Writing

Worldbuilding Part 7: Schismogenesis, Taboo, and Identity

/ michaelkilman / 1 Comment

How do we create identities? How do we decide what kinds of things are taboo in society? How do we know what is clean or dirty? Have you ever thought about the fact that sometimes, we reinforce our choices and values through rebellion and/or opposition?

It might be obvious why some things are taboo, or at least there is some sense of rationalism surrounding those ideas. It’s taboo to eat out of the garbage, since the likelihood you will get sick is high and that’s where we put the things we wish to discard. But why are there taboos surrounding colors of clothing or beards, or types of clothing or lack of clothing? Is there a rational reason a man can’t wear a bright pink bikini on a hot summer day in American society? Why does this make us uncomfortable? Is there a reason that it’s not considered manly? Keep in mind, by reason, I mean an objective scientific one. Don’t worry, you’re not going to find a picture of me in a bright pink bikini below, I promise. But when you’re building a fictional world, understanding why a society formulates taboos and norms can be really useful.

In this entry on worldbuilding, we are going to examine a way to think about how people form their identities and cultures using the concept of schismogenesis.

(Note: You can find the earlier entries on worldbuilding, including podcasts and a Ted Talk here)

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What is Schismogenesis?

Coined by Anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the 1930s, the term schismogenesis means essentially creation through division. By looking at your identity and behavior, I acknowledge how we are different, and thus solidify who I am. This often manifests as opposition. The most obvious form of schismogenesis is the rebellion of teenagers, who form their identity based on challenging acceptable behavior. Through opposition, they create identity. But this isn’t just a teenager thing, cultures and people do this all the time. It’s why suppressing differences, can actually make them stronger. The identity becomes more legitimate, more solid, because you fight against it.

Let’s return to bikinis.

I (apparently) am the kind of man who wears a bright pink bikini in public, and you, (assuming you’re a male in this example and of the status quo in American society) do not. Thus, I am behaving inappropriately in society, and you are not. You, will try to get me to conform. You will probably mock me for my strange behavior. You may seek to make me feel ashamed of wearing my bright pink bikini out in public. I will do one of two things. Either, I will capitulate, and take off my bikini and switch to the culturally acceptable norm of swimming trunks, or I will continue my rebellion and seek to recruit others who think like me. Thus, I will form my identity through opposition.

These kinds of things happen every moment of every day across every culture. Power and resistance are constantly in play on every level. Think of all the debates going on right now in your culture about what people should and should not do. There are hundreds of topics to choose from.

Let’s look at a more serious example. Take the pork taboo. Lots of people speculate why both Jews and Muslims have a pork taboo. People have puzzled over this idea for centuries. This isn’t just limited to Jews or Muslims either. Why do some cultures say that certain foods are clean, and others are dirty? There are entire lists of foods that people eat in one location in the world, but gag just thinking about them in another.

(Note: If you want to read a whole book on this topic and you are an anthropology nerd, consider Mary Douglas’s award winning 1966 book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo)

But why pork? Well, if you ask a Jew or a Muslim, the answer you’ll likely get is that pigs are filthy animals. They are living garbage disposals and love to live in their own shit and piss and eat whatever you put in front of them. Why, they ask, would you eat such a creature as this?

The reality though, is that pigs are not like this out in the wild. In fact, when I was doing research in a rural village in Mexico in the northern state of Nueve Leon back in 2008, the pigs they had in those villages were far from disgusting or dirty. They grazed in fields alongside the other animals and ate similar things. They didn’t live in mud, they lived alongside all the other animals. So the filthy ‘nature’ of the pig that is the central complaint of the taboo is something artificially created by human action, not nature. Often cultures and people will come up with logical explanations for their taboos to justify their practices.

That doesn’t mean we should disrespect our Jewish or Muslim friends by forcing pork on them. Every culture has things it forbids that defy rationality or reason. We all have superstitions and traditions that aren’t based on evidence. The point here is not to judge, but to understand how this works to better assist you in building fictional worlds.

One possible explanation for the pork taboo is schismogenesis. In the ancient world, there was a period for the Jewish people known as the Babylonian Captivity or the Babylonian Exile. Many Jews were forced to live under the control of the Babylonian empire after the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah beginning first around 598 BCE. The Babylonians captured and enslaved many of the Jewish people.

There were two large staples of the Babylonian diet that both became taboo under the Kashrut, the dietary restrictions of the Jewish people. The first was pork, and the second was horse. Both foods were common in Babylon at the time. The enslaved Jews did not consume this food previously. Thus, as their enslavement continued, they ate foods similar to that of their homeland, and not of those who enslaved them. This certainly contributed in at least some way to the prohibition, though it may not have been the only cause.

But here we see, at least in part, schismogenesis in action. The Jews, under the yoke of an oppressor, didn’t want to partake in the food of those who had enslaved them, hence, their identity surrounding their food taboo. Several generations lived under these conditions, then, when the Persians conquered the Babylonians and allowed Jews to return to Palestine, many of those ideas circulated into the wider culture. Food is common as an important identity marker in many cultures, this is especially true in populations that have been historically oppressed.

Now again, there are many debates on the pork taboo, and this is only one possible explanation. In fact, most cultural taboos and restrictions can come from several causes at once. But, schismogenesis is useful because it helps clear up confusion in a culture. If the enemy other is doing something, and you don’t want to be like the enemy, then you can avoid doing that thing. This solidifies who you are as a culture and with it, identity. In our case, it helps create more complex fictional characters.

Here are few things to consider if you want to employ the concept of schismogenesis in your fictional world.

1.    What are the core values of each of the fictional cultures you are building?

If you’re setting up a world where multiple major cultures will fight for control, then the first place to begin is where their core values lie.

–        What kinds of things are important to your culture?

–        What taboos do they have?

–        What things to they exaggerate or emphasize about their adversaries?

–        What qualities do they wish to cultivate in individuals on an ideal level?

–        What does their mythology say about core values (refer to Worldbuilding Part 4 – Six Things to Think about When Construction Myth in Fiction if you need help with this)?

If you take these things and sketch out what each culture is doing in these worlds, you will have a good place to see potential conflict between the different ideas of morality and/or taboo in the cultures.

This is especially true if you have a culture that has been conquered by another. Acts of rebellion don’t end at violence or protest. They can manifest in everyday experiences. In fact, when you stress a culture out, there is always a core group of people who will try to preserve important elements of their culture, hence, the rise of fundamentalists. They want to go back to the way things were before the changes came. It doesn’t matter that you can never truly return to the way things were, people want that old sense of safety and security of their cultural norms.

This is why we see groups like the Amish, whose very existence is in opposition to the changes wrought by modern technology. I grew up in part on the east coast, and not far outside of Philadelphia, it was common to see the Amish on the road in their horse and buggy, slowing down traffic. The way they choose to live is a form of schismogenesis. It might not feel subversive to us to live in that way, but to them, it is.

Which brings me to another point. Cultures aren’t homogeneous. There are all kinds of diverse approaches and ways to live within cultures. Be sure to consider that as you highlight the values and taboos of the larger culture above. You will want some wiggle room for resistance, for factionalism, even as larger conflicts between nations are happening. People disagree on pretty much everything, and sometimes that disagreement is a huge part of their identity.

2.    The minor differences matter

Yes, your cultures will argue over the big stuff. But the minor differences matter too. Every culture has a different protocol for body language, for dress, for the kinds of sounds and colors they like and dislike, and so on. Every little thing you do comes from making comparisons against others. While we focus on the things we like and enjoy, we often spend even more time on the things we don’t like or find disgusting as ways of acknowledging who we are.

