Worlds are comprised of plants, animals, and geology. But if intelligent life forms live in that world, societies will also exist.
We humans are tribal. We prefer an overarching power structure leading us because someone has to be the leader. We call that power structure a government.
As a society, the habits we develop, the gods we worship, the things we create and find beautiful, and the foods we eat are evidence of our culture.
If your society is set in modern suburbia, that culture and those values will affect your characters’ view of their world. You will still have to build that world on paper. But the information and maps are all readily available, perhaps in your own backyard.
But what if you are writing a sci-fi or fantasy novel? You must create the background material to show your world logically and without contradictions.
- Authors must know how society works in their created cities and towns.
- They must know the technology whether it is set in a medieval world or on a space station.
Merchants, scientists, priests, soldiers, teachers, healers, thieves – no matter the setting, each occupation has specific technology. They may also have a place in the social hierarchy, people they can and cannot associate with.
Society is always composed of many layers and classes. Below is a list of what I think of as “porch questions.”
This is the stage where I sit on the back porch and consider the world my characters will inhabit. Going somewhere quiet and pondering these questions brings clarity to my vague ideas.
The following is a list of points to consider when creating a society. Feel free to copy and paste it to a page you can print out. Jot the answers next to the questions and refer back to it if the plot raises one of these questions.
How is your society divided? Who has the wealth?
- Is there a noble class?
- Is there a servant class?
- Is there a merchant class
- Is there a large middle class?
- Who makes up the most impoverished class?
- Who has the power, men or women—or is it a society based on mutual respect?
Ethics and Values: What constitutes morality, and how do we treat each other?
- Is marriage required?
- How are women treated?
- How are men treated?
- How are the different races viewed?
- Is there a cisgenderbias, or an acceptance of different gender identities?
- How are same-sex relationships viewed?
- How are unmarried sexual relationships seen in the eyes of society?
- How important is human life?
- How is murder punished?
- How are betrayal, hypocrisy, envy, and avarice looked upon?
- What about drunkenness?
- How important is the truth?
- What constitutes immorality?
- How important is it to be seen as honest and trustworthy?
- What is taboo? What is “simply not done” among that group?
Power structures are the hierarchies encompassing the leaders and the people with the power. Government is an overall system of restraint and control among selected members of a group. Think of it as a pyramid, a few at the top governing a wide base of citizens.
Religion is rarely a sci-fi trope but often figures prominently in fantasy work. In sci-fi, science and technology often take the place of religion or are at odds with it. They both have similar hierarchies and fanatics, but with different job titles.
Archbishop might be replaced with Head of Research and Development.
Cardinal or Pope might be replaced with General, Admiral, or CEO (Chief Executive Officer).
Level of Technology: What tools and amenities are available to them? What about transport?
- Hunter/Gatherers?
- Agricultural/farming?
- Greco-Roman metallurgy and technology?
- Medieval metallurgy and technology?
- Pre-industrial revolution or late Victorian?
- Modern-day?
- Or do they have a magic-based technology?
- How do we get around, and how do we transport goods? On foot, by horse & wagon, train, or space shuttle?
Government: There will be a government somewhere, even if it is just the local warlord. Someone is always in charge because it’s easier for the rest of us that way:
- Is it a monarchy, theocracy, or a democratic form of government?
- How does the government fund itself?
- How are taxes levied?
- Is it a feudal society?
- Is it a clan-based society?
- How does the government use and share the available wealth?
- How do the citizens view the government?
Crime and the Legal System: What constitutes criminal behavior, and how are criminals treated?
Foreign Relations: Does your country coexist well with its neighbors?
- If not, why? What causes the tension?
Excalibur, London Film Museum via Wikipedia
Waging War: This is another area where we have to ask what their level of technology is. It is critical for you, as the author, to understand what weapons your characters will bring to the front. You must also know what the enemy will be packing. Do the research and choose weaponry that fits your established level of technology.
- What kind of weaponry will they use?
- How are they trained?
- Who goes to battle? Men, women, or both?
- How does social status affect your ability to gain rank in the military?
A common trope in fantasy is magic, which brings up the need to train magic-gifted people. Do your sorcerers/mages rely on
- dumb luck and experimentation?
- apprenticing to sorcerers?
- training by religious orders?
- or as in the case of Harry Potter, a school of some sort? What are the rules of your magic?
The Church/Temple is the governing power in many real-world historical societies. The head of the religion is the ruler, and the higher one rises within the religious organization, the more power one has. The same is true of both universities and research facilities.
Power in the hands of only a few people offers many opportunities for mayhem. Zealous followers may inadvertently create a situation where the leader believes they are anointed by the Supreme Deity. Even better, they may become the God-Emperor/Empress.
The same sort of God complex occurs among academicians and scientists. Some people are prone to excess when presented with the opportunity to become all-powerful.
If you were unsure what your plot was before you got to this stage, now you might have a real villain, one presented to you by your society.
What sort of society do you envision in your world? How does that culture shape your characters?
Being the leader means bearing responsibility when things go wrong. Scrambling to keep things afloat occurs far more often than basking in the glory.
When things are going well, it’s good to be the queen.
However, the Tiara of Shame weighs heavily when things go awry—and that is when we have a story.
