Maybe it’s because you like to write, and you’ll be crafting new worlds regularly – because you don’t want to repeat yourself. Maybe you want to dive deep into a world and deliver your ultimate work. Maybe you’re a game developer and it’s part of the job. Maybe you build settings for your friends to game in. Whatever the motivation, some of us want to be better at worldbuilding than we are now.
Of course you’re reading this column, so you probably want to get better at it. Or be less worse at it, but i’ll just assume you want to be more awesome than you are now.
But this raises an interesting question – is worldbuilding a skill you can improve? Is it a skillset or is it something else? (more…)
My answer? Yes it did, but in two ways.
First, D&D was definitely an influence on creative people and writers. That’s a given.
However, D&D also inspired other RPGs, which then inspired writing further. D&D also inspired other inspirers as it were.
Frankly, I want to see more on this. I think there’s a huge amount of things to explore in looking how the RPG and RPG like gaming scenes inspired fiction.
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
The 1980s were a time of excesses. While Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was a reflection, not the cause, one line summed up the corporate mentality; “[G]reed, for a lack of a better word, is good.”* Or, as Newhart‘s Larry, Darryl, and Darryl put it, “Anything for a buck.” Conservative governments in the US, the UK, and Canada embarked on deregulating and privatizing anything possible, regardless of the impact. During this time, the archetypical Cyberpunk novel, William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published, followed two years later by Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired, both taking a hard look at the rise of corporate power and what it meant to the workers and the outsiders.
As the decade began to wrap up in 1987, the movie Robocop hit theatres. The film was billed as a science-fiction action movie, set in the near future. Detroit was bankrupt and was being bought out by Omni Consumer Products. The Detroit Police Department had been privatized, bought by OCP who turned the department into a profit centre through underfunding. OCP has a project in the works to replace the officers in the field with robots; in fact, there are two competing projects. The first is a fully automated law enforcement unit, the ED-209. The second is Robocop. However, the Robocop project requires a human base to be augmented.
Enter Alex Murphy, police officer, family man. Murphy worked on the police as a patrol officer on the dangerous streets of Old Detroit. How dangerous were the streets? Body armour was part of the patrol uniform. Murphy and his new partner, Anne Lewis, respond to a call that led to the chase of Clarence Boddicker, the leader of a criminal gang handling a bit of everything, including cocaine dealing. Murphy and Lewis separated, giving Boddicker the opportunity to kill Murphy brutally.
Lewis discovers Murphy, barely alive. OCP takes over Murphy’s trip to the hospital, leading to Alex being declared dead and a clause in his work contract getting invoked. Bob Morton then takes possession of Murphy, wanting to use him for the Robocop project. The ED-209, championed by OCP VP Dick Jones, had a setback during initial testing, leading to the shooting death of an intern after the prototype failed to recognize the intern had dropped his gun. Morton reveals the new Alex Murphy, Robocop.
Robocop, along with being a violent science-fiction action movie, was a satire of the politics and culture of the 80s. Underfunded police forces, privatization, high level corporate drug use, corporate politics, dangerous streets, anything and everything that hit the news, TV series, or feature films. Yet, today, Detroit is bankrupt and the average police officer on patrol is wearing body armour. While it wasn’t meant to be predictive, Robocop foresaw the rise of corporate power and the militarization of police services.
With the risk aversion in Hollywood studios and the appetite of foreign markets for known franchises, it was almost inevitable that Robocop was remade for 2014. With the original movie having had two sequels, a TV series, a video game, a pinball game, and even a cartoon**, the character of Robocop is a known figure. Over-the-top action transcends language. Robocop was ideal for a remake.
The new Robocop saw a few changes right away, mainly because of cultural and political changes during the intervening twenty-seven years. While Detroit wasn’t mentioned as being bankrupt nor being owned by OCP***, the city was still a dangerous place to live. Murphy became a detective instead of patrolman, as did his partner, Jack Murphy.