Small things like how a culture eats can mark identity. Much of Europe didn’t adopt forks until the 17th or 18th century (depending on what region) because they were considered either unmanly or excessive. Just imagine, someone, at some point, was complaining about how feminine it was to use a fork. Yes, that really happened. Someone else decided to use a fork anyway, probably a teenager.

Even generations within cultures employ schismogenesis. Think about what different generations say about each other. I’m a millennial and hear constant complaints from older generations about us. I’m almost forty now, so obviously millennials aren’t that young anymore. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of complaints among my fellow millennials about Zoomers already. We make constant comparisons about all the little things we do differently.

You don’t have to pick big things for schismogenesis, in fact, sometimes a lot of little things add up to create stark differences. Remember, as I’ve said repeatedly in these entries, and in my book Build Better Worlds, culture is a performance. It’s a way of enacting practices to mark who you are and what you value. That isn’t just the big stuff, it’s all the little things too.

3.    Living within a cultural script

Every culture has a kind of script, a set of rules to live by that are both formal (laws) or informal (norms). Some cultures (like our own) make the concepts of choice and freedom paramount to their core values. But if you step outside the bounds of their norms, there are still all kinds of ways you can be disenfranchised. Think of the debates surrounding the right way to be a man in our own society. Forks and pink bikinis aside, these discussions aren’t about objective truth.

In fact, the irony of this discussion is that if choice and freedom were truly at the center of the debate, there wouldn’t be arguments about what makes a “real man”. Men would just go out and do whatever they wanted and that would be manly. These same scripts that proscribe masculinity limit agency (freedom of movement within a culture). There’s no freedom by living up to the expectations of a cultural script, but there is a sense of unity, an imagined comradery. (Note: See Benedict Anderson’s 1990 book Imagined Communities for the Anthropology Nerds out there) Though we may never meet most other Americans, there are certain behaviors and identity markers that are expected to establish a sense of unity across the culture.

This isn’t about good or bad, this is what cultures do. How a culture maintains itself, or how it changes, is an endless conversation taking form in every arena of every culture. These masculine norms aren’t about freedom, it is about expectations, about clearing up confusion to make identifying what is male and what is female in clear terms. Humans in general like things simple. Unfortunately, very little about humans is simple. We might idealize certain behaviors or how many genders we think we are, but of course, certain behaviors that are beneficial and unifying to one group will naturally be oppressive and divisive for another. This is exactly why, opposition can be a core part of identity.

With all that in mind, take a moment to consider, what kind of cultural scripts are used in your fictional world. There are certainly trends among humans. Male domination, though not universal, is common in the modern world. There are still matriarchies out there, but they are few and far between because of the larger patterns of empire and conquest.

A few things to consider with cultural scripts:

–        Remember Cognitive Maps (from the last post on worldbuilding) and how biological differences, magic systems, or superpowers will necessitate different brains and thus, different cultures.

–        Different political systems, like the matriarchy mentioned above, would have different scripts

–        Different economic systems, like a gift economy, or a system that uses potlatching, would have different scripts about what wealth and power look like

–        Different religions, for example, one without deities, are going to focus on different scripts.

–        Remember that culture is holistic, that every part of culture connects into every other part of culture, the scripts about behavior and identity will mirror all these elements put together

4.   Enforcing identity and Solidifying Resistance

In order for a cultural script to be useful, it has to be enforced. In some societies, there are laws about how people dress. They enforce what activities different groups can participate in, how they should appear in public, and so on. In addition to these formal laws, or in a situation where there isn’t written law, rumors and gossip act as a kind of social surveillance to enforce expected behavior. Gossip is likely the oldest form of surveillance and uses shame and guilt as a weapon against anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into cultural scripts. If that sounds like high school, you’re not wrong. Humans have been doing this to each other since we were… well, humans.

Remember, these scripts are also created in part because a culture doesn’t want to behave like the other. They want to mark themselves as distinct and different. They don’t want to engage in the behaviors of the enemy other, dress like the enemy, eat like the enemy, or even talk like the enemy. Groups that are focused on differences will often advocate for exclusionary rules or policies that limit the kinds of diversity possible. They will shame and embarrass those who don’t fit in the mold. Often, they have a fear that this other, this adversary, will creep in and take their culture away from them by changing things or forcing them to change.

We even do this on a large scale. The 1978 book, Orientalism, by Edwards Said, highlights the perceptions of Europe and its false dichotomy of the Eastern world vs Western world. The book is an attempt to critique our stereotypes of the Eastern world, and how empire, colonialism, and bias played a role in our understanding of world history and cultural analysis.

According to Said, men of the Orient were portrayed as culturally backward, physically weak, and feminine. This reinforced the ideas of Western masculinity. Of course, perceptions of the men of the Orient were just stereotypes. And nothing robs people of their freedom quite like a stereotype.  Raj from The Big Bang Theory, and Fez from That 70s Show, are stereotypical examples of Orientalism in action. Both the characters struggle to understand Western culture and are awkward. Both characters spend a lot more time with the women of the group and struggle to relate to the men in the same way. Both characters are mocked for their physical weakness.

Cultures will often create assumed cultural scripts for their enemy. We know these scripts as stereotypes. We expect the enemy to fit only within these boxes, and are often surprised when they don’t. This is not a product of only one culture, all cultures do this. We use our norms and rules to compare ourselves to the cultures we don’t like because they are a direct enemy, or because we consider them less civilized. But it works in a paternal dimension too. Paternalism in this case is the notion that we are more rational or advanced and must help civilize the “savage”.

What are the benefits of using Schismogenesis in fiction?

Employing schismogenesis creates all kinds of fertile ground for storytelling. There will be characters who highlight the differences between each group and hold conservative views about the way things have always been. There will be characters who think that some of these arbitrary things are well… arbitrary. They will accuse the conservatives of living in the past and highlight the ways that the past was ugly. These are the progressives of your society. They often advocate against these kinds of differences. However, they will also employ schismogenesis against those who they disagree with too, often the conservatives of their culture.

Just because you are liberal or progressive doesn’t mean you’re free of bias. No one is free of bias and oversimplistic thinking. We all generalize the people we disagree with. I catch myself doing it all the time. After all, it’s much easier to disagree with someone if you take away the nuance and complexity of their argument and create strawmen that are easy to knock down. We all have things we are bias about and we even know that some of them are arbitrary. Your characters absolutely should too.

There’s a third group in a mix, the ones who stand in the middle. These bicultural individuals (they can certainly have more than two cultural backgrounds) don’t have a specific set of rules or scripts to follow for their identity or they have more than one. Individuals like this are born in the middle of multiple scripts, being forced to discern how to move through the world. They could be mixed ethnicities and thus get culture from each parent, or perhaps they are an immigrant or refugee born in one culture, but now living in another. Every person who stands in the middle will take unique positions on different aspects of their identity and culture. Immigrants should be just as diverse and complex in their approach to the world as characters who are monocultural. Some immigrants may take on the dominant norms as an act of rebellion to their parents. Others may take on the traditions of their homeland to resist assimilation. Schismogenesis in the real world creates all kinds of diverse identities and experiences and in fiction, richer characters, backstories, and worldbuilding.

Consider:

–        How do your characters compare themselves to other cultures and individuals?

–        Why do they make that comparison? Are they jealous? Are they fascinated? Is the grass greener? Is the other more barbaric?

