Writers in the Storm

Nearly every aspect of life has pacing. Flowers bloom, seed, and wither. The seasons pass one after the other. The pacing of poetry and music sings to us. And pacing is a fundamental element of storytelling. 

It doesn’t matter if you write long or short forms or in which genre you write. Nor does it matter if you make pacing decisions while outlining, writing, or editing. Pacing allows you to manipulate tension, build suspense, and craft emotional impact in ways that engage your readers. Varying the intensity and speed of your story is a powerful skill. But it is a delicate balance between too fast and too slow. Pacing that is too slow or too fast for the story can make a reader stop reading. The right rhythm and tempo makes your story irresistible.  Here are 13 ways you can control the pacing of your story. 

Pace the Parts of a Story 

The Beginning

Act I of your story introduces your reader to the setting, the characters, and the initial conflict. It also hints at the existence of a world and life that existed in time and space before the story started. The pacing is necessarily slower. Using a slower pace at the beginning allows you to build intrigue, tension, and anticipation in your readers.

The Middle

In Act II and the first half of Act III, sometimes called the rising action of your story, the pace increases. This is where the stakes deepen, the conflict sharpens, and the obstacles grow more and more difficult. Depending upon your genre, your story’s pace may build to a hold-your-breath intensity (think romance) or to heart-pounding, non-stop action (think thriller). 

The Climax

The Climax, also called the story’s Turning Point, is where the tension and stakes and emotions are at their highest point. Here, the story should be at its most intense, rapid, and dynamic. Your story’s pacing needs to reflect the emotional journey you want your characters and readers to experience.

The Falling Action

During the Falling Action, the major plot problem is resolved. The pace gradually slows, which allows you to reveal how the major problem has worked out. This slow down allows your characters and readers to process what has happened.  

The Ending

The end of the story is where you address unresolved subplots and the future of your characters. The pace here varies depending upon your genre, whether there’s a sequel, and the emotional impact you want to impart. It can be brisk and conclusive and leave the audience with a feeling of resolution. Or it can be slow and deliberate, allowing your characters and readers time for contemplation and interpretation. Finally, it can be at any level in-between. 

What Determines Pacing?

The problem with pacing is that every phase, part, and component of a story contributes to the pace. Your choice of genre, the story premise, and the characters determine what pace your readers will expect in your story. But pacing goes deeper than that. It’s more involved than cliffhangers and reveals. Descriptions and action contribute to the pace of a story, but so do dialogue and paragraph length. Pace also is created in sentence structure, word choice, and white space.  

No Right or Wrong

What you are aiming for is reader engagement and satisfaction. 

It’s not a matter of sameness of pace either. An engaging story has an up and down rhythm to its pace. When the changes in pace make sense within your story, your reader will keep turning pages. 

How do you learn what pace your readers will expect? Some of it you learn by reading and studying stories in your preferred genre or branch of literature. Some of it you learn by reading and studying how-to articles like this one. The most important way to learn it, is by practice…practice…practice.

When Should a Story’s Pace Change?

To figure out where your story’s pace should change, ask yourself what changes in each scene. Is it the motivation that has changed? An interim or long-term goal? The character’s attitude or understanding? Perhaps her allies, opponents, or obstacles changed? Other changes include new information, or her relationships. Changes from action to inaction or from one location to another also affect pace. Not all changes are equal though. 

Pacing is more important when the scene’s changes dynamically affect the character or her goals. The level and intensity of the change also will help you determine when to speed things up or slow them down. 

Here are a few examples of different levels and intensity of change.

The character must readjust or change his state of mind. 

Imagine yourself in the same situation. How would this affect you?

Your reaction when a guest points out that the room-temperature wine you served should have been chilled can be major embarrassment. But when that guest has a life-threatening allergic reaction to the wine, your reaction is intense. 

Hearing the doctor say that you need a hernia repair is less intense than if the doctor says you need heart surgery.

The degree of change.

Having your significant other ask for time apart won’t be as intense as being asked for a divorce.

Learning you have to move out of your office is usually not as intense as having to leave your hometown for parts unknown.

The immediacy of the change. 

The choice of which college to go to next fall won’t be as intense as having five minutes to decide between saving your own life or the lives of a dozen strangers.

Being told your loved one has a chronic condition is intense. Finding out your loved one is trapped in a burning building is more intense.

The difficulty of the decision.

