Misused Advice: Write What You Know

Great advice taken too far

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Every piece of advice that we’re going to talk about in this series has good intentions at its origin but has evolved into something either misused or something inviolable. “Write what you  know” is the latter, especially in the last decade. In itself, “write what you know” is great advice because an experienced voice brings more depth to the work, but it’s been taken a little too far.

Origins

This phrase-turned-rule started with the illustrious Mark Twain, at least as far as I can find, though he wasn’t one to follow it himself in all aspects. “Write what you know” has become so limiting that, to be frank, often writers are left with boring stories and thinly veiled self-insertion because not all of us are privileged enough to have lived wild lives.

The biggest misinterpretation

The main issue I’ve found when it comes to the advice of “write what you know,” is that it’s taken too literally. Of course, you should write what you know, because it enriches your story. We all want that; we all want to really feel like we’re in that situation. 

For example, if I wrote a dystopian story where one of the plot points was the threat of a nuclear missile coming toward your location, I could easily translate the terror of thinking you’re going to have your face melted off, because I’ve lived through a fallacious warning of an impending missile strike. That can really bring depth to the work that could be lacking from someone who didn’t go through the same situation. 

But—but, that shouldn’t stop you from writing the same situation and asking someone if they have any insight they can give you to make your work more realistic. There are thousands of brilliantly written books with situations that are currently implausible, like Watership Down with its talking rabbits or the Outlander series with time travel. 

Limited experiences shouldn’t be an excuse for limiting creativity. I think Chuck Palahniuk said it best: “People who say ‘write what you know’ are afraid to make shit up.” 

Research is key

We don’t know everything. 

We won’t ever know everything—it’s literally impossible to know the ins and outs of everything to bring a semblance of realism to our books. So when writing what you don’t know, research is going to be key to bring in that realism. I’m not saying you need to be an expert in whatever field you’re writing in unless the fancy strikes you, but at least Google enough to not have egg on your face. Or find someone who knows more about the subject than yourself (like for myself, knowing nothing about horses whatsoever, am utilizing both Google and hippophiles to help me make sure I don’t put something ridiculously inaccurate in my work).

Another key aspect is respecting the subject you're researching. If you want to write about a religion or culture that isn’t your own, like A4A co-founder Renee Frey in her upcoming novel One Thousand and One Days, finding sensitivity readers will be a must. They will not only help you bring accurate information to your work but can also impart some personal experience to help enrich the world you’re writing about.

So what’s it really about?

Really, I think “write what you know,” started as writing in what you know in terms of adding emotional depth to your story. In the situations that are implausible for our world, emotional depth is really what’s going to make your story stick with your readers for a long, long time. It’s something your readers can bond with and relate to, even if it isn’t something that they’ve experienced themselves. 

And that, my friends, is our job as writers. 

Join us next week for an author interview with A4A author Diane Anthony, and in two weeks when we resume our series on plot archetypes, where we talk about the comedy plot archetype.

Let's Keep in Touch!

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date on our books, authors, and more!

Can't wait? Check out our website for available books!

The Importance of an Author Website

Do you really need one?

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

It’s hard to know exactly what you need when you’re starting out as an author, and an author website is one of the things I hear the most about in my writing groups and other social media: whether or not you really truly need one or if you can get away with only social media like Twitter and Facebook. We’re going to take a little time to explore why it’s so important that you have your own author website.

It’s a fundamental building block

Your author website is where, hopefully, your readers are going to go to get the most up-to-date information about what you’re doing and when your books are coming out. If they have to search all over Facebook and Twitter for that info, they might give up quicker than you want. 

And most importantly, you can control what information is on there. When you go onto sites like Twitter, you can’t control what’s going to happen there. I don’t just mean that someone can start a Twitter flame war with you there, but if for whatever reason you get a permaban (my guess is the Twitter Trolls got to you), every single bit of that information is gone. Poof. Bye-bye, you’re never going to see it again. 

With an author website, however, it’s always going to be there for readers to find out when the next book is coming and what you’re up to. 