–        Do they see some good things and some bad things about the other?

–        What generation are they a part of? Are there changes in technology for that culture or maybe some new cultural practice or experience has arrived?

–        Has contact with another culture happened recently?

–        Has there been a change in the political or economic structure?

Some Final Thoughts

Norms change. We don’t consider forks unmanly anymore. Though I guess the jury is still out on men in pink bikinis. Every generation gains new ideas, and loses some old ones. Maybe in the era of social media things are changing faster than before, but we need a much longer view, in terms of decades, to really understand what social media is doing to us. Sometimes, changes that appear bad in the beginning create really interesting changes in the long term.  

In building your world you could start out with one group of norms and rules for a society and then change the power dynamics of the situation to suddenly force those norms out. Brandon Sanderson does this masterfully in the Stormlight archives. At the beginning of the series, having light-colored eyes automatically means you are a person of rank and privilege. Being a poor light eyes is far better than being a wealthy dark eyes. Light eyes or dark, both groups have their own internal hierarchies as well. But, as the series goes on, and the return of old magic changes the colors of some people’s eyes, the power dynamic of eye color changes, and many of the characters are forced to confront the arbitrary nature of the light eye, dark eye, dichotomy, each in their own way.

The best stories are ones that show truth. The truth about most of what we do as humans is that it’s arbitrary. We have certain standards and taboos that do serve purposes. Some help protect people from harm in both short-term and long-term situations. Eating garbage or marrying your sibling are not wise moves and thus those taboos are useful.

However, many things we hold as important are really just cultural preferences. Loving your culture isn’t wrong. It’s just that these things don’t have any root in objective truth. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have value. There are many beautiful traditions the world over that some consider strange, while others find unity and comfort in them.

It’s all complicated. Wonderfully complicated. I think too often we look at complexity and throw up our arms and say, it’s too much effort to understand. But I think it’s better to be curious. But then, that is why I became an Anthropologist.

Writing honestly means to look at the world and understanding it for what it is. The world you create in fiction, is a reflection of who you are. Sometimes that means to create the best worlds, we have to step outside of what’s comfortable or easy. Good worldbuilding means you need to understand the cultures you’re creating. You need to hold what they see as sacred in your mind. Immerse yourself in their worlds. Live through your characters and embrace the wonderful complexity of the world you’re creating. Maybe try a little schismogenesis on for size.

After all, what’s more fun than being a creator?

Happy Worldbuilding!

P.S. I lied about the picture of me in a bikini…  

This is the most recent entry in the Worldbuilding series. Go back to Worldbuilding Part 6: Cognitive Maps, Magic, and Super Powers or browse the full Worldbuilding archive for all seven entries. For a comprehensive guide to anthropological worldbuilding check out Build Better Worlds. And if you want hands-on help applying these ideas to your specific project, I offer worldbuilding consultations – the first 15 minutes are free.

Shades and Shapes in the Dark

/ michaelkilman / Leave a comment

Sometimes a story or a character simply won’t leave me alone. It intrudes in every idle moment and even in dreams. It refuses to go away until I do something about it.

I guess that’s my way of saying that I’ve been working on a new book. Yes, I know there are other projects… but this one just won’t stop pestering me.

I’ve only told two people who are close to me about it, but in the last month (one of the reasons for my lack of posting anything) I’ve written 47,000 words in this book. I am hesitant to make any promises for when it will be finished (or any of my other projects) but it seems to me, if I keep writing this pace, it will be finished by the end of the fall season and perhaps sooner.

The book is both Dark Fantasy and Horror and is titled Shades and Shapes In the Dark. And though it is still a work in progress, I am going to share an excerpt here for everyone, and the first full chapter for my wonderful paid subscribers over on Substack

Here is the blurb for the book:

A Girl, A Skateboard, And Four Decades of Darkness…

When nine year old Clarissa chased a thief through the woods and stumbled upon a strange meadow, she had no idea that the creature living within would begin following her and feeding on her for the next four decades. Now, she must reflect on her life, and all the ways in which the creature she has named Demon has tormented her. For somewhere in her long experience there must be an answer to defeat it once and for all, or she will face a fate worse than death.

Shades and Shapes in the Dark

By Michael Kilman

Part 1

A Game of Shapes and Shadows

Those shades and shapes in the dark,

From which we draw our desires,

Shape our way of knowing,

Of where best to put our ire.

We cannot see the murky mists,

With our eyes shut ever so tight

Where we leave behind only corpses,

And journey into endless night.

Oh how we take and take some more

For thieving is our business.

We are a shadow of what we once were

When we know only stiffness

Where ever you go is where you are

No matter how fast you’re running,

No magic, nor wisdom, can set you free,

From your mind’s endless cunning.

Come,

Let us wonder through trains of thought

And let the forms take their shape

For having read this far already

Know now, Reader,

There is no escape…

Chapter 1

Tonight, she would stand before Demon for the last time. It was the last time because, now, tonight, as the cold crept in under her skin on the darkest night of the year, and as the snow pelted her face with it’s cold harsh kisses, she would end it. She was tired of running, tired of hiding, tired of the manipulations and the games the creature had visited up on her these long years. Her torment would end before the sun rose over the snowy meadow.

She had not come here for suicide, far from it. She was no conciliatory party accepting defeat and sewing for peace. There could be no peace between them. It was time to surrender to her fate, here, tonight, no matter her fortune. She would fight with all her being until one lay dead. At least, she hoped Demon could die. Perhaps it could not. But as they say, fortune favors the bold. And her boldness was the sharpest of edges.

It had taken everything from her. Through the years it had stripped away all pretense of happiness, so that only unease remained. Only a species of longing stretched out through her loneliness as if a single gossamer thread, balancing all of her life, were holding her up. And she was dangling, oh, she was dangling now. So what use was anything but surrender?

She had come here because this is where it all began. It was the origin story of her suffering, and her brushes with madness. She had looked for Demon’s lair, for the telltale sign of bones or bodies, but she found nothing in the forest. Clarissa had wandered for through the forest for endless hours in the last month. She had learned the nature of every tree and fern she could find. Still, there was no hint of the permanence of the creature, no domicile for which it sought shelter between feedings. As the year drew closed, both on the calendar and her journey around the sun for the forty-ninth time, she had decided to return where it all began.  

After she and the creature had met at this crossroad of life and fortune, she had come back one other time to confront it. She had thought it defeated then, but it returned just as fall inevitably follows summer. Clarissa wasn’t ready to die during her last confrontation. She was now. Perhaps that would make all the difference. Certainly something would change after tonight.

It would speak tonight. She had no reason to be certain of a such a thing, but it felt right being here. It didn’t matter that the fear nipped at any exposed skin. Nor, did it matter that if she was wrong it would kill her. It was right to be here, as if she stood at the crossroads of sanity and madness.

It was only because of the snow catching the light of the full moon peaking through the clouds that she could see something emerge into the meadow. There was no sound, save for the soft flutter of snowflakes as they gathered on the tall grass, sliding down to touch the earth and gather together. She wished she could gather like that with others. What a grand thing it would be to build something, some life with other people, but Demon had made certain of her isolation.

The trees bent outward, away from the meadow, and no animal ever dared tread here. There were no tell-tale signs of tracks crossing the open space. Any animal who did come near never made it much further than the edge of the meadow before falling into first death, and then decay and ruin. There was a circle of small bones and corpses ringing the meadow, marking it off as a place of sacrifice. When she had seen those skeletons and the strange growth of trees for the first time all those years ago, it had given her pause. Unfortunately, by then it was too late. She had already stepped inside what she now thought of as, the ritual grounds.