The movie begins with The Novak Element, a cable news program with high tech flash that wouldn’t be out of place on Fox or CNN. Pat Novak, played by Samuel L. Jackson, goes on a rant on how drones, being used for peacekeeping in American-occupied Tehran, can’t be used for law enforcement thanks to a popular law passed by Congress. Omnicorp, a division of OCP, is seeing hundreds of millions in unrealized sales, and a plan gets hatched to turn popular opinion against the Act. Raymond Sellars, CEO of Omnicorp, finds a loophole that lets him get his wedge; drones aren’t allowed, but a machine with a man inside isn’t covered. All he needs is a suitable candidate.
Meanwhile, Detectives Alex Murphy and Jack Lewis have been on the trail of Antoine Vallon, gang leader with fingers in a number of rackets, including selling guns from the Detroit Police Department’s evidence lockers. Hampering the investigation is the possibility that Vallon has several police detectives on his payroll. Murphy and Lewis arrange a meeting with Vallon, but have their covers blown. Lewis is shot and wounded during the firefight while Vallon escapes. Vallon later arranges for a bomb to be placed in Murphy’s car. The explosion all but kills Alex.
Alex’s wife, Clara, is approached by Omnicorp to keep him alive. There’s not much after the blast and the fourth-degree burns, but Omnicorp and its division Omni Life have made strides with cybernetic technology. Murphy is rebuilt, augmented, and turned into Robocop. The movie takes the time to cover Murphy’s transformation from barely-living to cyborg law enforcement officer. The conflict between Murphy and Omnicorp also grows; to the corporation, Murphy is product.
The original Robocop was known for its satire and for being over-the-top violent, almost getting an X-rating from the violence. At the same time, the movie had its moments of humour, despite the grimness of the setting. In the new version, the satire is still around, but it hits closer to home. Drone use by law enforcement is a hot issue, and today’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicles aren’t the combat model EM-208 and ED-209 robots of the movie, just remotely piloted aircraft missiles. Likewise, corporate influence on government is a concern; Omnicorp’s manipulation of public opinion and rules-lawyering is a little too close for comfort. Whether that’s a plus or a minus is up to the individual viewer; satire is a way to get a message across but does need a deft hand.
One big difference between the two movies is the level of violence. As mentioned above, the original movie was violent and brutal, setting a mark for other movies of what could and couldn’t be done and still stay R-rated. The remake, however, went for a PG-13 rating. PG-13 hits the sweet spot for blockbusters; it allows younger audiences in to watch the movie while signalling that it isn’t sanitized. An R-movie prevents viewers under seventeen in, losing a major market. To get a PG-13 rating, though, the level of violence had to be toned down. Robocop’s primary pistol is a variable-setting taser instead of a beefed-up machine pistol. The amount of blood and gore shown is minimal; there is no one getting doused in toxic waste then splattered across the the front of a step van like in the original. To make up, the fighting became more personal. Murphy isn’t showing off his shooting skills; he’s hunting down his own killers, defending himself, or fighting the combat drones.
As its own movie, the Robocop remake holds up well. It’s a science-fiction action movie that reflects its time. As a remake, that reflection creates a few problems. It’s not the almost cartoonishly violent movie that the original was. Nor does it take the theme of what it means to be human. Instead, the remake looks at the human spirit, what keeps a man going despite everything that has happened to him. It also looks at the degree of leniency that corporations enjoy today, something the original just scratched the surface of. The remake is Robocop, but it’s the Robocop of the new millenium, not of the 80s.
Next week, a look at methdology used when writing Lost in Translation.
* It was lost on people championing the line that the character who said it, Gordon Gekko, was indicted in the film for insider trading.
** The 80s were known for seeing R-rated movies getting cartoons. See also, Rambo.
*** A deleted scene from the remake does have the CEO of Omnicorp making an offer to the mayor of Detroit to buy the police department.
This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on June 3rd, 2014.
“Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him— respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months’ rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.” Craphound, by Cory Doctorow.
The following First Contact scenarios can be used with humans on either side of the encounter. Don’t discount the possibility humans being the relatively more advanced civilization making contact, or both being at about the same level. Most of them can be combined with several others (consider how “missionary work” could be added to “information/signals only”). (more…)
So we’ve covered biology, psychology, society, and how they tie to sex. My fundamental thesis is that sex is best viewed as a primal form of communication for life, and thus logically infuses all aspects of said life. Life, in short, transmits.
