lands, you can always find your way back to the middle. That castle is also placed in a very specific spot. When you first enter the theme park, it tells you to keep moving into the land like a hook on a line. And once you’re there, you’re literally in the middle of a gigantic wheel and can enter any other land easily. It is the axis that the entire park revolves around. A compass.

Even in the upcoming Epic Universe, Universal Studios takes this middle axis point and expands on it, using literal portals to welcome you into the different worlds.

So, what is your castle (or compass)? No matter how wacky and weird the world around your characters evolves, do we as the readers have something to hold onto and ground us? Is it maybe a goal, like Dorothy trying to get back home? Is it something tangible and part of the scenery, like the lamppost that Lucy finds or the bright doors of Luriat? The compass could literally be a prop like Lyra’s compass in His Dark Materials. Maybe it’s something more character-based like the friendship between a Monk and a Robot, the grinding and ever-changing body of Shesheshen. Maybe it’s Shizuka Satomi’s deal she struck with the literal devil. What is the thing that no matter what else is happening, we go back to? What can the reader hold hands with as we walk through this new adventure?

And this adventure doesn’t even need to be a linear plot! In Disneyland, there’s no “you must start in Tomorrowland and work your way around.” Sometimes you forget there was something you wanted to do, because you found something else to do. Goals can ebb in and out, narrative structure can be original and do whatever you need it to do. But what is that thing that we can keep our sights on to know what sort of world we’re in, and where we are?

 

Making the World Real: Details and Senses

Another thing the parks are famous for is absolute detail. How does Disney create this whole massive world that makes us forget that there’s an IHOP literally across the street from Avengers Campus, and Toontown doesn’t go onward into the cartoon hills but instead butts up right against the interstate’s exit ramp?

With the castle in the middle, Disneyland fans out into different spokes. Adventureland, Frontierland, New Orleans Square, Bayou Country, Galaxy’s Edge, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, and of course back to Main Street.

And each one of these lands is not some cardboard cutout or filler space or side quest. Wherever you are, there’s going to be a rich story.

Sit in the corner of an alleyway eating your ice cream while smelling real flowers on a cart. Suddenly, you hear someone in a window above. The lights turn on. The shower starts. They whistle as they get into the bath, and then they howl because the water is too hot. This is all done with lights and sound, and it’s not an attraction; it’s just a small detail for someone sitting in a corner. Giving a richness to an unimportant window in an unimportant spot makes it feel like the town is as intricate as the real world.

I remember the first time I realized how dense the lore was in Disneyland. A Cast Member at the gift shop asked us if we’d found Patrick Begorra’s house. (Side note: Mr. Begorra will come back up in a later essay, because he is indeed a stereotypical leprechaun that was created fifty years ago and there’s a lot to unpack there.) The Imagineers created a miniscule house for Patrick off the beaten path in Adventureland, for guests to discover. There is lore upon lore about him, including a whole picture book. There is no ride, there is no signage. Just a fable of a man who lives in Disneyland in a tree.

So if there are little insignificant breadcrumbs of life and lore around every corner, no matter how small, then that means it is a thriving, real-life ecosystem. That exit ramp behind Mickey’s house isn’t there. Because there are clouds and hills and a fire station and footprints on the sidewalk, Toontown goes on forever. The world is Disney, and Disney is the world.

Weirdly enough, Disney has trained its guests to fill in those blanks for themselves. Next time you’re at the theater, look to see what is painted black. Usually the curtains, puppeteer’s clothing, and even the house with the lights off are all black. Coming from Kabuki tradition, we have been trained that black means nothing is there. Disney takes this idea and uses Go Away Green, a specific paint color that they use to cover show buildings and fences and gates that are supposed to be part of the fantastical world but are hidden from sight. This is not here, it’s just here for you to fill in with whatever else you’re seeing. So even in those places where you as a writer don’t fill in the blanks, how do you use that black curtain or even the green wall to let the reader imagine the entire universe?