She had spilled blood here. It didn’t matter if it was an accident. She was certain now that, by spilling blood in the meadow, she had woken Demon and begun the unending torment that was her life.

Something was moving on the edge of the wood. It rarely let her see it in all its form and being. Mostly it lurked in the shadows, satisfied to feed on her from a distance, to terrorize with uncertainty. Mostly she only saw shapes and shades of the dark, from which it sipped on her. Even now after four decades Clarissa could close her eyes and hear the soft slurping sounds it made as it sipped from the shadows in the corners of spaces. Perhaps, she thought, it cost a lot for it to take full shape. She couldn’t be sure if it was more terrifying in full form, or as a shadow, but both were the just shades of the same color of fear.  

It did not want her dead, at least she didn’t think so. It’s purpose was like a plague that left scarred survivors. Perhaps it was a parasite. She suspected it was her fear, anger, and sorrow on which it fed. For it always appeared when she was deep in possession by strong emotions or it sought to create them. When it appeared, her joy would turn sour in her mouth. Love would wilt away under the drought of goodness so that all that was left was her fixation on fear, then anger, then hatred, and finally despair.

She called it Demon. But she didn’t believe in Deities. Some might argue that the existence of such an evil would demand a deity, but why should it? No, for Clarissa, gods and devils were just lazy stories that people told themselves to feel better about their life. She spat at their simplicity. It would be so easy to hope that some god or goddess would come aid her, to defend her, to send some sign to press forward. But in forty years of torment, she had seen nothing to suggest divine intervention. No, she was on her own. Here she was now, standing in the frozen meadow, forced into a confrontation with some supernatural being. She couldn’t deny magic, but magic didn’t mean there were gods or devils or heavens, or hells.

She called it demon only because she didn’t know what else to call it. It was an animal of some kind, perhaps not one bound by the same rules and principles of our her own existence, but it seemed to follow at least some rules. At first, she had called it shadow, but that wasn’t right. Shadows couldn’t kill. Light disrupted shadows. Demon disliked the light, but… once, it had shown itself in the height of the noonday sun. That moment was forever fixed it in her memory as the moment when her passion was stolen from her, when her one refuge was taken.

There was a soft crunching noise in the snow, now several inches deep. The wind picked up. It did not howl, but it shook the snow from the tops the surrounding trees and cast it into the air like confetti. Somehow she knew that the wind was Demon’s doing and on the back of the wind, she could feel its laughter.

Footfalls emerged before her. She could see impressions forming in the snow. Silence fell. Demon had arrived.

She lifted her flashlight and shone it at the spot. Demon raised its arm to shield it’s eyes, taking a few steps backward. But there was no hiss of burning, or wince of pain, though she had bought the brightest flashlight money could buy. After a moment it let its long jagged arms, relax by it’s side. Spikes protruded every few inches, starting small at its wrists and then growing in size until they stood six inches tall on its shoulders. They reminded her rotting teeth made of something like solidified tar. It’s eyes were like giant black orbs, deep as the darkness it inhabited. To stare into them was to feel a sucking sensation on your soul. Clarissa knew from long experience, that to stare into them, was to risk everything. She stared at them now, fixing her will on Demon.

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Master Four Elements of a Scene to Enhance Your Fiction Writing

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Like music, good writing often has a rhythm and a flow. There are always exceptions of course, but if you want your readers to connect with your content, it can be helpful to consider the four elements below.

This essay will focus mainly on fiction. Non-fiction has a different set of elements, and maybe I will write about that soon (comment below if you’re interested in that).

Before I dive in, It’s important to note, that style is really important here too. Different writers use these elements in different ways, but, finding your way to balance them, can help your writing immensely. Often, thinking about how to balance these elements is better done in your second draft. Why? Well, often the first draft is more about discovery. What’s happening? Why is it happening? Once you have the core basics of what you want the scene to accomplish, then you can go back through and apply these elements. Of course, as you practice, you’ll get better at doing it the first time around too.

As I cover each element, I’m going to write a sample scene using the elements. Each element will build on the previous scene. The first iteration of the scene will only include dialogue. With each element, we will add another layer to the same scene.

Let’s dive in.

Element 1: Dialogue

What makes dialogue compelling? Have you ever stopped and read your favorite scenes of dialogue?

There are a few key ingredients to dialogue. But before we get into that, it’s good to note that dialogue in real life, is not the same as fiction. You can’t listen to real-world conversations to help with fictional dialogue.

When I was in graduate school a huge part of my job was transcribing interviews and roundtable discussions. I spent hundreds of hours typing up conversations. It wasn’t long before I discovered that most people don’t follow the same grammatical rules that we do when we are writing. Good dialogue has to simulate conversation but is cleaner and more to the point. No one wants to read all the ums and pauses and false starts. So a first tip is to consider studying how your favorite novels or films set up quality dialogue.

Beyond the flow of dialogue, it’s vital to consider your characters’ interests. What does your character want out of this conversation? What’s their agenda? Do they just want a cup of coffee or are they trying to persuade someone else to take action?

Every person in the dialogue should have some kind of agenda, even if the agenda is to try and remain neutral or understand what the other character is trying to say. How does that agenda tie into their larger goals? Or does it? Maybe their goal is to relax and their neighbor is pestering them. Maybe the conversation is with a powerful person whose goal is to take over the world.

Dialogues are often games of power, persuasion, and coercion. We use our words to enforce norms in society. We use them to get what we want or prevent something from happening. We use words to connect with people or share our feelings just as often as we use them to compete. Always consider how these conversations drive the plot and character development.

Each of your characters will use different kinds of words and phrases. A ten-year-old, unless they are a prodigy, is unlikely to use big words and scientific jargon. They are also less likely to be self-reflective. However, if the 10-year-old is trying to sound smart (because their agenda is to sound more grown up in a group of grown-ups) it can be fun to have the child use the words incorrectly.

You can also use a conversation between an adult and a child to reveal something about your world. The adult can explain elements of your world or story to your child that might be difficult to do in other ways. Children and newcomers to a world are often useful tool for helping your reader to understand your story more organically through dialogue than a long info dump.

Personally, I am not a huge fan of incorporating a lot of dialects into writing. In the Harry Potter series, for example, I loathe reading the Hagrid Dialogue out loud to my kids. That’s because sometimes it’s hard to understand what the character is saying. You have to read the sentence several times and that kind of dialogue can pull you out of the story and leave you feeling frustrated. Your use of accents or dialects should never pull the reader out of the story. You want to draw people in, not frustrate them and force them to read the same line several times to understand what’s happening. There are always exceptions of course, but generally, I suggest avoiding distracting dialects.

On the other hand, if there are certain words or phrases that a character always uses, it can be a good way to build personality or remind your reader of their quirks. Just don’t overuse this. We have all encountered the annoying person who uses the same phrases over and over. Though, this too can be a tool in writing. Perhaps your main character is exhausted by their neighbor who says the same phrase six times in a single conversation. But remember, a little bit goes a long way.

Avoid adverbs. I’m not one of those writers who says never use them, adverbs have their place. But if you always have to write something like, ‘She spoke softly’ or ‘He said with certainty’ then you aren’t really balancing out the other elements. There are lots of other tools in our writing kits that help us understand tone and emotion. Dialogue can be good for showing the reader things, but avoid telling your reader about the tone or feelings of the character. Let the character share their own thoughts and feelings as much as possible.