But there’s one more element of sex and your setting to consider beyond these – then come the metaphysical, mystical, and divine. If your world has a supernatural (or perhaps “metanatural”) component, then sex is going to impact that too. Sex is part of living beings, living beings deal with metaphysical realities, ergo it’s going to be something you have deal with as a world builder.
Got spirits and sorcery? Sex is going to come into the equation as your sentient races interact with such things.
Now this goes into so many potential areas I’m just going to cover the basics – since your worldbuilding will doubtlessly have its own elements that are unique to your work. I’m just trying to get things going here.
But first . . . (more…)
Well one big announcement here is that I’m releasing the very crude Alpha of the Writing Prompt Generator. How crude? Well I’d consider it at best 15% done, but the framework is there.
So this is where you come in – I want feedback and suggestions! I could do this all myself (and indeed I’m going over famous opening lines of books for ideas), but as this is quite an effort frankly, and could do in so many directions, I thought it’d be fun to get feedback while I worked on it.
So go check it out and tell me what you think it needs!
And now, some examples:
- A plague is just like marriage – he always said that.
- A war was just what I expected.
- And now the the cloud is speaking.
- And now the the ocean is howling.
- Disbelief requires love, and that’s where things get complicated.
- Evan knew that wisdom requires education.
- Famine, wisdom, and it seems the star is giggling.
- He died for faith, that was the problem
- He lived for evil.
- Isaiah was an astronomer.
- It was Wednesday, the day of birth, and that’s when the murders began.
- Mass murder – it was definitely Saturday.
- On Wednesday I became a linquistics expert.
- She lived for ambition.
- The communications officer was speaking.
- There was a case of sudden poverty, he was a starship salesperson, and he was going to be the problem.
- There was a famine, he was a bard, and he was going to be the problem.
- There was a war, but nobody knew that.
- This is a tale about justice and begin a zookeeper.
- We called her Makayla, but we didn’t know why.
OK gang, let me know what else to add, your favorite opening quotes, and more!
– Steven Savage
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
It’s said that a writer should write what he knows*. For Scott Adams, a contract at Pacific Bell was an inspiration. The result, Dilbert, was picked up by United Media Syndicates. While the artwork was simplistic, the situations hit home with working readers. Adams based the characters on people he met on his contract. Dilbert is an amalgam of the engineers Adams worked with, while Alice and Wally were based on specific people. Alice was modelled on the lone woman engineer at the firm who felt she had to out-perform the men in all areas**. Wally, that model of corporate laziness, was based on an engineer at PacBell who couldn’t be fired after making a major mistake but was told he’d never be promoted; the engineer turned his intellect towards doing the least amount of work possible.
The strip focused on the day-to-day life of working at an unnamed tech firm and introduced a few terms into the English language. Anyone who has spent time in a large enough company has run into a Pointy-Haired Boss, or PHB, who has absolutely no understanding of what his people or even his department does. When Dilbert isn’t working, he spends his time with Dogbert, a dog with all of Dilbert’s intelligence and none of his morality. Dogbert gets to be the cynical part of Dilbert, saying what Dilbert would only think while abusing people for fun and profit. Meanwhile, Ratbert often represents the general public being abused by Dogbert.
The popularity of the comic strip comes from readers being able to, if not empathize with Dilbert, recognize similar situations in their own lives. Even if they’re not engineers, readers have dealt with PHBs, evil heads of human resources, and lazy co-workers. Dogbert says what many people think but can’t vocalize at work if they want to stay employed. The strip is meant for an adult audience, readers who are or have been in the work force, though people at tech firms get a bit more out of the situations.
In 1999, Scott Adams teamed up with Larry Charles, showrunner for Seinfeld, to create a TV series A live-action series was considered but the ultimate decision was to go with an animated Dilbert. The show aired on the former UPN, now part of The CW Network and lasted two seasons. The animated series had a head start on how the characters would look, thanks to the comic strip, but had a few other concerns to deal with. The first was mouths. In the strip, Dilbert, Dogbert, and Catbert, the evil head of HR, had no mouths. Facial expressions and, for the animals, wagging tails were enough to convey emotions. Word bubbles made it clear who was speaking. In an animated series, though, people expect to hear the characters speak and know which one was speaking through mouth movements. The decision was made to add the mouth when Dilbert, Dogbert, and Catbert were speaking, with the mouth disappearing when they were silent.