That’s one reason why I love fantasy stories. We keep coming back to these rich worlds because there’s so much detail to see and green walls to paint with our own imaginations. You can see this happening everywhere from AO3 to EPIC: The Musical to Wicked. We want sandboxes to play in. And although even sandboxes have boundaries and borders, our brains have been trained to certain formalities and connotations so that we believe the green wall is magic, the puppeteer onstage is not really there, and the sandbox is a desert that goes far beyond its wooden edges.

In those confines, we must make the reader believe that world is so rich that it does spill out beyond the boundaries. This isn’t only done with set dressing at the park, but literal movement. The dark ride for The Little Mermaid is engineered to take you down under the sea. Your ride vehicle dips backwards and dives under a screen of water and a sheen of fog. Peter Pan was groundbreaking because the dark ride’s vehicle hangs from a track above, making it so you are “literally” flying. Flight of Passage creates a ride seat that seems to swell with breath, dives, and flies, and Ratatouille’s ride uses FIRE.

Imagineers have the confines of the ride to work with, and we writers only have words on a page. How can we create those words to be in a certain order or sound or look a certain way so we emulate the feeling of motion or action?

Bam.

Pow.

That’s the easiest example.

But what about the beginning of Percival Everett’s James, where it opens with a stranger’s shitty journal? And the middle of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow when a character’s brain is traumatized, or how The House of Leaves uses the liminal space between physical book and reader’s imagination to create horror?

From personal experience, when my time-and-space-jumping character, Ringmaster, leaps in and out of time, I decided to use scene breaks and chapter breaks in the middle of sentences. I got this idea from K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs when a character dies in the middle of a sentence.

Have fun with the placement of your dark ride’s track. Use the literal space to simulate what is happening in the narrative.

 

Aesthetic and Voice

Speaking of working in the confines of a medium. The thing that historically made Imagineering work was collaboration between brilliant creators who were allowed to be themselves. Voice is so important, even if your voice is a little weird. Voice can create depth and human meaning (I see you, AI and algorithms and bottom lines).

The year is 1964. There’s going to be a World’s Fair, and Walt Disney wants to make a ride that brings the world together and has the subtext of, “Please don’t blow each other up with nuclear war.” But also, he’s Walt Disney so it needs to be like sugar sweet.

Half of the Sherman Brothers team was a buoyant and sunshine-powered Jewish jingle writer who was the son of a Jewish jingle writer. The other half, his brother, was a Jewish soldier who had helped liberate Dachau. So their co-written work goes literally from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to “Hushabye Mountain” and “Feed the Birds.” Clearly this was the correct choice in composers for the water ride that said, “Let’s talk about our assured shared destruction but like with dolls designed by whimsical Mary Blair.” And maybe that’s why people don’t like “It’s A Small World,” because it’s a little creepy and very repetitive (and leans into harmful and colonizing stereotypes), but it’s definitely why that ride has some lasting power. It’s not just a happy-go-lucky tour of the world…it’s unnerving. But it’s memorable. It’s got meat on it, depth, history, a reason for existing.

On the other hand, the aesthetic of the actually creepy ride needed to be lightened up a little. The Haunted Mansion hinged on collaboration between Marc Davis and Claude Coats. Davis wanted it to be funny, Coats needed to make it scary. Imagineering allowed both of these duos to play into their own aesthetic and vibe, creating something real and raw.

 

Worldbuilding can be overwhelming. But you’re not alone, and you’re not (usually) reinventing the wheel. Look to see how storytelling is all around us, even in a theme park, how other artists in other mediums tackle similar problems. There’s a reason why there’s overlap in the theme park world and the writing world, like the Wicked experience at Universal Studios Orlando or the Oz land at Movie World on the Gold Coast. The Magic Kingdom itself is full of Hans Christian Andersen stories. Because we want to enter these worlds, we want to be swallowed up and smell it and feel it and hear it. We want to explore, and we will keep exploring as long as there are new fantasies to find. Be brave, little Lucy, and step through your wardrobe.

Then go and find your castle.

© 2025 J.R. Dawson