There are definitely more things to think about with dialogue but considering these key points can significantly improve your dialogue. If you want to dive deeper into dialogue specifically, I highly recommend the book ‘How to Write Dazzling Dialogue’. It’s a pretty quick read and covers some additional key points about how to improve that particular part of your writing.

Scene Example Part 1: Just Dialogue

Stephanie said, “I’m leaving for a reason.”

Grandma said, “But we need you here on the farm.”

“Bert isn’t going to college. He’ll stay here forever.”

“One person isn’t enough to take care of all the animals.”

“So hire someone.”

“You don’t care about your family?”

“It’s not that grandma. I do care. But this place. It’s just not me. I don’t feel like I fit in here. I want to find where I belong.”

“Stephanie, of course you fit in here. I couldn’t do any of this without you. And besides, Bert isn’t going to marry anyone. He’s not going to have kids. This farm has been in the family for generations and you’re just going to abandon us?”

“It’s not abandoning you. I have to find myself. I’m an artist Grandma. I need inspiration.”

“You can paint here!”

“Paint what? Barns? Trees? Farmers? No. I want to travel the world and paint all the amazing things I see.”  

Element 2: Action

Action isn’t necessarily violence. Action is also motion. It’s everyday tasks. It’s moving around in the space and inhabiting it. Action is important because you don’t want your character floating around in a void, you want them to be living breathing beings inhabiting an interesting space.

Is your character cooking dinner while talking to their grandmother?

Are they brewing a magical potion to curse their enemies while discussing their evil master plan with their assistant?

Action and Dialogue work together in beats. The dialogue in the example above is an okay start but when we only have the words, were missing so much more of the lived experience of these two characters. Dialogue and action have beats and melodies just like music.

If you have only dialogue and no action, there’s no room for the reader to pause and consider. Action can give dialogue some breathing room. It can add quirks to each character and deepen the emotions of the dialogue.

Maybe it’s just me, but I struggle to stay interested when there is too much action. A big battle scene, a one-on-one fight, a massive explosion, or a scene where someone is fleeing a monster can be a lot of fun to read and write. But if your characters never stop to catch their breath, if every chapter has a scene where someone is fleeing a monster, if your entire book is a battle… you’re going to bore the hell out of most readers. There are certainly people who will read nonstop action. Hollywood counts on some of those people to consume their endless sequels of Fast and Furious, but even those movies, have downtime.

Action should serve a purpose in the story. Yes, you can absolutely write cool action scenes and they’re definitely fun to write, but why? What does this do to drive the story?

Frank Herbert was notorious for cutting out the vast majority of the big battles in his Dune books, and Dune is hands down the best-selling sci-fi novel of all time. There’s lots of action in the books, but you don’t hear very much about the big interstellar battles as Paul Atredies conquers the galaxy. And while not everyone loves Dune, it’s one of the most important science fiction novels in history. There are lots of ways to approach action.

Why does that bomb need to go off? Why do two rivals have to fight that battle? Or rather, why do you need to show the battle? Is your main character a warrior so the audience needs to see their skills or use of magic? Is important to show them fighting for their life against an evil shapeshifting clown? If your story contains a lot of battles, it’s not necessary to show every element of every battle. Choose important moments in longer moments to highlight important actions. Don’t make the mistake of the Transformers movies and have ninety minutes of a two-hour film dedicated to fight scenes. Those movies make my eyes glaze over because it’s just action, action, action.

Be strategic with your action. Too much and you might have readers putting down your book, too little and they won’t understand the scene the way you want them to.  

Scene Example Part 2: Dialogue and Action

Stephanie stirred the marinara and said, “I’m leaving for a reason.”

Grandma kneaded the dough on the adjacent countertop. She pressed her hands much harder in the dough than needed, “But we need you here on the farm.”  

Adding in some more garlic, Stephanie stopped and turned facing her grandmother. “Bert isn’t going to college. He’ll stay here forever.”

Grandma sighed shook her head. “One person isn’t enough to take care of all the animals.”

“So hire someone.”

Grandma stopped kneading the dough and put her hands on her hips, scattering flower on the floor. “You don’t care about your family?”

Stephanie turned back to the pot, adding seasoning to the sauce. “It’s not that grandma. I do care. But this place? It’s just not me. I don’t feel like I fit in here. I want to find where I belong.”

Her grandmother leaned into the rolling pin and flattened the dough. “Of course you fit in here! I couldn’t do any of this without you. And besides, Bert isn’t going to marry anyone. He’s not going to have kids. This farm has been in the family for generations and you’re just going to abandon us?”

“It’s not abandoning you. I have to find myself. I’m an artist Grandma. I need inspiration.”

“You can paint here!”

“Paint what? Barns? Trees? Farmers? No. I want to travel the world and paint all the amazing things I see.”  She waved her arms around spattering droplets of marinara on the countertops.

Element 3: Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding is the cultural and environmental setting your characters are in. It’s the kinds of cultural elements you’ll see in the seen giving your story more context.

– What time in history does your story take place?

-What is the level of technology?

-Are the characters indoors? Outdoors?

-What kinds of things decorate their walls?

-What kind of furniture or objects fill the room?

-What does the landscape look like? Can people walk in it or do they need a space suit?

We cultivate our spaces based on cultural knowledge and personal experiences. But personal experience is also bound by culture. If you live in a different culture you will naturally have different experiences. Think about the culture and the setting of your scene. In our example, we have a family farm and a young girl dreaming of traveling the world and painting. What kind of cultural details are important to make the world feel real?

Worldbuilding should be realistic. No, I don’t mean you can’t use magic, or spaceships, or supernatural forces, I mean your world must be internally consistent and holistic. What does that mean? It means that there are manyl ways that sentient creatures (like humans) interact and adapt to the world they live in both socially and physically.

-Every culture has limitations and gaps in knowledge. What are your characters?

-What are the power dynamics between the characters? Who tries to assert power? Who tries to resist it? The rebellious teenager who wants to travel the world and paint is trying to both resist the power of the older generation and assert her own.

-Do they fit within the status quo of the culture or is one character challenging the status quo?

-How does their identity fit, or not fit, into the culture?

A few sentences here or there can add a little more context to the world in which the characters inhabit. Everyone always says to avoid info dumping. But what if you have to introduce the reader to a giant walking city, telepathy, and what it’s like to be homeless in this environment in a single scene? How can you avoid info dumping? The balance between these elements (including the next and final one) can help you to draw your readers in and make a scene more compelling, while at the same time introducing interesting concepts or ideas to your story.

If you want a full book chapter that includes worldbuilding through, dialogue, action, and the environment, you might consider listening to audio narration of the first chapter of my novel “Mimi of the Nowhere” for free over on YouTube.

If you want more on worldbuilding specifically, I’ve written several other essays on the topic and of course, my co-written book, “Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers, and Filmmakers might give you some things to think about.

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Scene Example 3: Dialogue, Action, and Worldbuilding

Under the warm light of the kitchen, Stephanie stirred the marinara and said, “I’m leaving for a reason.”

Grandma kneaded the dough on the adjacent countertop. She pressed her hands much harder in the dough than needed. “But we need you here on the farm.”  

First, adding in some more garlic she had bought that morning from the farmers market, Stephanie stopped and turned facing her grandmother. “Bert isn’t going to college. He’ll stay here forever.”

Grandma sighed shook her head. “One person isn’t enough to take care of all the animals.”

