Some assembly required
Sometimes people ask me about my process occasionally, and I find it genuinely difficult to answer in a way that... doesn't sound either vague or slightly unhinged. The honest version involves a lot of rabbit holes, a suspicious amount of reading about things that have nothing to do with what I am currently working on, and a folder of ideas that did not fit anywhere yet but will someday.
The single most useful piece of advice I can give anyone building a world is also the least glamorous: read a lot. Not to become an authority, nor to pass an academic examination on everything you intend to include in your world. Just enough to have a satisfying answer to your own questions, which is a different and considerably more achievable standard!
When I am working on something set in a period or a place I am not already familiar with, I do not need to become a scholar. I need to understand enough to feel the texture of it: how people moved through their days, what they feared, what they found beautiful, what the power structures looked like from the inside and from the outside. Enough that when I ask myself a question about the world I am building, the answer feels earned rather than invented, if that makes sense. The distinction matters, even if the reader never knows the difference. You know the difference, and it shows in the writing!
Read history. Read anthropology if it interests you. Read about architecture and food and medicine and trade routes and how wars actually ended rather than how they are remembered as ending. Read things that have nothing to do with your project and see what sticks.
My worlds rarely start from nothing. They start from somewhere real, or from somewhere historical, or from a concept I encountered in something I read, and then I start asking questions.
What if this event had gone differently? What if this social structure existed not in medieval Europe but in the far future, after several civilisations have risen and collapsed? What if this piece of technology existed a thousand years earlier than it should have, and a society had to build itself around something it did not fully understand? What if this mythology were literally true, and the people living inside it knew it, and had to make practical decisions accordingly?
These questions do most of the work. The world does not need to be invented wholesale: it needs to be displaced, or inverted, or extended past the point where the historical record runs out, and then examined honestly for what that displacement implies. Pull one thread and follow it. That thread leads to three more. Follow those. At some point you look up and there is a world there, and it has internal logic, and things in it happen for reasons that exist independently of your needing them to happen for plot purposes.
Of course, this process generates an enormous amount of material that does not fit the current project. An idea that is fascinating but wrong for the tone. A concept that wants to be its own thing rather than a chapter in someone else's story. A character who arrived fully formed and belongs somewhere that does not exist yet. I do not throw any of it away, and neither should you! I put it aside, may it be in a document, in a folder, in the specific corner of my brain that should be used for adulting stuff. Everything eventually finds its place in something. The discard pile is not a discard pile: It is a stockroom.
This is the part I feel most strongly about, so I will try not to turn it into a manifesto.
...I will probably partially turn it into a manifesto.
There is a pattern I have noticed across a lot of recent games, series, and other media that I find genuinely distressing, which is the creation of characters by checklist. Here is a trait. Here is a flaw, presented precisely once and then never engaged with again. Here is a backstory beat, delivered in a monologue, doing the emotional work that the entire character arc should have earned. The character is assembled rather than grown, and you can feel the assembly in every scene they are in.
They exist to fill a function. They do not exist as people.
The question I always start with when creating a character is not what role they serve in the story. It is: where did they come from?
What kind of environment did they grow up in? Not just geographically, but socially, economically, emotionally. Was it stable? Was it loving? Was it loving in ways that were also limiting? What did that environment teach them to expect from the world, and from other people?
What kind of people did they meet, and at what age, and what did those encounters leave behind? The mentor who believed in them. The person who didn't. The friend who disappeared. The rival who pushed them. The stranger whose offhand comment they have been turning over in their head for twenty years without quite knowing why.
What did they consume? What stories did they grow up with? What music, what art, what beliefs? A person who was raised on stories where individual courage overcomes everything is going to behave very differently in a crisis from someone who was raised on stories where survival required community and compromise. These things shape how people understand the world before they have even had enough experience to question them.
All of these things accumulate into what I think of as a character's core: not a list of traits, but, again, a texture. A specific gravity of sort that holds it all together. The thing that makes them react to situations in ways that are distinctly theirs, that could not have been predicted by anyone who had not been paying attention, but feel completely inevitable once they happen.
When I get this right, characters start making decisions I did not plan for them. They resist the plot when the plot asks something inconsistent of them. They surprise me. That is when I know the character is real, or as close to real as a fictional person can be: when they start pushing back.
World building and character creation are, at their core, the same activity approached from different directions. The world shapes the people. The people reveal the world. The people then shape the world. You cannot do one properly without the other, and neither of them can be done properly without genuine curiosity about how things actually work: how people become who they are, how societies form and fracture, how ideas spread and mutate and outlive the people who had them first.
It is a lot of work, sure, but it is also, genuinely, some of the most enjoyable work I know how to do. The point at which a world becomes somewhere you could get lost in, and the characters become people you would cross the street to avoid or desperately want to have a conversation with: that point is worth everything it takes to reach.
Read widely. Ask the awkward questions. Keep everything. Build people from the inside out.
And trust that the discard pile-stockroom will eventually become something extraordinary!