This is awesome! Make sure to be careful with online translators, though-for example I just typed in “I am bored” into the latin translator and got back “i, cibi” which makes no sense at all.
I’M JUST GONNA BE THAT ASSHOLE WHO REBLOGS AGAIN BUT, PLEASE! don’t use use ancient greek/latin translators. if you just want simple words or verbs (for latin at least), use WHITAKER’S WORDS — it’s a secret classicists keep.
i wasn’t aware of this but YES DO AS THE TWO ABOVE SAY :)
populations and peoples don’t just suddenly change at a border marker. cultures interact and blend.
there are usually a multitude of cultures in one place, and religions often have different factions within them
what are the differences between the upper and lower classes? is there a lower class? what system is used? fuedalism? capitalism? communism?
how does your society view and deal with poverty?
think about the diaspora. invent a large population of immigrants. why are they there? how long have they lived there? how does their culture now differentiate from their homeland?
languages. is there a global lingua franca (a language that people use to speak internationally. historically this has been latin and french, and right now, english)? if so, why That One? are there smaller lingua francas within different nations?
a large country will almost always have smaller languages within it. put some in. you don’t even have to name them, just have someone mention that they often have to translate for their parents
the lingua franca will usually be the language of the majority, but not always. if a particular ethnic group has control of the government, and therefor education, then that language will probably become more widespread. although sometimes there are “official languages” and “daily languages”
i could write a whole other post about languages honestly
what things do different cultures see as beautiful? is it eyes? hair? what parts of the body are considered scandalous. are the bodies of men and women seen differently? how do people feel about breasts?
how is makeup used? is it daily? is it ceremonial? do different colours and patterns have meanings or is purely for aesthetic? is it seen as gendered?
basically just don’t take everything in your culture as the “norm.” there is no norm. the world is weird.
learn about other cultures in our own world. please.
I would add to this, it is a good idea to have at least a rudimentary idea of how people came to inhabit the places they do and why.
Geography has a heavy influence on early societies - especially access to water, light and other critical resources.
A culture’s history will heavily influence its social norms, just as change to access to resources is likely to cause social norms to shift (for the better or worse depending on whether access opens up or restricts).
Me trying to figure out the distance between places and how long it’ll take a character to get there in a society that travels mostly on foot:
Relatable…
Good roads, fairly level (or at least gently graded) terrain, reasonably fit human (most in a walking society would be accustomed to all that walking)… If they’re walking mostly in daylight hours with regular rest breaks, plenty of food, a good night’s sleep, all in good weather and with only a mild burden…an adult can do about 30 miles (approximately 48km) in a day.
But if all their transport is done on foot and they have no pack animals, yet are hauling a lot of gear on their back, slow it down to 20mi (32km). If they’re pulling a travois (pole drag) or maneuvering a push-cart, slow it down further.
If they’re traveling at night, it will depend on their night vision and their light source; a mostly foot-based society probably won’t have high-powered thousand-lumens flashlights or headlamps to see by, so slow it waaay down.
If they’re traveling unfamiliar territory, slow it down a little…but on the converse side, if it’s familiat terrain, give them a familiarity bonus and speed up how far they can travel in a given timeframe. (Unless they’re being called home to be yelled at by their parental figures, lol, then slow it waaay down, lol.)
If the road is rough or the terrain steep, slow it down. If the weather is harsh, slow it down. If there is no road where they are going, cut the speed according to the terrain. LIght forest or grasslands, 75%. Modest forests 50%. Thick hack-your-way underbrush/jungle, slow it to 25% speed…and these calculations are after discerning elevation changes and weather conditions and burden management. However, slow it to 10% if you have a frikkin’ cart you’re trying to get somewhere, or any other Wide Load. A travois might be acceptable if it’s narrow.
If you’re traveling with another person and using shoulder carry poles with gear dangling, slow it to about 75% to 50%, depending on their strength and burden weight. (And terrain, weather, etc.)