It grows with you

Unlike a landing page where it’s just a single page that has one thing, a website can grow with you. Maybe you write more than one series, or maybe you write more than one genre. Whatever the reason may be, you’re going to need more than one page that’s going to reach readers where they can buy your books. You don’t want to be limited by something if you’re planning on making writing a long term career.

It’s how you can best market yourself

I hate to break it to you, but when you want to become an author, you’ve got to put yourself on a stage and dance for dollars. Well, not literally. But you, without fail, have to market yourself right along with your books.

One of the absolutely most important things that you need as an author that’s trying to market yourself is a mailing list. But how do you get people to sign up? Your author website, of course. It’s easy to insert a link or a widget for potential readers to sign up on every single page of that website.

You can show people how well you write

Not only can people get excited about your books by going to your website and seeing all the covers and blurbs you have on there, but you can give them experts of your book to entice them into wanting more. You can do that on your mailing list too, but more often than not, people are hesitant to get free samples through their email if they haven’t already seen a little bit of your work. 

You can host your blog through your website

Depending on the route you take on websites, you’re going to have a built-in page just for your blog. You don’t have to have a blog, and you certainly don’t have to write one daily, weekly, or even monthly, but if you do have one, people get to go on your writing journey with you. 

People like success stories. People like to know how hard the road has been for you. They want to know those extra little tidbits about how you came up with your world building, how your character’s background influenced their decisions before book one starts, or even just what your emotional reaction to writing the book. 

Or they just want to know you know what you’re talking about. 

I don’t know how to get started

That’s totally fine. 

I’m the first to admit—and usually without prompting!—that I’m technologically inept. I might as well be a five-year-old when it comes to technology, and that might be generous. 

There are dozens of websites out there that have pre-made sites where you can just pop in your information and go from there, and there is always YouTube for learning how to design things yourself where you won’t necessarily have to depend on someone else or a prefab site. Don’t let the fear of not knowing what you’re doing keep you from getting your author name out there.

The best part about an author website is that it’s going to bring attention to you as the author. The more attention and readers you get, the more book sales you’re going to make, and you can keep doing what you want to be doing, which is writing. 

Join us next week when we talk about combatting self-doubt!

Let's Keep in Touch!

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date on our books, authors, and more!

Can't wait? Check out our website for available books!

When Should I edit?

Making sure you don’t get bogged down in edits

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

It can be hard to decide when the best time to edit is—many of us are perfectionists who want it done right the first time. Or, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re scared to put bad words on the page, so we edit it to death. We’ve talked a little bit about how to edit already, but we haven’t talked about when to edit. So when is the best time to edit? Let’s find out.

Before

Wait, what? You can’t edit before! You’re right, you can’t. In this case, I mean before you’ve even finished the first chapter. 

Stop what you’re doing. Stop it. This. is. a. pit. You’ve entered the fire swamp and are going to drown in the lightningsand, and Westley isn’t going to be there to save you before your work in progress dies a slow and agonizing death. 

When you become so obsessed with making sure that every single word is perfect before you can move on, you’re never going to move on, because guess what? It’s never going to be absolutely perfect—ever. 

But before I move on to the next section, I want to leave you with a quote and a bit of advice:

“The first draft of anything is shit.” ― Ernest Hemingway

I regularly tell this quote to authors who are new to writing, and also that shit makes the best fertilizer; without those bad words on the page, you can’t make them into something better. Don’t let your fear of not doing things right the first time get in the way of finishing your story and leave you with regrets. 

During

So, despite what you might think from the section above, editing while you write is not a bad thing. It becomes a bad thing when you can’t go more than a few lines before obsessively going back to edit it again and again and again. 

There are a couple of different ways that you can edit during the writing process of a manuscript that can be very productive and help you come out with a clean rough draft. There are three that I would recommend if you’re determined to edit while you’re writing, and each one has a different recommendation of how much you should actually be doing during each one. I will say, though, that editing during the process also runs the risk of slowing down finishing your first draft. 