Fantasy is and always has been my favorite genre. I became a fan when I first read the Hobbit at the age of nine. I have read countless works written by people who understood how to construct a plot and set it in a believable world. These classics trained me to notice contradictions in what I read, whether in a magic system or elsewhere in a book.
I can suspend my disbelief when magic is only possible if certain conditions have been met. The most believable magic occurs when the author creates a system that regulates what the characters can do.
Superpowers are both science and something that may seem like magic, but they are not. Think Spiderman. His abilities are conferred on him by a scientific experiment that goes wrong.
While an ordinary life is comforting to those of us who simply long for peace and stability in our daily lives, we read for adventure. The story must take an average person, someone who could be your friend, into an extraordinary future.
Unfortunately, maps have fallen out of favor thanks to satellite technology and the GPS in our cell phones. Many people don’t know how to read a map.
If you are designing a fantasy world, you only need a pencil-drawn map. Place north at the top, east to the right, south to the bottom, and west to the left. Those are called 
Use a pencil, so you can easily note whatever changes during revisions. Your map doesn’t have to be fancy. Lay it out like a standard map with north at the top, east on the right, south at the bottom, and west on the left.
Many towns are situated on rivers. Water rarely flows uphill. While it may do so if pushed by the force of wave action or siphoning, water is a slave to gravity and chooses to flow downhill. When making your map, locate rivers between mountains and hills.
Maybe you aren’t artistic but will want a nice map later. In that case, a little scribbled map will enable a map artist to provide you with a beautiful and accurate product. An artist can give you a map containing the information readers need to enjoy your book.
In my part of the world, the native forest trees I see in the world around me are mostly Douglas firs, western red cedars, hemlocks, big-leaf maples, alders, cottonwood, and ash. Because I am familiar with them, these are the trees I visualize when I set a story in a forest.
Every fantasy world has a setting, and that environment has a climate. Certain climates limit the variety of foods available.
We know from bitter experience that weather affects the food we produce and influences what is available in grocery stores. Abnormal heat waves across temperate states, category 4 hurricanes along the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico, and category 4 tornadoes down the center of the US and Canada, and even deep freezes in Texas and the deep south have been our lot in the last five years.
Once you have decided your historical era, terrain, and overall climate, research similar areas of the real world to see how weather affects their approach to agriculture and animal husbandry. Look into the past to discover ancient agricultural methods to see how low-tech cultures fed their large populations:
Also, if your story is set in a particular era, how plentiful was food at that time? Famines occurring all across Europe and Asia over the last two-thousand years are well documented. Egyptian, Incan, and Mayan history is also fairly well documented so do the research.
We have witnessed monumental changes since the turn of the millennium. We know California teeters on the edge of disaster, that a water shortage threatens the lives of millions, as well as one of the largest agriculture industries in the US.
Several years ago, I read a fantasy book where the author clearly spent many hours on the food of her fantasy world and the various animals. She gave each kind of fruit, bird, or herd beast a different, usually unpronounceable, name in the language of her fantasy culture.
As many of you know, I have been vegan since 2012. However, during the 1980s, my second ex-husband and I raised sheep. Most of the meat we served in our home was raised on his family’s communal farm. Our chickens and rabbits roamed their yard and had good lives, and our family’s herd of twenty sheep was managed using simple, old-style farming methods.
Knowing what to feed your people keeps you from introducing jarring components into your narrative. In 
Where do you see your story taking place? In the real world? A fantasy realm? Space? An alternate dimension? Alternate Earth? Setting is what we are focusing on today.
Every series set in this world happens at a different point in their history. The current novel is set in the year 131 AS (After the Sundering). The Tower of Bones series begins in the year 3254 AS. In that era, the Sundering of the Worlds is almost a legend, yet the black wall of the Escarpment topped by the Mountains of the Moon still testifies to the reality of the event.
It’s a low-tech agrarian society. Tribal villages are communal, run by a council of elders. Everyone contributes to the community’s storehouses and benefits equally. While some earn more and others less, there is no class disparity. Ivan lives in Weiland, the main citadel of a western tribe, Weila.
If our work is set in an actual location, we should know where to find resources for appropriate slang, urban myths, and other local peculiarities. I suggest adding a list of where to easily access the resources about your chosen community to your storyboard. My co-Municipal Liaison, Lee French, reminds us that we don’t have to immerse ourselves immediately, just lay the groundwork for November.
Magic and the ability to wield it confers power. Magical creatures, elves, mythical races, mythological gods and demigods – these are some of the many natural and supernatural components of fantasy.
Authors of sci-fi must do the research and understand the 
The following is my list of places where the rules of believable magic and technology converge in genre fiction:
Science or magic is only an underpinning of the plot. They are foundational components of the backstory. 
The “three S’s” of worldbuilding are critical: sights, sounds, and smells. Those sensory elements create what we know of the world. Taste rarely comes into it, except when showing an odor.
At this moment, inside your room and outside your door, you have all the elements you need to create an alien or alternate world.
Maps are essential tools when you are building the world. Your map doesn’t have to be fancy. You need to know north, south, east, west, where rivers and forests are relative to towns, and locations of mountains.
And we’ll just toss this out there – while you can drop a tall tree across a narrow creek, building bridges over rivers requires a certain amount of engineering. Cultures from the Stone Age on to modern times have had the skills needed to make bridges.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
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