Deciding whether to go to prom with the dashing football captain or the dreamy bad boy is intense. But deciding whether to leave the prom because your date made a bad choice is more intense. 

A decision between two, equal but good or equal but undesirable choices, can be extremely intense. Choosing between staying a captive or escaping the bad guys with your dying loved one is an intense but straightforward choice. It’s much more difficult if you believe you must choose between working with the bad guys to develop a cure or going with your loved one who will leave without you if you stay. 

The difficulty of action.

Choose physical actions or actions with emotional costs particular to your characters. Target their weaknesses or fears. Make them pay a physical, mental, or emotional toll for mistakes. Make them attempt to rise to the challenge. Your reader’s anticipation of the cost of that attempt increases the tension and makes your story irresistible.

Climbing a mountain is difficult, but not challenging for a trained mountain climber. When the character is untrained in mountain climbing and terrified of heights but must climb the mountain, your reader can’t turn pages fast enough.

Ways to Increase the Pace

There are many ways to increase your story’s pacing through how and what you choose to write. 

Characters 

The more characters your reader must keep track of, the slower the scene, chapter, or story feels. Need a scene’s pace to pick up? Remove any inactive or non-essential characters from this scene. 

Consider merging characters who fill the same role in the story. 

Chapter and Scene.

Shorter chapters and scenes read faster.

Use minimal description and brisk action. 

Eliminate or minimize reflection and internal dialogue.

The number of scenes and or sequels.

Usually, writers are told there must be a sequel for every scene. But the more scenes and sequels you have, the slower the pace. 

Chop out scenes that are less important. 

Combine scenes of discoveries and information learned.

Cut out sequels that drag. Skip ahead to the next scene.

Be certain that the story action and arc remain clear to the reader. 

Sentence Length.

Short, choppy sentences convey speed and urgency. Cut to the chase. Use simple nouns and verbs. 

There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.

 Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell Tale Heart.

Use. Single. Word. Sentences. Used at the proper time, single word sentences demand attention, convey urgency and apply a powerful quickening to the story’s pace. 

I felt that I must scream or die! and now—again!—hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!

Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell Tale Heart.

Clarity is crucial. Make your sentences too choppy and you risk confusing your reader.

Physical Movement. 

The physical movement of your characters influences the pace of your story. Keep your character on the move will give your reader a sense of a faster pace. Each time you increase your character’s speed of movement, your story’s pace will pick up. 

Cut scenes of the journey to a destination when the destination is more important than the journey. A single transition sentence can do that work and speed up the pace.

Raise the Stakes.

Empower the Emotion.

Fear, horror, and aversion can be great enough to be emotional barriers. These barriers increase the stakes and tension of a story. Read more about emotional barriers in this three-part series from Tiffany Lawson Inman here on Writers in the Storm.

The potential loss of something takes an emotional toll. Use degrees of loss. The loss of a possession usually isn’t as great as the loss of a pet or a loved one’s affection.

Add a Ticking Clock.

A challenging deadline with dreadful consequences instills a sense of urgency and increases the story’s pace. This plot device or trope can be an actual clock or time limit.

Cinderella must leave the ball before midnight or risk being seen in her usual rags.

Create a deadline with dreadful consequences that isn’t based on a time limit.

In Speed, starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, the ticking clock is that the bus they are in will explode if they slow down. 

The story, Beauty and the Beast, isn’t particularly fast-paced. But learning that the Beast must earn Belle’s love before his rose loses all its petals keeps the reader’s attention.

Add Physical Barriers

Physical barriers can be any physical state, place, or object that creates an obstacle for the characters in your story. Attempting to cross or change these barriers creates tension. Tiffany Lawson Inman discusses physical barriers on Writers in the Storm in this three-part series. 

Ways To Slow the Pace

As with increasing the pace of your story, you must use techniques to slow the pace of your story with caution. Too slow and your reader will put the story down never to pick it up. Use these techniques judiciously to vary the pace of your story. 

Sentence and Paragraph

Long, complex sentences or paragraphs describing details of thought, movement or objects slow the reader and the pace of your story. This gives the reader time to process or reflect on the words.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. 

“No human metal had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed to almost vanish when seen edge on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing and a ghost light that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew that it was sharper than any razor.”

George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones.

Scene to Sequel ratios.

Abbreviate or skip the scene and jump right into the sequel. The sequel is a time for reaction, reflection, and planning. Slower paced, these can provide a breather from faster paced sections of your book or convey a sense of tranquility to the reader. 