At the end of every chapter

If you’re wanting to edit after every single chapter, the most you should be looking for is making sure that everything is spelled correctly and your sentences flow smoothly. There’s a poetry to writing, and every sentence should flow into the next without feeling stilted. For example, you might have something like this in your manuscript:

 He stood. Then he sat. Then he got up and paced. 

They’re not very good sentences, and it can easily be turned into one. But another thing about it is it lacks any feeling; it’s very clinical and dry. When you’re going through your edits, you’ll ideally want to end up with something more like this: 

He stood before quickly changing his mind and sat down again. His knee bounced as he anxiously waited for news of his wife. He couldn’t take it anymore and jumped from his seat, pacing back and forth in the waiting room. 

Your reader needs to be able to feel what you’re seeing in your mind’s eye while you’re writing, and it might not happen the first time you write it down, which is okay. It’s more than okay—that’s why there are edits and rewrites, and then more edits. And then more edits.

Every few POV chapters

Let’s say that you have only two POV characters, and their timelines are happening in a linear story. You might have more, but that’s easy to adjust with how many chapters you’ll have to wait to edit.

As with after every chapter, you’ll be looking for spelling errors, making sure your sentences flow smoothly, but now you’re going to make sure that your timeline matches up. This is going to be things like time of day, what the weather is, and if Character B’s scenes actually come after Character A’s. 

At the end of each act

Unsurprisingly, editing once you’ve finished each act is going to include everything talked about in the above sections, but this one is a little different. When you’ve got a full act to edit, you can make sure that you’re hitting your plot points and pinch points at the right time, and that you’ve definitely introduced your conflict at the right moment. Especially with the first act, if you haven’t introduced your conflict by the end of it, you have made a major mistake, and it needs to be corrected before you get too far into the process. 

Ideally, this will keep your manuscript in a tidy order, and you won’t have to add in points that you then have to edit to make sure it flows seamlessly with your other work and that you don’t have to take away superfluous scenes that then create timeline issues that need to be edited out.

After

This, I’ve found is the most common way of editing. You wait until you’ve gotten everything out of your system, and then you take a break to clear your head and take a whack at editing. 

I don’t want to keep making this point to death, but what you’ll be looking for when you edit afterward is everything mentioned above: spelling, sentence structure, timeline, and plot structure. 

The beauty of editing after everything is finished, though, is that if something comes up in act three that you want to slowly sow the seeds for in act one and two, you can easily put those in now that you know it’s happening. 

But, let’s be honest here. You’re going to be editing the whole thing after you’re finished anyway, regardless of whether you wait to edit until the very end of the writing process or not. And it will be a couple of times, at that.  

My Recommendation

There really is no right or wrong way to edit—with the exception of editing everything so much you never move forward. For me, I tend to edit at the end of everything. I like to be able to see the full picture and know where the story is going and how it got there to make sure that even the beginning chapters point in that direction. 

But, no matter which process you choose, editing is going to happen several times until you feel like you’ve been edited out. 

Join us next week when we talk about editing software and apps. 

Let's Keep in Touch!

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date on our books, authors, and more!

Can't wait? Check out our website for available books!

A Year in Review

Our First Year as Publishers

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

We’ve officially been publishing books for a full year now, our first book coming out in November 2018. We’ve learned a lot about publishing, a lot about books, and a lot about ourselves and we want to share that with you. 

Books, Books, and More Books!

First and foremost, we want to talk about our wonderful authors and their books. As a micropress, we only publish ten books a year, so we choose our books very carefully. 

What will it take, might you ask?

Well...you’ve got to keep our attention for one. We read books all. the. time. So if you’ve kept us wanting more until the end—and even more after it’s over—then fair chances are, we’re going to ask to contract your book with our company. 

Our Authors

We’re not just saying this because they’re our authors, but our authors are the best. Especially the ones when we were just getting on our feet—they took a chance on a brand new publisher and learned right along with us how things happened. They all have a heart for books, and we feel like we’ve found kindred spirits in all of them. 

We want to brag a little on the very first author who took a chance on us: C. Bradley Owens.