Cornelius the Rooster picked that moment to jump up and peck at the kitchen window.

“So hire someone.”

Grandma stopped kneading the dough and put her hands on her hips, scattering flower on the peeling linoleum floor. “You don’t care about your family?” She grabbed the ancient rolling pin, that had probably been around as long as she was alive. Two white handprints lingered on her apron as she worked the dough.

Stephanie turned back to the pot, adding seasoning to the sauce. “It’s not that grandma. I do care. But this place? It’s just not me. I don’t feel like I fit in here. I want to find where I belong.”

Rain replaced the rooster, drumming on the window.

Her grandmother leaned into the rolling pin and flattened the dough. “Of course you fit in here! I couldn’t do any of this without you. And besides, Bert isn’t going to marry anyone. He’s not going to have kids. This farm has been in the family for generations and you’re just going to abandon us?”

“It’s not abandoning you. I have to find myself. I’m an artist Grandma. I need inspiration.”

“You can paint here. Your family loves you. We’ll miss you.” She nodded toward the family portraits on the wall, taken semi-often over the last hundred years. The older photos were black and white and gradually changed to a printed copy Grandma had reluctantly taken with her cell phone.

“Paint what? Barns? Trees? Farmers? No. I want to travel the world and paint all the amazing things I see.”  She waved her arms around spattering droplets of marinara on the countertops. Similar stains speckled the walls from past disagreements, a map of misunderstandings.

Element 4: Internal Life

Internal life is what’s happening in the character’s mind. Not every scene needs a great deal of internal life, and in some situations, it might make sense to cut it entirely. But I think that internal life can be a powerful ally in writing a scene that connects the reader to the character’s emotions. It can also show how a character has changed in a longer story.

One of my favorite fantasy writers, Brent Weeks, does a fantastic job of using the internal life of his characters to show how they reflect on what’s happening to them and how they’ve changed over time. When you read either one of his famous book series, The Lightbringer, or the Night Angel series, that inner life helps you to feel that you’re growing with the character and you feel a deeper connection.

Things to consider about the element of inner life:

-What are the character’s thoughts and feelings?

-How do they think about what the other person just said?

-How do they feel about the place? The weather? The political situation?

-What do they think about themselves?

-What emotions are most potent in the scene?

-What things do they ruminate on? What can’t they stop thinking or worrying about?

-Do they have trauma? What things force them to relive that trauma?

-What motivates them?

-What are they afraid of?

-How does the internal life reflect the outer conditions?

Be careful, too much internal life can slow the scene down to the point where it’s hard for the reader to focus. If you’re always in the character’s head, the scene can feel bloated. Some books focus so much on inner life that nothing happens for most of a chapter. That may or may not be good for your story. Consider carefully.

Scene Example 4: All Four Elements

Under the warm light of the kitchen, Stephanie stirred the marinara and said, “I’m leaving for a reason.”

Grandma kneaded the dough on the adjacent countertop. She pressed her hands much harder in the dough than needed. “But we need you here on the farm.”  

What did they need her for? She barely tended the animals anymore. She couldn’t understand why her grandmother was pushing so hard to keep her around.

First adding in some more garlic she had bought that morning from the farmers market, Stephanie stopped and turned facing her grandmother. “Bert isn’t going to college. He’ll stay here forever.”

Her baby brother loved this place. He was up early every single day with the animals, spent hours on the tractor, and loved the work. But Bert was a loner. He only left the farm to go on supply runs.

Grandma sighed shook her head. “One person isn’t enough to take care of all the animals.”

Cornelius the Rooster picked that moment to jump up and peck at the kitchen window. She hated that damn bird. It woke her every morning and pecked at the window all the time. She definitely wouldn’t miss him.

“So hire someone.”

Grandma stopped kneading the dough and put her hands on her hips, scattering flower on the peeling linoleum floor. “You don’t care about your family?” She grabbed the ancient rolling pin, that had probably been around as long as she was alive. Two white handprints lingered on her apron as she worked the dough.

Stephanie turned back to the pot, adding seasoning to the sauce. “It’s not that grandma. I do care. But this place? It’s just not me. I don’t feel like I fit in here. I want to find where I belong.”

The rain replaced the rooster, drumming on the window. She’d almost rather the rooster. Stephanie was so tired of the rain, of the endless months of overcast. She wanted to be somewhere warm and sunny.

Her grandmother leaned into the rolling pin and flattened the dough. “Of course you fit in here! I couldn’t do any of this without you. And besides, Bert isn’t going to marry anyone. He’s not going to have kids. This farm has been in the family for generations and you’re just going to abandon us?”

And there it was. She wanted Stephanie to become the typical barefoot and pregnant farmer’s wife. And who the hell would she stick around for? There weren’t exactly a lot of good options around here. After high school, all the fun people had gone off to college. After her parents had died, she had stayed for three years until Bert graduated. But she dreamed of New York and Paris and London. And she wanted to see those places before she even considered kids.

“It’s not abandoning you. I have to find myself. I’m an artist Grandma. I need inspiration.”

“You can paint here. Your family loves you. We’ll miss you.” She nodded toward the family portraits on the wall, taken semi-often over the last hundred years. The older photos were black and white and gradually changed to a printed copy Grandma had reluctantly taken with her cell phone.

“Paint what? Barns? Trees? Farmers? No. I want to travel the world and paint all the amazing things I see.”  She waved her arms around spattering droplets of marinara on the countertops. Similar stains speckled the walls from past disagreements, a map of misunderstandings.

Concluding Thoughts

Take a look at how much more we know about the character’s motivations and the world in which they inhabit in the last example compared to the first one where we only use dialogue. How I use these elements will certainly be different than how you use them, but I hope the scene examples will help illuminate how you might approach and improve your own scenes.

Even if you choose to skip one of these elements, or if you use one far less than the others, it’s important to consider how each of these approaches is used and integrated into the scene to breathe life into your characters. These aren’t rules, these are suggestions. At the end of the day, you decide how to approach your style of writing.

I write essays like this to help readers like you understand the core foundations so that they can truly understand the nature of the art and craft of writing. After all, the world is a better place with better stories. And I believe that stories can save the world.  

I hope this was helpful! Best of luck with all of your writing! Feel free to add questions or comments below.

Rereading to Improve Your Writing Craft

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There are so many books to read and so little time. It’s a mantra every bookworm knows well. I currently have almost 300 books on my Goodreads, want-to-read list, and that’s just what’s on Goodreads. I probably own at least 200 more ebooks, audiobooks, paperbacks, and hardcovers. I often feel frustrated that I can only get through so many books in a year, despite constant reading. I want to explore new ideas and new worlds and new characters and grow my knowledge of fictional universes to improve my craft and gain exposure to new styles. Yet, the more I read and the more I write, the more I have come to believe that rereading some of those books I live is vital to improving my craft.  

Over the last five years or so, I’ve begun to put books on a reread list. The books that make this list are ones that I couldn’t put down, books that I often sacrifice sleep to read chapters or finish. I want to reread them because I enjoyed them, but there’s another reason. I want to understand the why of what caught my interest. Was it something in their style? The descriptions? The characters? What made it so I couldn’t put that book down and how can I build on those skills in my own writing?