Internal dialogue and introspection are a large part of the sequel. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo are slow but much-read stories that provide a lot of introspection. 

Descriptions

Like long complex sentences, long descriptive passages, slow the pace of your story. 

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

Jack Kerouac, On The Road.

That Sunday, clouds spilled down from the sky and swamped the streets with a hot mist that made the thermometers on the walls perspire. Halfway through the afternoon, the temperature was already grazing the nineties as I set off towards Calle Canuda for my appointment with Barceló, carrying the book under my arm and with beads of sweat on my forehead... A grand stone staircase led up from a palatial courtyard to a ghostly network of passageways and reading rooms... I glided up to the first floor, blessing the blades of a fan that swirled above the sleepy readers melting like ice cubes over their books.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Shadow of the Wind.

Subplots

Subplots related to or with a logical connection to the main plot of your story can slow stories that race too fast. 

The subplot of the feud between the Montages and the Capulets, complicates the romance and increases the intensity of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Too many subplots or unrelated subplots may confuse your reader. 

The number of Characters

Stories told by multiple characters are longer. This can slow the pace of a story that needs more time.

Examples of stories with a large cast of characters include War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and Shogun by James Clavell.

Be certain these additional characters contribute value to the main story arc. Otherwise, they may slow the story so much readers put your story down. 

Flashbacks and Backstory

Including more flashbacks and backstory in long chunks usually detracts from your story. Sprinkling in bits and pieces of backstory and flashbacks can slow the pace. The right bits provide information, emotion, and breathing space for your readers.

Flashbacks can provide much needed motivation for your characters. In Disney’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a flashback shows what Grinch experienced at Christmas. It explains why Grinch hates the holiday and makes him a more sympathetic antagonist. 

Pacing: the Tortoise and the Hare

Knowing pacing means you know when to be the Tortoise and when to be the Hare. It is a skill and an art. You need to know when and how to use it in your story. Study how authors you admire use these pacing techniques. Practice using these techniques in all phases of your story. Figure out what works for your story. When you control the rhythm and tempo of your story, you’ll provide your readers with the captivating reading experience they crave. 

What pacing technique (s) have you used in your writing lately? Don’t forget to share what influenced your choices (genre, part of the story, etc.)

About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows is an author, blogger, creativity advocate, and Yorkie wrangler. She survived moving seventeen times between kindergarten and her high school graduation. This alone makes her uniquely qualified to write an adventure or two.

Her Fellowship Dystopia series takes place in 1961 Fellowship America where autogiros fly and the rules aren’t optional. It’s a story of a young woman who dares to break rules. But she learns that even the elite can be judged unbelievers and be hunted by the Angels of Death. Books one and two, My Soul to Keep, and  If I Should Die, are available everywhere books are sold online. She is madly scribbling away on book three, And When I Wake, scheduled to be published in 2024.

Lynette lives in the land of OZ and is a certifiable chocoholic and coffee lover. When she’s not blogging or writing or researching her next book, she avoids housework and plays with her two Yorkshire terriers. You can find Lynette online on Facebook, or Twitter @LynetteMBurrows or on her website.

Image Credits:

First image designed by Lynette M. Burrows with elements from a purchased image.

Second image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Third image by kewl from Pixabay

Fourth image purchased from depositphotos.com

by Joseph Lallo

Fans of speculative fiction have no shortage of things to argue about when it comes to dividing fantasy and sci-fi into subgenres. If something has wizards and takes place in Boston in the year 2003, is that Urban Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, or Contemporary Fantasy? But one thing that reliably separates fantasy from sci-fi is the presence of magic.

Some people prefer fantasy over sci-fi both as readers and writers because magic is a one-word solution to making any fantastical thing possible and plausible within a setting. It takes the limiters off, allowing a shortcut into exactly the sort of story you want to tell. But anyone who relies too heavily on “a wizard did it” runs the risk of removing the stakes from a story or frustrating readers with inconsistent, unsatisfying plot elements.

So what do we do? Do we avoid magic entirely? Do we stick to the most minor of mystical elements? No! All we need to do is make sure we construct our magic system with drama and consistency in mind. Today, we’re going to talk about how to avoid the pitfalls of bad magic by going through elements of good magic. Because all it takes is some consistent and compelling rules and limits, a reasonable bar of entry, and some well-thought out components.