C. Bradley Owens was born in the small coal mining town of Grundy, Virginia. After a stint in the suburbs of Chicago, C. Bradley’s family settled near the even smaller coal mining town of Haysi, Virginia, where he spent most of his childhood in the woods on the side of a mountain in the heart of the coalfields of Appalachia, dreaming of a larger, more complex world.

Through reading, he found a more complex world, and as an adult, he seeks to create such a world through his fiction. He writes for all of those children sitting alone in their rooms, whether in the woods or in the city, hoping, longing, wishing for just a glimpse of another world, another possibility.

He writes for the outsider in all of us, for the kids that desperately want to fit in but consistently find that they cannot for whatever reason, and he writes to let everyone know that, no matter what age or condition of birth, they are not alone on that mountainside or in that forest or in that apartment building or in that house in the suburbs.

Our Books

We specialize in escapist fiction, and our stories range from shorts to epics. At the moment, we have eight short stories—soon to be nine—and twelve novels published. And that’s just the start. We’ve been lucky enough to have our 2020 and 2021 calendar fill up quickly, and we’re working on our 2022 calendar as we speak. 

But before we take too long puffing ourselves up, we want to go back to Owens and talk a little about his book, The First Story:

Matt lives to write stories. And those stories might be the only thing keeping his best friend alive after school bullies brutally attack him for being gay. At the side of John’s hospital bed, Matt weaves together tales in the hopes of waking him from his coma before it’s too late...

Storytelling itself comes to life in the world of Creativity. When unexpected changes cause chaos there, personified character archetypes known as Aspects must find the source before everything they know is lost. They suspect that someone has stolen the most powerful thing in all of Creativity: the First Story. But who is powerful enough to wield it?

Follow the Aspects as they journey through an ever-changing series of folktales, ghost-stories, tragedies, comedies, classic fantasy, and modern science fiction to piece the clues together. If the Aspects cannot trust in reality—or even their own memories—can they work together to find the thief and restore their world?

What we’ve learned about publishing

Guys. Publishing is hard. We’ll be straight with you—it’s very hard and all time-consuming. There isn’t a single day where we don’t think about what more we can be doing for our authors and how can we be better for them, but there are only twenty-four hours in a day. 

Submissions

We know the query process is hard for authors—we’re authors ourselves, and it’s nerve-racking waiting to see if an agent or a publisher will accept or reject your manuscript. But what you might not know is that it’s hard on the agents and the publishers too. There are a couple of reasons, one of which you might not expect: the abuse from authors who get rejected. You can get yelled at in emails saying you don’t know what you’re talking about, and don’t you know their work has been lauded elsewhere? You can be called anything from stupid to unprofessional and cruel and be blasted on social media for sympathy likes when you tell authors what you found in their work you thought was an issue. On the other side of that coin, there are authors who will genuinely thank you for taking the time to even bother critiquing their work.

The second, and even harder part, is having to reject books that are good. As a micro-press, we have very limited space for what we can publish per year, and that means sometimes having to reject books that are good. 

Editing and Proofreading

This takes a lot longer than you might think. The whole publishing process takes a lot longer than you might think, honestly. To get a thorough job done, you’ll need at least two passes in both editing and proofreading by your respective editors, and even then, you’ll still need a continuity reader because after reading a book so many times, the editors can become blind to some of the issues. 

Getting Reviews

You would think that this is an easy thing to get; our authors are amazing, and they write good quality work. Getting reviews should be a breeze, right? Wrong. It takes a lot of work, getting reviews, finding good ARC readers, and getting enough to trigger those good ol’ Amazon algorithms to get your book viewed more. 

What we’ve learned about ourselves

Starting and running this company has been a life-changing experience for all of us. I, personally, have learned a lot more compassion...and tact. Tact was the hardest and most useful thing for me to learn. But we’ve learned to appreciate the art we’ve dedicated our time and money to, even with all the unexpected roadblocks. 

No matter how long the hours get, and sometimes overwhelm us, we would never quit, because we get to help our authors achieve their dreams, and it’s such an honor and privilege to do it. 