Recently I reread Kim Stanley Robinson’s book Red Mars. Robinson is one of my favorite sci-fi authors because he’s an extraordinary worldbuilder and his characters are so wonderfully complex. Of course, he’s not everyone’s cup of tea as some of his passages and descriptions are quite lengthy, but I love his work. In reading Red Mars for a second time I was able to see exactly how he used his themes through his characters’ lives and how some characters were even a kind of avatar of a theme or philosophy that could be pitted against each other. So much of Robinson’s arguments surround the arguments, to terraform or not to terraform (each represented by a major character and their followers) and to continue with the Terran status quo or to create something politically and economically new (again represented by particular characters). In this you have a kind of four-pointed nexus that makes for very interesting and contrasting characters, all of whom want to call Mars home, but in their own way.

Rereading the book reminded me a bit of some of the suggestions from John Truby’s wonderful book The Anatomy of Story. The most interesting stories often have characters with similar goals, but different approaches.  This makes for lots of really interesting conflict and opportunities for characters who do change as a result of their experiences in a way that feels organic and natural. Of course, if you’ve read the whole Mars trilogy, you know that the conversation continues for many of the characters and the depth grows. But while I wasn’t ignorant of these themes the first time I read the book,  I didn’t notice the same level of depth the first time around. It’s not that I don’t think you can do this the first time around, it’s that I think you can do it better the second time around because you’re less distracted by the story itself and thus can tinker with the materials that went into the story’s construction. Once you observe the whole picture, you’re ready to understand the fine details of its construction.  

Consider, after you’ve finished the first draft of your own story, you can do the same thing. I know it takes me about seven to ten drafts before I feel a chapter or a short story is ready to go to an editor. So why not use the first few drafts to get the story out of the way, and then in the later drafts apply that critical eye you get from rereading books you love?

Here are a few questions I ask myself during a reread:

  1. How does the dialogue in this passage contribute to the character’s place in the story and the general themes that they embody?
  2. What kind of description speaks to you? When are your eyes glazing over from too much description?
  3. How does the author use the show vs tell dichotomy and how well does it work? What did you want to see more of? Less of?
  4. How does the pacing between action, dialogue, worldbuilding, and the inner life of the character work? When does it shine? When is it weak?
  5. What kinds of things make you turn the next page? What piques your curiosity?
  6. If the book is bad, why did you put it down or struggle to finish it?
  7. How does the author use themes or their central thesis to move the characters or build connections?

Ultimately a lot of this is your own opinion, and it’s important to keep that in mind. But even if you don’t like a book but it has fantastic reviews and critical acclaim, it’s worth doing this process to expand your craft. The goal here is to get you thinking critically about your own writing and thus improve your work. For me, I’ve found that rereading has been useful in that endeavor. What do you think?  

Adding Diversity to your Writing (Panel Discussion Cosine Comic-Con 2023 in Colorado Springs)

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This last weekend I had a great time at Cosine Comic-con. I was on several panels as both participant and moderator and sat in on a number of great discussions. As always, I try to record some of the panels that I think might be helpful for writing or a good resource for people. You can find the recording of, Adding Diversity to your Writing, below. This panel included myself and the following panelists:

Betsy Dornbusch

Betsy Dornbusch writes epic fantasy, and has dabbled in science fiction, thrillers, and erotica. Her short fiction has appeared in over twenty magazines and anthologies, and she’s the author of three novellas. Her first fantasy novel came out in 2012 and her latest trilogy, Books of the Seven Eyes, wrapped up with Enemy in 2017. The Silver Scar, a standalone future fantasy novel, was called “a spellbinding saga” by Publisher’s Weekly.


Thea Hutcheson (Moderator)

Thea Hutcheson explores far away lands full of magic and science with one hand holding hope and the other full of wonder while she burns up pages with lust, leather, and latex, brimming over with juicy bits. She lives in an economically depressed, unscenic, nearly historic small city in Colorado. She is a factotum when she is filling the time between bouts at the computer.

Martha Wells

Martha Wells has been an SF/F writer since her first fantasy novel was published in 1993, and her work includes The Books of the Raksura series, The Death of the Necromancer, the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, The Murderbot Diaries series, media tie-in fiction for Star Wars, Stargate: Atlantis, and Magic: the Gathering, as well as short fiction, YA novels, and non-fiction. She has won Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards, and Locus Awards, and her work has appeared on the Philip K. Dick Award ballot, the BSFA Award ballot, the USA Today Bestseller List, and the New York Times Bestseller List. She is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and her books have been published in twenty-two languages.

Guest on Indie Book Talk Podcast

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A few weeks ago, my co-author Kyra Wellstrom and I recorded an episode with Indie Book Talk. The podcast episode was a lot of fun. We talked about worldbuilding, anthropology, and writing more generally. The episode is on the shorter side (only 24 minutes) so it’s a great discussion of the lot of the things we do in a quick and interesting episode. The episode came out this morning!

Check it out here!

Eye of the Wood (New Fiction Published!)

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Hey all,

It’s been a bit since I published something but my new horror short story Eye of the Wood goes live Wednesday August 17th, 2022 on all major bookselling services. It’s a short story (about 5000 words) so it will permanently stay .99 cents. If you want a quick dark read, this story is for you!

You can find the preorder link here



Blurb: All must seek the eye of the wood, the clearing at the center of the forest. For within lay the only hope to keep the living, hungry darkness at bay.

Happy 4th Birthday Mimi of the Nowhere! An Announcement, Why My Series Isn’t Dystopian, And Why Book 5 Has Been Slow Coming

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Today is the 4th anniversary of my first novel, Mimi of the Nowhere going live on Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes and Noble. In the last 4 years, there have been four books published in the series since that date, with more on the way. I am approaching the end of the first draft of book 5, The Children of AEIS and expect it to be out late summer.

For those who of you who have been following the series, you may have noticed it’s been two years between book 4 and book 5. Why is this? Well, as I am sure so many of you have experienced, the Covid-19 pandemic made life a bit more complicated for a while. But in addition to that, in June of 2020 I suffered a major head injury during a cycling accident. I struggled to read or write anything for almost 6 months. I would have occasional little bursts of creativity during that time, but I wrote and read very little. I was diagnosed with post concussion syndrome and I can say now, that after almost 2 years, I finally have a great deal of normality with only occasional concussion related issues.

This spring and summer I am back in the full swing of writing. And so there is another announcement. The Children of AEIS became rather lengthy, well over 1000 pages. If you’ve been following the series, you might no why… the world went from one walking city, to multiple, and then in book 4… the whole solar system began to open up. Because of it’s length, I have decided to split it into two books. Which will release within six months of each other. The new entry to the series, means the series will now be seven books in length. Book six is titled, “A War For The Heavens.” While book 5 focuses on the survivors of the aftermath of the Battle for Langeles, book 6 will return back to Manhatsten with their new allies the Lunites, and a conflict that is growing with ROAM. Book 7, A Hand to the Stars, will focus on the final battles for the fate of all remaining walking cities and the solar system itself.

You know, another thing I have been thinking about… my series never really fit quite right into the dystopian literature. Things are hard yes, but not hopeless. There is a lot of oppression, a lot of social control, but there are good things as well. It’s much more complex than the label of dystopian. My project here isn’t to talk about how awful society can be and the fear around the slide downhill… instead, this series is something different. I recently discovered an article on polytopias, about stories where the fundamental driving force of the story is that of change and diversity itself. I realized that the heart of everything happening my fictional universe fits this approach so much better. Definitely give that article a read if you want more info about polytopias. The author correctly points out Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and the Expanse as important examples of polytopias, and stories about change and diversity are definitely my approach.

Thank you to all of you who continue to follow my work. I appreciate every single one of you. I don’t have many fans, but the ones I do are the absolute best.

