blog A Quick Guide to Worldbuilding Cultures

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A Quick Guide to Worldbuilding Cultures
by Roel Karstenberg



In a previous article — called Worldbuilding on the Crossroads — I wrote about a technique writers can use to quickly create cultures for their worlds. For a background group this might be sufficient, but what if instead of a mere outline of a culture, you want to create an in-depth culture? A culture filled with customs, traditions, values and more? Well, I wouldn’t raise the question if this article didn’t provide an answer.

The process established below should be seen as suggestions, not as a clear-cut guide. The more complex you want your culture to be, and the more complex their history is, the more you will wish to jump between the different sections. The “finished” state of the culture you are building is up to you to decide, for cultures are complex structures which can be expanded upon without an end ever coming in sight. Such is the nature of worldbuilding. The work can never be truly finished, so it is up to you to call it quits when you have satisfied your worldbuilding needs. With those words of caution out of the way, let’s delve into this guide.

Environment and Migration

The first order of business is establishing the environment of your fictional culture. For this section you write down (in a few key points or sentences) what the environment in which...
Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

 

Hey Black Dragon. I have written bits and pieces of in-world sacred texts for at least two different projects. One of them was based on the Holy Piby and represented the beliefs of a Rastafarian splinter religion, while the other was set in a fantasy world and had a quasi-Gnostic basis. I think that religiosity is a great way to explore a world and its characters, but I more often explore that through the material world and folk values than segments of sacred texts, because I believe that it is rather easy to miss the tone with such texts, making them either too modern, too old-fashioned or too shallow to be representative of a living, breathing religion. Whenever I write passages from an in-world religious text I make sure to keep them short, a paragraph or two at most, so I don’t risk missing the mark. How do you tackle them?

 

Hello Silvahkir. I agree with what you've written. It is far too easy to assume that the world at large values the same foundational things which one is raised with and views matters in the same way, when one is not exposed to other ways of thinking dominant among other cultures. I believe that the more aware a writer is of the effect that the cultures one is exposed to have on our perception of the world, the better our ability to write diverse and interesting people becomes.

One site you might enjoy is https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/ which allows you to compare the values of different real world countries based on five different criteria. Some countries are better explored than others in the comparison model, but most of them have additional insight on each country listed below them. The model does not address regional cultures, but it is a good tool for getting an idea of how different cultures might view the same things.

 

Hello Baylee Predovic. With poetry you can start any way you want, and depending on the type of poetry you're interested in you may wish to throw all rules out the window. That being said, if you are new to it I would suggest you google different rhyming schemes and play around with those, trying to fit your words and your story into a pre-established scheme. The puzzle of trying to word your thoughts in such a way that they rhyme according to a scheme you set out in advance can be quite fun.