The other concern also comes from the characters speaking. Readers would have an idea of what the characters sound like. Even Adams stated as much in one of the DVD extras. The casting search needed to find actors who were, well, not that manly*** and, in Dogbert’s case, would sound like the voice came from a small, egg-shaped, cynical dog. The search resulted with Daniel Stern as Dilbert and Chris Elliot as Dogbert, both of whom fit the characters well.
The series brought in as many of the supporting cast as possible, though Bob the Dinosaur wound up with just a cameo despite appearing in the opening credits. Ted the Generic Guy was replaced in importance by Loud Howard; Howard’s schitck, being loud, was easier to do with an audio track. The episodes tended to focus on Dilbert’s office life, as he dealt with annoyances from Marketing down to the trolls in Accounting, but did highlight his home life and go to Elbonia. All the elements of the comic strip were in the show.
Helping to keep the the series close to the feel of the comic strip was Scott Adams’ involvement. He was listed as a producer and wrote or co-wrote several episodes. Being on UPN also helped; the network needed viewers and wasn’t willing to drive away existing fans by adding a love affair between Alice and Dilbert. The animation allowed Adams to experiment away from the three-panel format of the strip, giving him a chance to try out stories that would take weeks or even months in newspapers. The animation also let the scripts bend and ignore physics as needed.
Dilbert the series lasted two seasons on UPN. While it did well for UPN at first, the schedulers managed to channel the PHB in the second season and placed the show after Shasta McNasty, a series about a three-man rap band whose label goes bust when the band moves to LA. The audience for Shasta was unlike the audience for Dilbert, leading to the end of both shows.
As an adaptation, the animated Dilbert kept the feel of the comic strip. Adams and Charles worked to make sure that the voices fit the characters. The episodes had the mix of whimsy and cynicism found in the comic, and, ignoring the look of the computer equipment, are timeless****. Respect for the fans of the comic could be seen throughout the series.
Next week, Robocop.
* To a degree, it’s true, but it might be better to say that a writer needs to know about what her writes. Otherwise, all that would ever be published are autobiographies and coming of age stories, and that would get dull.
** Sadly, a state of affairs common in engineering due to the heavily male-dominated field.
*** Except for Alice, really.
**** “The Return” is funnier today thanks to the proliferation of online shopping. “Ethics” predated the Diebold voting machines and served as a predictor of the inevitable.
(This post is ironic in light of the recent Supreme Court decision, but at the same time quite illustrative)
So last time I discussed the complex elements of sex and society. Sex is a kind of primal element of living creatures, and thus affects how they develop, interact, and work together. Sentient creatures, so my thesis goes, are basically about communication, and sex is just the first form of it. Because it is so core to living beings, sex infuses a lot of what sentient beings do – or the complex structures that evolve and develop as they make societies and civilizations.
Now when it comes to worldbuilding cultures and society, reproduction and sex will inevitably be a part of what you create, because you don’t have members of a society without making more members of society – and all the complications that ensues. Sex may be simple in principle, but it gets pretty complex.
So to help you devise the sides of your society that involve sex (and tangentially that’ll be a lot), here’s a list of areas to consider. This is not a complete list, just a way to get you to develop the traditions, language, and so on for your society.
The fact that this is not a complete list gives you an idea of what you may face.
But First . . .
But first, let’s ask the thorny question – when designing a civilization or a culture or a society, just how much do you need to think about all of this? When you consider all the traditions, habits, words, and so on that involve sex it can be pretty exhausting to try and detail how a society handles sex. So how much do you need to do so you can get on to other stuff?
I mean yes, you can’t spend all your time thinking about sex, even when you feel you could if it was about you having it. You’ve got magic and solar systems and the like to design.
In this case, I advise a few things:
- Understand the basic attitude the society has about essential sexual issues.
- Detail the elements relevant to “manifest” that attitude clearly.
- Know “just a bit more” than you think your reader will need to know.
#1 is really important because, if you need to figure something out, you’re primed to figure out the answers for things you didn’t think of.
And with that said, let’s get going . . .