Why Your Narrative Design Team Needs An Anthropologist or at Least Some Anthropology

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Why Your Narrative Design Team Needs an Anthropologist

By Michael Kilman, M.S. Applied Anthropology

I’m an avid gamer and science fiction author. I’m also an anthropologist with over a decade of teaching, fieldwork, and consulting experience. So for me, worldbuilding is everything. A bad worldbuild kills my immersion immediately. And as audiences grow more sophisticated, I hear this more and more from gamers, readers, and filmmakers too.

Which raises a question: why do so many fictional worlds still feel hollow?

Part of the answer is that most narrative design teams are missing a specific skill set, someone trained to see culture as a living, integrated system. Characters across games aren’t just copies of western identity, there are distinct ways of knowing the world that don’t always translate easily across culture. That’s missing skill set is anthropology.

Below are six reasons why bringing anthropological thinking into your narrative design process can transform the worlds you build.

1. Holism: Everything Is Connected

One of anthropology’s foundational concepts is holism. It’s the idea that culture is an integrated system. If you change one facet of culture, you change everything. Think of chaos theory’s butterfly effect: small shifts ripple outward in unexpected ways.

Applied to worldbuilding, this means your fictional economic system, your family structures, your political arrangements, your religion, your ethnic identities, your people’s relationship to death, their biology, their environment, all of these are deeply interrelated. They shape systems of power, freedom, and oppression. When you’re building a fictional world, a holistic framework helps you understand how those relationships create meaning, consequence, and true complexity.

Anthropologists are trained to hold this complexity. We work at the intersection of biology, environment, social structure, language, and culture. This big-picture thinking is exactly what most narrative design processes are missing.

2. More Immersive and Realistic Cause-and-Effect

Creating a believable fictional world means thinking carefully about the causes and consequences of every major action. This isn’t just true for individual characters, but the culture as a whole. The most compelling games and narratives are often the ones that let player choices ripple outward in culturally coherent ways.

Imagine if your protagonist made an alliance early in a game with a faction. This alliance created real, culture-wide changes throughout the narrative.  This isn’t just a change in character relationships, I’m talking about changing the religion, economics, political system, or maybe even language of your world later in the game. That’s where anthropology comes in. Anthropologists have more than a century of research on how cultural change actually works and how it manifests across cultures and generations.

When I’ve consulted on these kinds of questions, including with a major tech firm on post-pandemic cultural shifts, we’ve drawn on real historical examples. The 1918 flu pandemic, for instance, fundamentally shifted American standards of beauty. It made sunbathing fashionable, and altered building architecture toward open spaces and natural light. That’s the kind of layered, counterintuitive thinking that makes fictional worlds feel real.

3. Anthropologists Are Intercultural Communicators

Our job isn’t just to study cultures, it’s to help different cultures and subcultures understand one another. We are a kind of intercultural mediator. That’s why tech companies hire UX and Design Anthropologists, and why I’ve worked with clients ranging from Native American tribal governments to Samsung UK on cross-cultural research questions.

Intercultural communication is a fundamental part of narrative design. If your world has diverse factions, ethnic groups, or political coalitions, an anthropologist can help you think through how those groups would actually perceive and misread each other. In fieldwork you learn quickly that even the most positive, and well intentioned changes you might make to a community meets resistance. That’s because, no matter how benevolent the change, someone will always lose and in ways you may never expect. Building that friction into your narrative design is what makes a world feel inhabited rather than constructed.

4. Diversity Is a Craft Skill, Not Just a Political Position

There’s a lot of conversation right now about representation and diversity in games and media. Culture wars are near constant in the social media sphere. But here’s the thing, lack of diversity isn’t just ethically problematic, it’s bad storytelling. The world is complex. Fictional worlds that flatten that complexity feel wooden and vacant.

The challenge is that writing cultures unfamiliar to you requires more than good intentions. True inclusion requires research, consultation, and ideally collaboration. Anthropologists can help mediate that process. We’re trained to identify the blind spots in our own cultural assumptions.

Have you ever considered what you think of specific accents? Why do you think that? Where do your opinions on different kinds of accents come from? These biases don’t just come from personal experiences, they’re formed over time, and through history and conflict. 

Anthropologists have also spent decades thinking about analogs and representations. If your fictional culture is standing in for a real one, you need to know what you’re doing. An anthropologist who has worked directly with those communities are ideal, they can help you navigate your own assumptions and open up your fictional world in a way you never considered before, a way that makes your story vastly more interesting and immersive.

5. The World Is Full of Untapped Source Material

Every culture is a dreamscape, a world made through symbols and imagination. One of the biggest missed opportunities in speculative fiction is that it only draws on a tiny sliver of possibility. The same alien invasion stories, the same European medieval settings, the same recycled mythologies, and gods, and political archetypes, and economic systems appear over and over. To be fair, it’s not that these traditions aren’t rich and wonderful on their own, it’s just that they’ve become predictable and stale, a singular worldview that no longer makes us question our own thinking with wonder. They just don’t stand out anymore.  

The world contains thousands of distinct cultural traditions, belief systems, governance structures, and cosmologies that most Western narrative designers have never even thought about. I made this exact argument in my TEDx talk, because, what we imagine matters.

Consider the game Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), made by and for Iñupiaq people, featuring the indigenous language and unlockable interviews with Iñupiaq elders. That game didn’t just tell a unique story, it expanded the possibilities of what games can do. It’s beautiful, and complex, and driven by the culture it comes from. There’s nothing else out there quite like it. It stands out because it offers another way of knowing/being in the world.

6. Anthropology Is a Toolkit, Not Just a Perspective

Everything I’ve described above isn’t abstract, it’s practical and in the era of AI, more necessary than ever. AI is capable of generating an incredible amount of mediocre and predicable media. Anthropology is an edge in worldbuilding and storytelling. It gives you concrete tools: frameworks for analyzing kinship and power, models for understanding how religion and economics interact, methods for identifying the cultural logic behind social norms that seem arbitrary.

My colleague Kyra Wellstrom and I built some of those tools into a book titled: Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers, and Filmmakers. It distills over a century of anthropological research into an accessible guide that doesn’t require wading through academic textbooks.

On my YouTube channel I also host live Worldbuilding Q&As every month called, “Ask an Anthropologist.” I also bring on special guests. There you can also find my social science explainer series, Anthropology in 10 or Less, and soon my new series launching this spring, Anthropology Through Science Fiction. I’ve been translating these same ideas into free, accessible content for creators. And in my worldbuilding consulting practice, I bring this toolkit directly to projects.

Ready to Build a Better World?

I’ve spent 11 years teaching anthropology at the university level, published research on how worldbuilding works as a pedagogical tool, and consulted for clients ranging from indie fiction writers to major tech firms. My fiction, including the dystopian sci-fi Chronicles of the Great Migration series and my dark fantasy novel Shades & Shapes in the Dark are built on the same anthropological foundations I’m describing here.

If you or your team is serious about creating fictional cultures that feel authentic and immersive, I’d love to talk.

Book a free 10-minute consulting call →

Or explore free worldbuilding resources, essays, and video content at loridianslaboratory.com.

Michael Kilman holds an M.S. in Applied Anthropology (focus: Media) from Portland State University. He is the author of the Chronicles of the Great Migration series, Shades & Shapes in the Dark, and Build Better Worlds. He is also known for his TEDx talk “Anthropology, Our Imagination, and How to Understand Difference.”