There are a lot of aspects to WorldBuilding. Lots are pretty obvious while are... not so much. So this post is going to go into some of the more unnoticed aspects of WorldBuilding that I think about in stories. Who knows? Maybe you’ve noticed them as well?
Infrastructure
How do people get food? Where does trash and waste go? What happens when someone dies? This is stuff we tend to just not think about because it’s such apart of our lives. Most people if they’re hungry will just go make a sandwich in the kitchen. Well we’re did that bread and stuff on the sandwich come from? The store? How did the store get it? From farmers? Well if your story takes place in a wasteland, then there aren’t going to be many farms. Which means there won’t be a whole lot of fruits and vegetables for everyone to eat. if people can’t farm they’re not going to have much meat. And this indirectly ties into medicine as well. For example, if you say there’s no chicken because there’s no way to farm chickens, then that means their aren’t a whole lot of eggs either. And everything made with eggs will also be scarce. Like penicillin.
When it comes to trash, we just think to throw it in the garbage and then take it out when it gets full. But THEN where does it go? Well for us, it’s taken to dumps where a lot of it is burned compacted or buried. What does your world have?
Clothing is another thing lists of people don’t think about. You know how in lots of post apocalyptic stories, everyone is wearing leather and has colored Mohawks? Where did they get the leather from? Where did they get the bottles of hair dye from? And why is EVERYONE wearing it? You’d think during an apocalypse and there were clans of people, each traveling caravan would be diverse, or at least each one would have a different style. And a style that is fitted to the weather that they’ll be traveling through.
Next is transportation. How do people get to place to place? Do they have mass transport like busses or planes? If not, does everyone have a bike or a car? Is there gasoline or something that powers these things? (This is why bikes are the best, because no fuel required.)
And last is jobs. You’ve gotta think of how your society works. For a bad example here I’ll use divergent. So in divergent there are separate groups that handle specific jobs, but they don’t cover all the bases. They have law makers, police/soldiers, the smart scientists and all those things. But they completely neglected to mention hard labor type jobs. How does anything get done without those? Who are the janitors? Who takes out the trash and serves people food? Who delivers mail and ships supplies out to the different groups? Hard labor is the bloodline of every major society and it’s just not mentioned. They have the perfect group of people to do it too! The unclassed people who don’t fit into any category and are homeless. Why are their homeless? Just give them all the bad jobs! You get cheap labor and they don’t have to starve to death because hey have a job to sustain themselves! Make sure you don’t forget your hard labor jobs! They’re just as important as the high in government/ soldiers jobs!
Basically don’t be divergent.
Don’t ignore the lower class.
Why NOW?
Why is all the stuff in the story happening now? Why didn’t the dark lord kill the main character when he was a baby? I never understood this. How does the baby ALWAYS SURVIVE??? Why don’t you double check? Why don’t you burn their body, or chop their head off and bring it back as proof to be 100% sure? Why does the plan to kill the chosen one always fail for no reason other than “the bad guys didn’t double check”. Or if they’re a kid, they burn down the village they grew up in and just assume they died in the fire. NO. BE SURE. YOU HAVE TO BE SURE.
Now if the dark lord didn’t know about any prophecy or was aware of any type of looming threat then this is forgivable. Because they weren’t seeking that particular character’s death in the first place. But another thing that happens a lot is the MCguffin death. Now this is when your main character needs to kill the dark lord, but they can only be killed with one specific magic weapon or you have to destroy that piece of jewelry their wearing that somehow makes them immortal. For the former, why wouldn’t the dark lord do everything in his power to find that weapon and keep it on him at all times or destroy it? Why would he not try to take his only weakness away from his enemies? And if he does seek it out, why is he just now doing it? He should’ve been on that, the SECOND he was aware it existed! And how do people even find out about the dark lords weakness in the first place if he’s never died before? Does the senile old wizard guy just tell the hero, but he only just now decided to tell someone and kept it to himself all these years letting countless innocents die? What a jerk! If the weapon has to be made and the hero and the dark lord are finding out about it at the same time, then that starts to make some sense. But anything else makes the bad guy seem lazy.