Society And Sex Checklist
So here’s areas that you’ll need to consider when designing sex and societies in your world. As noted it’s not complete, but it should be enough to keep you going.
Lineage: Most forms of reproduction we may conceive involve close lineages – someone is the offspring of so-and-so, who is the off-spring of such-and-such, going back in time. Sex means someone gets out there and produces the generation that produces the next one.
Just consider the battles over kingships and inheritances you’ve seen or read about. Or think about the obligations people have in your culture towards family members.
Is lineage (who’s the family of whom) important in your setting? If not, no worry – but if it is important (or instinctual) then how does it affect society, traditions, laws, and so on?
Exercise: Ask how many times you’ve dealt with lineage-based issues in your life – wills, inheritance, paternity, etc.
Birth: At some point a new life comes into being. So what does the society do then? Considering how much reproducing a society may do, there’s going to be a lot to do and thus . . . traditions, rules, and more.
Birth means you suddenly have a new member of society – and if your’e anything like humans, one that’s rather vulnerable and needs to be raised. It also brings in the complications of lineage, medical issues, validation of said lineage, health, and more. Birth is so complicated people may forget what the person giving birth is going through.
So it’s very likely a society is going to construct a lot of traditions and policies around birth. Birth is sort of the end result of sex – and the beginning of a lot of other questions.
Exercise: Last time you or a close friend or relative had a child, what social, religious, and cultural activities did you engage in? What purpose did they serve (if any)?
Raising Children: Once you’ve got new members of society, your various races and beings and societies are going to raise them. Perhaps there is, again, some difference between the people you write and we humans, but if not, then you’re back to the issue – raising kids.
In this case, you have to ask what raising children does – and following my theme of communication, it’s about taking new members of society and integrating them into said society. It’s helping them become functional, giving them a place, and telling them who they are.
On top of that,it’s also going to be influenced and influence other elements of society. It’s the morals to be passed on, the education, the principles. Raising Children is the end result of sex, and in the way what societies all come down to passing things on. It’s not just genes.
Exercise: How did you get raised to be who you are – and what worked and what didn’t? Why did the traditions and things you experienced exist (even if it wasn’t a good reason).
Puberty (or the lack): Puberty among humans is something we take for granted because we’re used to it. Every joke or lamentation about it seems so standard that we miss what it is – a child beginning the transformation into an adult, and an adult capable of reproduction. That’s actually pretty impressive, but we tend not to think about it.
It’s likely any species you design has some kind of change into having fall maturity and reproductive capacity. If this isn’t part of a species you design, then that alone brings in a lot of complexities. Have a sentient species that can reproduce right after birth and you have some seriously complicated issues. I mean at that point you’ve got human Tribbles.
But I’m going to focus on puberty or the equivalent in your settings, assuming a setting you created has creatures that take time to reach physical, mental, and sexual maturity.
Consider what puberty means. It means the transformation of a creature into a more mature form, which includes reproductive capacity. A society is going to have to cope with that because that’s a big change. It’s almost like the person is evolving into something else just within their lifetime.
Come to think of it, unless maturity comes in a proper order or all at once, sexual, mental, and physical maturity may arrive at different times. As we can see in humans, they don’t always line up – and if there’s something like that in your species, it gets more complicated. You can certainly see plenty of examples in human society where these things get complicated (just look at the arguments over sex education in America)
Exercise: Think of the different rituals you’ve seen for puberty, the different initiations (formal and otherwise), and social concern for adolescents. Now think of what that means for a society you develop.
Adulthood: If you’ve got some kind of maturing process (Puberty) at some point a creature in a society becomes an adult. That’s another level of complication.
Adulthood brings up a huge amounts of issues a society must cope with. When does someone become mature? What is needed for them to be a functional adult? How is this adulthood communicated to people? What rules about sex change at maturity?
Adulthood is when you get handed the keys to society as it were, so most societies consciously or unconsciously, in an organized or disorganized manner, need to have systems and institutions to pull that off. Needless to say plenty of interests – and competing interests – come into play.
Adulthood, to bring it back to our subject, is also when the ability to sexually reproduce is recognized and perhaps even emphasized. The child is now a member of society, and that usually indicates some reproductive capacity. Society needless to say needs to recognize and prepare them for this – and maybe prepare itself.