Let’s start from the top.

Rules and Limits

Some of you may look at this requirement and scoff. What’s the point of magic if you’re going to go slapping limits on it? But hear me out. If magic is truly unlimited, truly all-powerful, then the only story you can realistically tell is the story of someone trying to acquire it. Because if the villain already has it, the world is instantly their plaything. And if the hero has it, there are no challenges, no obstacles.

Now don’t get me wrong, the story of a hero trying to acquire unlimited power, or to stop a villain from acquiring it, is extremely time-tested and compelling. But when you’re working with that, you're looking less at a magic system and more at a McGuffin. Apply some rules and limits, though, and now magic is just one of the tools in the toolbox, one of the weapons in the arsenal.

An Example

An example, as usual, is helpful here. Disney’s Aladdin, despite featuring a being of phenomenal cosmic power, lays out some pretty classic and rigid limits right up front. Only three wishes, no killing, no resurrecting, and no making someone fall in love with you.

• A wish limit provides us with the all-important “rarity” which we’ll talk about later.
• The no kill rule prevents the genie from simply seeming like a weapon and installs some basic morality to its actions.
• A no resurrection rule makes sure that threats to life and limb is a genuine threat. The no resurrection rule ensures that any threat to our hero's life and well-being is genuine and irreversible.
• And the no love rule–aside from avoiding the unfortunate implications of taking away someone’s free will–also ensures that the main plot of the story can take place. Aladdin will need to find some way to get Jasmine to fall in love with him, and so the story can be told.

Consistent = Believable

If you do nothing else with your magic system, make sure it has rules, and it follows them. The people who hate stories with magic often hate them because they view magic as being “anything goes.” We're all familiar with the quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For our purposes, we’re reversing that. The best magic systems are effectively their own new science. And science isn’t just a set of rules, it’s a set of rules that we didn’t make. These are rules we can’t break, because they are enforced by the universe itself.

Your job in creating a good magic system is to play the role of scientist. Your job is to discover the unbreakable rules and limits. It will make it feel more real, more like what we’re accustomed to from reality, and it will keep you from using magic as a crutch.

What makes for a good rule or a good limit? A key consideration for the rules of your magic system is how they will make the story more interesting. You want the rules to create weaknesses which the heroes can exploit to conquer the villain and which they must overcome when using the magic themselves.

An Example

A classic limitation like this is the inability for shapeshifters to change their eyes. By installing a simple rule like that, a thousand storytelling elements open up for you. Suddenly anyone with their eyes hidden is suspect. Maybe it’s just a normal person who likes to shade their vision. Maybe it’s a changeling with glowing red eyes hidden behind that blindfold. Another limitation is the requirement to know someone’s true name to target them with a spell. Now, before we can strike the villain, one must go on a quest to learn their name. Or maybe the hero, to prove their bravery or hubris, proclaims their name for all to hear. You want rules that aren’t insurmountable, but that take a clever mind to overcome. It means that magic can’t solve every problem, and sometimes solving the problems of magic becomes a big part of the story.

Bar of Entry

Once you’ve established what your magic can do, it’s time to figure out who can use it. This is a bit of a sliding scale, because you want to match the power of the magic to its rarity. If something can shape the world and rewrite history, you want it to be profoundly rare.

A world where the ability to poof one’s enemies into ash wouldn’t last very long if you could acquire the means to do so at the nearest market. If magic is equivalent to nuclear weapons, it should be as tightly regulated as nuclear weapons.

Conversely, if magic is little more than parlor tricks–minor illusions and the like–feel free to dye it into the wool of the universe. Think about it, in modern times we have the ability to contact virtually anyone we want at any time and access the sum-total of human knowledge with a rectangle in our pockets, and life is STILL anything but easy, so a little widespread magic isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Something you do want to think long and hard about is through what means magic is made inaccessible.

An Example

A popular one that I’m not terribly fond of is to have only certain special individuals capable of it. It’s very effective and provides you with story elements like a society split between the haves and have nots, but personally, I don’t like the idea of magic being utterly inaccessible to some people simply by a trick of fate. I prefer to make it akin to singing. Some have a natural affinity for it, and some are uniquely bad, but few are willing to put in the time and effort to learn to be truly phenomenal at it.

Of course, you could also make magic dependent upon artifacts or materials that are hard to come by, which takes us nicely into…

What about Mechanics?