But these kinds of rules don’t just apply to the bad guy. Oh no the hero can be guilty of this as well. Nothing gets me more that a hero who has the means to end the main conflict but doesn’t. Like in SAO when Kirito hacked the game to save yui from being deleted. If he had access to the source code and could hack it that easily, then WHY DIDN’T HE JUST RE-ENGAGE THE LOG OUT BUTTON AND SAVE EVERYONE IN THE GAME?
Power changing society
Lots of stories like to have magic powers in them. And who can blame them? Magic powers are cool! But lots of times it’s not really thought about how these powers would change society if people have them. For example, if people can fly, transportation would be way different. A great example of this being used is avatar the last air bender. Each nations power set heavily influence their lifestyle.
The air nomads lived in tall mountains, making it that only air benders or someone with a flying bison could access. Everything was on high ledges and they traveled by gliding, because an air bender would have no issues getting from place to place.
The fire nation used lots of metal in their building because they had the means to melt materials and burn coal to create metal things easily. Which is why their military was so powerful. They had all the metal weapons, tanks and metal ships that could handle heavy onslaughts and were built for war.
The water tribe lived in cold places with ice barriers and surrounded by water for obvious reasons. They could make ice barriers to protect their homes and can easily travel by water, which is why they’re so surrounded by it. And since they can also have the ability to heal, all the best doctors in the world were water benders.
And the earth benders can live freely almost anywhere on land. Which is why their kingdom is the biggest. They can build houses and town extremely easily out of rock and can settle just about anywhere. Not the mention they can make their own walls to protect themselves and most of their cities are heavily guarded.
Each power had the means to make an aspect of their lives easier and they took advantage of that. I mean if everyone could fly, there wouldn’t be much need for cars would there be? If everyone had night vision, there would be no need for streetlights at night. It also works in reverse. I’m talking about clothes again but, If everyone had wings, or tails, fashion would have to change to be comfortable to wear. Winged ppl would need specials shirts and people with tails would need special pants to comfortable in. The best way is to think of a persons everyday life, and what they would do with their powers to do simply casual tasks. Super powers aren’t always about high risk super battles after all.
Culture is complicated
I love stories that have their own culture. Bonus points if there are multiple that play off of one another. Buuuuut there is one problem that often arises. People of a culture seem to just all be solely identified by that culture and nothing else. It’d be like if everyone in our world was their ethnic groups stereotype. Which is obviously just not the case. You’re going to have people who don’t follow the culture as seriously and some who follow it TOO seriously. But there should be a normal standard. Let’s say part of a culture is not to eat meat. The ones who follow it too seriously would probably not eat anything from an animal period. No eggs, no milk, no cheese, just go straight up vegan. While normally doing that sort of thing isn’t really ground upon because it’s just not seen as that big of a deal. Then the ones who don’t take it too seriously would probs say no to all meat except maybe fish. Because they don’t consider fish in the same category as cows and chickens. But all people of the spectrum would still not eat chicken, cow, pigs and other mammals. They all still agree that that’s the “no crossing line”. So if someone DID eat meat, ALL THREE perspectives would be shocked and think that was unacceptable in their culture. See what I mean? Culture isn’t as easy as saying “every in this area either believes this one thing or they don’t.” There’s like a spectrum.
And what’s also important is knowing WHY culture exists. Let’s use the meat example again. Maybe animals are scarce and they don’t want them to go extinct? Or maybe animals are apart of their daily life and are used to help with work instead of food because they can’t use machines? There’s lost to think about. But hey that’s half the fun of it right?
Well that concludes post on things often forgotten in world building. I hope you found it helpful! We are also looking for new who can be active every week! If you’re interested, please take a look at the club wikis below! We would REALLY appreciate new active to help us grow! So if if you’ve been around for two weeks or more, be sure to check out the rules and send me a pm! Well that’s all for now. See you in the next installment fellow explorers!
Comments (4)
This is really insightful. Thanks. Usually I think though is that if you get too bogged down into the world building then the story itself becomes lost amidst it. So maybe that’s why some authors choose not to directly address this in their books/writing.
Well of course you don’t have to directly mention all of it, but it should still be kept in mind.