Alsofootwear can make a difference. If it’s rough or thorny terrain and the characters are walking barefoot, they’re definitely going to go slower, or if they’re walking with open sandals. Boots don’t always guarantee great traction, however.
If it’s pre-rubber-availability, boots and other leather but non-moccassin shoes are usually either hobnailed or not. If hobnailed, they’re used on muddy terrain, and they can be painful to walk upon over long distances (metal lumps, only a few layers of leather to cut down on construction cost, in most cases). But walking on cobblestones, flagstones, brick roads, etc, means that the metal studs on the bottoms of your shoes run the risk of slipping. (You’ll gain back some traction on icy paved streets, but not on rain-wet paved streets.)
If they’re meant for walking on paved roads, shoes & boots tend not to be hobnailed, but they lack traction and you’ll slip on wet surfaces, and definitely slip on any muddy or icy slopes. If your character can afford it, they could have two kinds of footwear…but even so, they’d still have to carry the weight of that second pair of shoes. People who travel on foot tend to either have lots of servants (often slaves, in historical accounts) to carry extra gear, or they pare down their own gear when traveling.
One way around the different types of terrain traction issue is to make rope sandals, by stitching coils of braided rope in place (think braided rug construction style, not woven like cloth). The coils can provide “grip” or traction–more than smooth leather in mud, more than hobnail studs on paving–and if you make them thick, they can be remarkably comfortable. But it’s not always feasible in wet climates because water will soak into the rope, saturate it, and give it mold or mildew problems over time.
Either way, if you’re wearing the wrong soles for the type of surfaces you’re traveling, that will cause problems, too.
Also, people who travel almost entirely by foot do not wear high heels.
I gotta repeat this one:
People who travel almost entirely by foot DO NOT WEAR HIGH HEELS.
(thank you for comng to my TED talk)
Also, chopping the heels off of high heels does not suddenly make them practical walking wear.
Character and Plot are connected. Much more closely than many people think. And not just in character centric literary fiction.
At their core: a character has a few fundamental drives. The biggest two are something that they want and something that they fear.
For my space opera that I barely ever work on, my main character wants to have wealth. And they’re afraid of being insignificant. So I can build any plot where these two ideas conflict. Maybe he has to get famous in order to be wealthy, so he has to overcome his fear to get his desire. Maybe he has to choose whether to be famous in some way that doesn’t draw wealth or to be wealthy, so he has to decide which is more important to him. The one I actually chose is that he can be wealthy and famous but he has to give up his real self significance to do so. He can have everything but it is a sham for someone else’s benefit. Making it a, be careful what you wish for story.
And that, at the large scale is how you make a plot from a character. The character has to do X in order to get Y but Z gets in the way. And you delve down into escalations of Z. Basically you come up with a lot of ways to get Z to interfere and make your character adjust how they pursue Y.
This works in four essential stages of X. 1) Show Why the character wants Y. 2) Show How Z messes up the chances for them to get Y. 3) Show How the character learns to overcome Z. 4) The character either does or not get Y, overcoming or failing to overcome Z in the process.
It’s a very light plot but it works and you can strengthen it in other ways once you have the basics down. Plus the basics will suggest more details.
For example again, to have my character have everything he wants as a sham for someone else’s benefit, implies that there will be a rebellion, which I can put through the four stages again, to have a more precise subplot.
This is a great guide! Even more so because, in order to build a complex plot, you can just go through stages of the process multiple times.
For instance, a character might find a way to overcome Z in order to get Y. That process can either be simple or convoluted. But maybe once they get past Z they realize that it was only the first step on the way to Y. Now there are four other letters left to overcome if they really want to make it all the way.
Or maybe, once the character overcomes Z, instead of celebrating, they realize oh no… I don’t really want Y anymore. Now I’ve gone through all of this stuff to get Y but what I really want is C!
Or one of my favorites: I went through Z to get to Y but in the process I actually made it harder for me to get to Y… uh oh XD
Read all kinds of books. Books in your genre will give you a sense of what works versus what doesn’t and what tropes are especially common. Books outside your genre will help you look at things from a fresh, more creative perspective. Good books will teach you how to write well. Not so good ones will teach you things to avoid and help you think about how to fix problems in other people’s writing and your own.