How does your magic work? While it can be a mystery in the story itself, it’s useful if you know where the arcane power originates. There are two broad options here, and they each have their dramatic value.

The first is for the magic to have an exterior source. Perhaps spirits must be called upon to perform the spell’s effects. Maybe magic is simply an ambient power that can be harnessed. Ancient artifacts, not fully understood? Mystic herbs or minerals? These forms of outer strength can help drive the story in a number of ways. A limited source of magic can make it a valuable and sought-after resource, creating a conflict.. If it isn’t limited, it has the effect of putting all of the characters on a level playing field, with the skilled application of the magic determining who will be victorious.

Alternatively, the source of magic can come from within. The soul of the caster. A mystic bloodline or arcane heritage. This allows the story to focus more on the innate or intensely trained skills of the individual. It harkens back to the limitation talk earlier, allowing you to apply magic only to those who have the knack, or who have trained over a lifetime. It makes the caster more important than the spell.

Putting it together

Now that we know what it takes to make a good magic system, let’s follow the steps and see how I made one of my more recent systems, “Paper Magic” from The Greater Lands Saga. In that story, a paper mage is able to produce magic by writing in an arcane language. The words must describe in precise detail the effect of the spell, the time it will be cast, the place it is being cast, the target of the spell, and the nature of the one casting it. Paper mages can cast spells using any ink, paper, and quill, but the more potent each of those components, the more potent or concise the magic can be. Casting a spell destroys it, consuming the ink and/or paper in arcane flame. There are shortcuts, such as replacing the ink with the blood of the target or the caster, but they take a terrible toll on the caster.

The limits here are many and varied. Because the spells must be written, and the timing of their casting is a part of the spell, one cannot simply cast a spell spur of the moment. The spell must be prepared, its need anticipated in advance, but not too far in advance. Because of the complexity of the language, while anyone can learn paper magic, few can master it. Consuming the materials with each casting means one can realistically “run out of magic” by consuming all of their paper or ink. The limits on the power are actually fairly broad, as if there is adequate time to prepare and enough expensive paper and ink, a paper mage can assemble a truly remarkable effect, but such will be a rare occurrence.

Spread the Word

A final point to consider, related to the creation of a magic system but not directly associated with the magic itself, is how you’ll teach the reader about the magic system. You don’t technically have to teach the reader anything. It’s entirely reasonable to shroud the mechanics in mystery. The fact you’ve laid out the rules for yourself means the magic will still be consistent, though you should take care to demonstrate its approximate range of power and its relative rarity early on, lest your well-crafted magic system suddenly show some of its more powerful aspects late in the tale and come off as a deus ex machina.

If you want the reader to understand it, so that they’ll be in on the struggles and challenges of the spell casters, there are a few ways to do it. The most thorough way is to have one of the characters learn the magic as a part of the tale. Making a character an apprentice, or having them discover a knack for magic along the way, will provide an organic way to lay out the nitty gritty details of the magic without it sticking out. This was basically the entire purpose of my first book, The Book of Deacon.

Another tried and true technique, which meshes well with the hero’s journey, is to have someone come into the world of magic as an outsider, such that they must discover the nature of the magic, and through their discovery we will learn. The last choice, one that is very dangerous, is to simply info dump by the narrator. It is not impossible for you to do this in a way that the audience will enjoy, but it is very tricky.

Have fun with it!

If you’ve absorbed the lessons of this essay, you’ve got all the pieces necessary to build a fun, dramatically useful magic system. All that remains is to put it to use! Come up with some frustrating weaknesses of the magic and have the heroes find clever ways around them. Have an apprentice become a master. Explore every last law of metaphysics and bend your own system into shapes even you didn’t think it could achieve.

What’s your favorite distinctive magic system, and what stood out about it to you?

* * * * * *

About Joseph

Joseph R. Lallo took a crooked path to authordom. He was educated at NJIT, where he earned a master’s degree in Computer Engineering, and paid his bills in the world of Information Technology until Sept of 2014, when he finally became a full-time storyteller. The international bestseller The Book of Deacon defined his early career, and he has since written dozens of novels, short stories, and novellas. These include the critically acclaimed Steampunk series Free-Wrench and the thrilling sci-fi adventure saga, Big Sigma. 

Outside of writing, he has co-hosted multiple self-publishing podcasts over the years, including the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing podcast.