We’ll be taking a break from next week’s blog post for Thanksgiving, but join us in two weeks for an interview with A4A author, B. B. Morgan, on her upcoming book Hard as Stone. 

Let's Keep in Touch!

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date on our books, authors, and more!

Can't wait? Check out our website for available books!

How To Overcome Writer's Block

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Writer’s block is the bane of every writer’s existence, and it happens far more often than we would like. So how do you get writer’s block, and how do you get over it?

Identify why you’ve got writer’s block

What do you mean, identify why I’ve got writer’s block? The words just won’t come, silly! 

Well, that’s true, but there’s usually a reason why you’ve got writer’s block. So what is it? I’ll cover three of the biggest reasons you and your fellow writers get writer’s block.

The idea that your work has to be perfect

I get it, writing is scary. I often suffer from this particular aspect of writer’s block; I want so much for the words to be perfect that instead of just writing, I freeze and stop writing altogether, and I can’t seem to move on.

Or when you’re starting a story, you’ve got the main idea down pat, but you don’t quite know how to get it out, and you’re scared it’s going to come out stupid, so you don’t put the words down. 

Or that even if you do write something and put it out there, that no one will like it, because your writing isn’t good enough, so you delay and delay writing this book.

Putting it off until you’re too tired

I fall victim to this one a lot. You’ve got a full day of adulting, and you’ve got to wait until your kids go to bed so you’ve got quiet time—provided you’ve got kids, and if you don’t and suddenly have children in your house, call the police. 

Now you’re so tired from your long day of whatever it is you’re doing, working, child-rearing, etc. that your brain is worn out, and all you want to do is be a blob and be entertained instead of having to create words…because words are hard.

You’ve got too much going on

This isn’t to say that it’s a bad thing that you’ve got a lot going on, but that isn’t always the best way to get writing done. This could be anything from someone pestering talking to you via text, social media, or in the room; someone watching a loud movie in the same room you’re trying to write in; finishing the next level in candy crush because you couldn’t beat it last night when you were supposed to be sleeping, and the list goes on and on and on.

Distractions are everywhere, man.

How to overcome your writer’s block

Now that we’ve talked about what causes your writer’s block, we can talk about the solutions for getting over those blocks. Unlike the last section, I’m going to five solutions that have worked for me in overcoming my writer’s block.

Take a walk

Those who know me know exactly how desperate I have to be to take a walk to overcome my writer’s block. Much like being creative, exercise can reduce stress and make you happy. If you don’t believe me, believe Elle Woods:

Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don't kill their husbands. They just don't.

You might not kill your husband after taking a walk, but you might just kill that character you need to get out of the way, and that’s a good thing. 

Go somewhere else

We’ve all seen the overplayed trope in movies of writers in a Starbucks with their scarves and topknots typing away madly while they’ve got their earbuds in and an undrunk (or in the case of movies, never filled) cups of coffee. There’s a reason this is a trope…writers do it all the time. 

Going somewhere else and putting yourself in a new surrounding can really open up whatever block you’re experiencing, and the words will just flow. I’ve written many a chapter in a coffee shop when my husband and I are visiting family and he wants to do activities that I don’t really want to. And by golly, it was the most productive I’ve ever been while writing because I didn’t have any other option but to write. 

What else was I going to do? Talk to a stranger?

That’s how you get murdered.

Work on a different project

Sometimes the best thing that you can do is put your current WIP aside and pick up a new one. We promise that your old WIP isn’t going to be the sad little orphan whose parent never comes back for them, but it will help you start writing again. Once words start to flow with a different project, it’ll be easier to go back to your first one. 

Alternatively, you can do another project that isn’t writing but just as creative to reduce your stress and make it easier to write, like coloring, sewing, or doing a DIY project. Anything that gets those creative juices flowing.

Write first thing in the morning

Gross, the sun isn’t even up yet!