Just because your work isn’t adored by thousands doesn’t mean your work isn’t valid. It doesn’t matter if you post or publish. What matters is that you enjoy what you do.
You may have heard the common writing craft advice: Act first, explain later.
This doesn’t work out when you’re pouring your fifth glass of wine and drunk-texting a confession to BFF about eating the last bag of Cheetos your husband had been pining for (I would never!).
But it’s great if you’re giving a story beginning or a scene instant momentum, engaging readers to follow something exciting, and showing how a character reacts or makes decisions under pressure.
This cuts through that propensity to start a scene with telling and backstory and that slow setup that’s hard to shake off. And if you’re struggling to start a scene, sometimes jumping right into the action helps to get the writing gears oiled, too.
But the common pitfall with this common advice is: confusing the heck out of readers.
Suppose we have a bank robbery that bursts off of page one, ninjas in black masks yelling and shooting the ceiling, customers and employees screaming. Then one baddie ninja drags a pale, trembling employee to unlock the big safe, his gun barrel jutting painfully into the woman’s back. She sobs and obeys his orders. Once he has the cash, police arrive outside the bank, their car lights flashing wildly, increasing the stress of the moment. While police and Baddie Ninja Leader end up in a hostage negotiation, a wizard floats down into the bank and the ninjas fight him. Then, a news helicopter hovering near the rooftop explodes, a tumbling cloud of scrap metal, fire, and ash snowball into the heart of the city.
After pages and pages of this scene unfolding, we have no idea what’s going on or who to care about.
We’re getting thrown into another world and trying to make sense of our surroundings. But it’s not as pleasant as a thumped landing in a TARDIS from a Doctor Who episode. It’s more like utter confusion and impatience in that example I just sneezed out, where we’re trying to anchor ourselves to something but can’t.
Sooner (rather than later), readers need to…
understand what’s happening in context
connect with a character
This is where we trip. And if you’re like me, crash without grace.
We can choose not to reveal certain story details yet (that’s the “explain later” part), but we need to make sense of what we do share and introduce a character that readers want to follow, whether it’s caring about them or hating them.
One example I love is from 1987, the very first lines of Nora Robert’s Hot Ice:
“He was running for his life. And it wasn’t the first time. As he raced by Tiffany’s elegant window display he hoped it wouldn’t be his last. The night was cool with April rain slick on the streets and sidewalk. There was a breeze that even in Manhattan tasted pleasantly of spring. He was sweating. They were too damn close. Fifth Avenue was quiet, even sedate at this time of night. Streetlights intermittently broke the darkness; traffic was light. It wasn’t the place to lose yourself in a crowd. As he ran by Fifty-third, he considered ducking down into the subway below the Tishman Building—but if they saw him go in, he might not come back out.”
The main character is deep in action while Roberts describes the setting and why the character needs to run—he’s afraid for his life. We just don’t know yet what the baddie wants from him. But we’re starting to get curious and to care what happens to this protagonist as his options for escape narrow.
Suddenly, act first, explain later becomes an umbrella for including other writing rules:
Anchoring the fictional world: details that establish the setting and orient readers. This includes the rules of the world.
“Fifth Avenue was quiet, even sedate at this time of night. Streetlights intermittently broke the darkness; traffic was light. It wasn’t the place to lose yourself in a crowd.”
Character sympathy and goals: the character is trying to get something or, in this case, get away from something that threatens his world.
“He was running for his life.”
Bites of info: creating context—embedding background info or explaining the relevance—between the action. In this case, hinting that this protagonist isn’t the perfect citizen.
"And it wasn’t the first time.”
After that thrilling action, we can slow down to give readers more insight: why he’s being chased, why she doesn’t trust men, why he doesn’t talk to his father anymore, etc.
It’s all about orchestrating a particular experience for readers—from action that’s exciting and makes sense so readers get hooked, to explaining the truth later so readers stick around until The End.