Exercise: When did you find you were considered an adult – or what do you think your society requires you to do to be considered an adult.
Courtship: Reproduction leads to offspring, offspring grow and mature – and then have more offspring. So when designing your society, you’re going to then have to figure out how society deals with your species finding mates and reproducing – well if they have sex.
It sort of comes full circle.
Societies have an interest in courtship because it usually leads to social bondings (marriage, relationships) and thus children. Actually it can also lead to children without other social issues, which means that society at large is kind of concerned with that as well.
It doesn’t take much reading of human history to see just how much drama, ritual, writing, poetry, conflicts, and time is dedicated to courtship. That should tell you that when you’re designing a society, you gotta gear up and cover courtship. Probably in painful detail.
Exercise: Walk through advice sections of a bookstore and see how many are on anything related to courtship, from dating to weddings.
Marriage: Reproduction leads to children who grow, mature, court, and then bond/pair bond/get married/what have you. Sentient beings enter into some kind of reproductive relationship, so for the sake of your world building I’m just gonna call it marriage.
Societies obviously have an interest in marriage since that involves social bonding, reproduction, and the roles of people. The individuals in societies obviously have an interest as well. So you’ll have to figure out how your society deals with marriage.
Marriage traditions around the world vary, and they vary in history, but their sheer prominence tells you that humans think a lot about it. You can assume most sentient species will be likewise involved.
When it comes to marriages, it’s also important to be aware that expectations and traditions and elements of societies may not be verbalized or obvious. They can be so accepted and so integral and so common no one even knows they’re they’re. Marriage, when you get to it, gets into everyday life – and thus people may not even pay attention to it.
Also marriages have boundaries – which you’re not supposed to transgress. There’s things you don’t do (and you’ll notice those often involve sex in our human societies). These things can change (such as issues of premarital sex).
Exercise: How many people do you know define themselves or are significantly defined by their marital relationships? How many people are defined by those relationships (such as children)?
Conception: OK you get children who grow up, become adults, court, get married – and the system starts all over again. New life gets created.
This is sort of where all of societies’ attitudes about sex come together – the rules, issues, and traditions of creating new life.
. . . or not creating new life. Because birth control, non reproductive sex, and so on also come into the picture. As noted sex is likely to infuse the lives of sentient beings and evolve and be repurposed with them, so there’s also points where you don’t want conception. Just logging onto the internet will give you access to plenty of things about non-reproductive sex that you should definitely not be looking at at work.
Thus your society is going to have plenty of rules for conception, not conceiving, pregnancy, and the like. Simply at that point you’re starting to get to having a new member of society (or avoiding new members), so there will be policies, rules, and traditions. Probably extensive ones.
Exercise: How have attitudes towards sex and conception changed in your lifetime? The lifetime of your parents? Of your country’s history? Why?
Decrease/End of Reproduction: Finally, there’s a point where life forms stop reproducing. Now in some cases that’s death (yes, I know if we drag in cloning, but stick with me here), but in the case of humans at least we often lose reproductive capacity before that point. Because this involves various biological changes, it can be pretty prominent in other ways.
Consider humans. Menopause involves the ceasing of reproductive ability and hormonal changes. Look at the concern about impotence men may have. Just consider issues of royal and family linages affected by age.
Rituals, society rules, obligations, and so on may recognize, have penalties, or compensate for these changes. After all they’re be, to say the least, rather noticeable as people are having it happen to them.
This is an area where world builders don’t give enough thought, in my opinion. So I’m encouraging you to.
Exercise: Where have you seen people deal with a loss of reproductive capacity, how did they react, and what social rules were involved.
Onward And Forward
This is just a limited list of major social areas where a society is going to have rules that, directly or indirectly, relate to sex. It should give you enough to think of.
I can say that sex is an area that is usually not addressed in proper detail in much world building – it’s too easy to map what is known or put “a twist” on an idea, or to just resort to tropes, without really exploring. But a look at the fascinating history of traditions related to sex, courtship, rules, art, and more shows there’s a lot to build and create in your worlds.
Done right it makes richer, more believable worlds and characters.
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