I’ve seen all over Twitter the #5AMWritersClub hashtag and I thought these people were crazy to get up that early to do some writing, but writing first thing in the morning and making a habit of doing it at the same time every day really will break the dam down. The last thing writers need to be doing is waiting for inspiration to strike because writing takes work. It’s a little bit like planning on being rich by waiting for gold to fall out of the sky and hit you. 

Plan, plan, plan

The last tip that I want to give you is the simplest one: plan your novel.

If you know where you’re going in the story, and each chapter, it’s much easier to write toward that goal. For example, when I started writing my series, I knew exactly where the series was going to end, and where each book would end for the most impact. With that in mind, I could plan each chapter until I hit those goals. 

Writer’s block still happens, of course, but knowing where I’m going makes it a lot easier to get over the hump quicker. 

I hope this post has been helpful for you, and that you can get back to writing ASAP. Join us next week when we talk about the importance of an author website.

Let's Keep in Touch!

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date on our books, authors, and more!

Can't wait? Check out our website for available books!

New Authors: The World Revolves Around You

What makes your world your world

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Well, hello there. Welcome back to us talking about world building. If you missed it last year, you can find all of what we’re talking about in further detail here, but we’re just going to be hitting just the highlights in this post. For the sake of brevity, I want to cover what I think are the five most important things to think about when you start your world building. 

Your World

The first thing you need to do when starting your world building is in the name: the world. 

The top three things I always advise people to think about when creating just the basics of their world are what kind of people they’ll have, how time works, and what kind of land they’ll have. The latter is absolutely the most important. This is where you’ll decide if you’re going to have an earth-like environment or if you’re going to have something completely different than what we know. This could mean anything from odd plants and animals to literally living in space on a different planet, moon, or even in a different solar system. 

As for your people, that can vary as easily as your planet. You could have all animals as your cast, fantasy creatures such as elves and dwarves, or you could stick to plain ol’ humans. Or you could have a mix of all three and see who kills whom first see who becomes the dominant species see what happens.  

Lastly, because I apparently like to work in reverse order, how does time work in your world? This is important based on where you choose your location. Will your year be 365 days as it is on earth, or are you on another planet where one revolution around the sun is a single day and your people only live to be ninety days old? And how will time be marked? There are nearly as many calendars as there are countries in the world, so it’s truly a decision with no downside.

The land itself

Well...in some sections, you’re going to have extras snuck in that pertain to the main section, so you’re welcome for being indefatigable. This is how we ended up with our original eighteen-part series on world building in the first place. 

This decision is purely contingent on what type of world you choose (earth or not-earth). This is where you’re figuring out your geography, climate, and how they affect the local people, plants, and animals. If you’re living somewhere in the mountains, your resources and climate will not be the same as if you were living near an ocean or a desert. Knowing what your people will have to face will help you shape what your people will want, need, and thrive with.

Food

As mentioned above, where your people live is going to affect what kind of climate they have and what they eat. If you’ve got people living in very fertile land, they can become a very rich people in terms of resources and not have to worry about how to feed themselves in anything other than very severe drought or epic natural disasters. 

There are also several other things to think about with food: are there any sort of delicacies that only the nobility can afford to eat; are there any feasting days that are celebrated by all; and do the working class hunt for their own food so that they don’t have to pay as much out of their monthly wages—or even sell their game to make more money during the year?

This could easily get drawn into commerce and trade, but if you want to read about that, go ahead and follow the link at the top of the page because I promise if I go on too much longer, I’ll add every single subject I can in this blog post. 

Government

Governments, love them or hate them, are a necessary plot point. You might say, “But mine’s post-apocalyptic dystopian, there is no government!” Well, honey, that’s a plot point; why did your government fall? Was it an invasion or revolution ending with Madame Guillotine?

First things first, you want to figure out what kind of government you want to have. There are plenty of examples throughout history, and in the post where I’ve covered government before, you can learn about eight different types and find real-world and book examples of them. What’s also important to know is, what does your government actually do for your people? Do they keep the cities clean, or is that relegated to its inhabitants? Offer library services to aid in the education of its people? Lastly, you’ll want to think about what kind of legal systems are in place and how your governments make laws. 

Politics

Government and politics go hand in hand. Love it or hate it, politics makes the world go ’round. 

When it comes to your politicians, you’ll want to think of a couple of things: how long they stay in office, what kind of political parties that you have in your world, and what kind of foreign relations there are. Also, depending on the type of government you’ve chosen (read: monarchy), if you have any sort of political marriages that strengthen alliances. 

Defense

Also depending on what kind of government you choose, the defense of the county comes down to the government’s discretion. Here in the United States, one cannot enter a war without congressional approval. (Laugh all you want; thems the rules, even if we do habitually break them.) However, if you’ve chosen a monarchy, particularly one set in the past where the delegation of power to duchies, clans, or whatever you want to write about was prominent, you can easily have wars the head government is not a part of. 

Your time period will also dictate how wars are fought—guerilla warfare versus Napoleonic warfare versus chemical warfare versus siege warfare (there are a lot of types of warfare, okay? People be killin’ people since people existed), and on and on until everyone’s dead. You’ll also need to figure out what type of weapons will be used that are appropriate for the world that you built.

All of that is really to say: who decides who fights, who is in charge of it, and how do they fight? 

Religion

Religion is a complicated and diverse subject that can take years of discussion without getting all the fine points hammered out. 

What you’ll want to think about for your world is what kind of religion—if any—you want for your people. Will your world be dominated by a monotheistic god, or will you have polytheism present? Or both? You aren’t trapped in one religion, and it makes a story wonderfully rich and diverse if you don’t stick to just a single religion. 

You’ll also want to think about how religion influences the ethics and values of your world. Your hackles might be rising at the last, saying, “You don’t have to be religious to have ethics and values!” You’re right; you don’t. However, oftentimes, they go hand in hand and influence far more of your day-to-day life, even if you aren’t a follower of that faith, than you think it does. 

Customs

Our whole lives revolve around our cultures, whether we realize it or not. We have rituals for births and deaths and everything in between. We also have customs for how we generally treat people—everyone’s heard of Southern Hospitality—to how we greet them, and even how we visit with each other. For every decision you make when it comes to daily customs and rituals, make sure that it fits the narrative of the culture that you want. You would not have a particularly aggressive culture doing dainty little rituals and vice versa, more subdued cultures having particularly brutal rituals.

Magic

Having magic in your world is a lot more complicated than just saying, “Let there be magic!” and then resting on Sunday. 

There are several things that you’ll need to think about while creating your rules of magic. First, who can actually do magic? Is it just any old person, or are only certain people blessed with the ability? And, if only certain people can create magic, can a non-magical person use a magicked item, such as a curse or a magical gardening tool?

Next, you’ll want to think about the consequences of magic. Does the magic user have to draw the power from themselves—if they use too much, can they wind up dead? Do they have an opposing force against them while they cast so if they lift a bolder, will they end up sinking in the ground? 

Lastly, how will your baby magicians be taught? Will there be covens of witches that each have their own brand of magic? Will you have a wizarding school à la Harry Potter? Is skill taught from parent to child? There are so many options you can choose from, but whatever you pick, make sure it fits within the world that you’ve crafted. 

Education

Speaking of education…

Education is an important part of society as a whole—it’s how we make advancements, and the more people who have knowledge readily available, the quicker that happens. There are four things you’ll want to think about while you’re implementing the education of your world: who is educated, who does the education, where are the people educated, and what is taught?

Depending on the time period you’ve gone with, only the upper class are afforded the right to an education. Will it be like that in your world? Will education be free for all, up to and including college? The time period can also determine who will be teaching and where students will be taught: historically, governesses and tutors would teach the rich in their homes until they completed their education, but your world can easily have state-mandated schools with teachers from all backgrounds. 

All in all, for whatever world building you’re doing in your story, make sure that it serves the story that you want to tell. 

Thanks for reading more than you bargained for, and join us next week when I talk about themes.

Let's Keep in Touch!

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date on our books, authors, and more!

Can't wait? Check out our website for available books!