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Tumblr | Wattpad

Top image by Deleyna via Midjourney.

by Janet Forbes

Who do you cry out for when you’re in pain? Is it God? Your mom? Or do you try to stifle your cries?

We’re all a product of our environment: of our parents, our education, our morals and taboos. And the same is true for our characters.

But when worldbuilding, writers often create characters before thinking about cultures and backgrounds. They tack culture on afterwards, like a precarious, florid hat. Not only does this make the culture feel superficial, it can make our characters feel generic and tropey.

If you know my Agile Worldbuilding method, a smarter approach to worldbuilding for writers, you’ll already know my favorite saying - your worldbuilding is the tapestry of your novel, weaving through your characters and plot. So let’s put this another way:

Your character is in love. Will they show it with a hug? With a Haiku? Will they rub noses? And if they kiss, how will they kiss? Will they press lips or suck them? Will they touch tongues? Is there nibbling involved?

Fictional and fantasy cultures can be even weirder than our real-world examples, and that’s saying something. So you can see how critical it is to understand your character's cultural background, particularly when interacting with others of different backgrounds. And this doesn't just bring characterization - it can bring character motivation and conflicts, plot points and drama to our writing too. 

The basics of worldbuilding a culture

When you’re worldbuilding cultures, there’s a lot to think about - traditions and behaviors, beliefs and taboos, symbols, language, costumes and artifacts. If you're looking for more guidance on worldbuilding cultures, World Anvil also has a culture worldbuilding template with a lot of prompts to help you cover your bases.

But assuming you’ve already done the hard work, and created a culture or two (or five!), here are some ways to develop interesting character traits, goals, biases and even conflicts from their background.

Character goals - their inherited vision of self

A lot of our goals and ideals are inherited from our parents, our background, and in a wider way, from our culture. There are several very fertile creative spaces to explore.

Favored professions

What were you supposed to want when you grew up? Because that's a cultural construct. Favored professions is a good place to start. What a culture interprets as a desirable or worthy profession reveals a lot about what they value. And that has a huge impact on your character’s goals, too. Did your character's culture pressure them into a money-making career (lawyer, stock broker)? What about an honorable career? Exactly what honorable means varies from culture to culture: from caring and educating (nurse, teacher), to putting yourself in danger (firefighter, soldier), to distinguishing yourself in the eyes of your god (priest, nun). And how did your character react to this pressure - with fervent excitement, tired obligation, or rebellion? 

Some cultures also prohibit careers for certain people - for example, non-working castes or genders. If that’s the case, how has it affected their motivations, and the things they strive for?

The defining moments of “adulthood” 

What defines “adulthood” in your character’s culture? Is it remembering to do your laundry before you’re wearing a bathing suit beneath your clothes? Does it mean you can protect your own from bandits and raiders? Does it mean financial independence, catching the biggest stag, entrance into the man’s tent, instead of the boy’s? The meaning of adulthood can be bound up in a lot of different things, but different cultures have specific markers and rites of passage which affect the way we view adulthood. And that can drastically affect our character’s motivations and understanding of self.

The issues of parenthood

And that brings us to parenthood. Is having children a right, an honor, or a duty in your society? How will people react if you don’t want to have children - and how many is the “right” number? Is a specific gender of child preferred? There are people whose life’s goal is to be a parent, and those who can’t abide the idea. While this can be personal, a lot is related to culture and background, or the rebellion against them.

Familial duty and kinship bonds

And speaking of families, familial duty - what our families expect of us - plays a huge part in our daily goals. If someone killed a member of your family in Ancient Greece, vengeance wasn’t just your honor-bound duty, it was a viable legal action. What about duty of care? Are you honour-bound to look after your parents? What about your second-cousin-twice-removed parents? How far does that duty of care extend, and is it with money, time or both? 

Whether it’s honoring the ancestors, giving our mother grandchildren, or crossing the earth for vengeance, our duty to our families forms a huge part of our motivations. And for characters of different cultures, this can be a massive and varied motivator. 

What is virtuous?

And finally, virtue plays a huge part in character motivations. Whether it's Xena, Warrior Princess, Zuko from Avatar the Last Airbender, or Ebeneezer Scrooge, characters seeking redemption - a return to what they consider virtuous - is a compelling, age-old story. But virtue is considered different in different cultures. For example, getting up early, eating vegan, and praying, are all behaviors considered virtuous by some cultures, and meaningless (at least in virtue-terms) by others. Whether your character strives for their culture’s interpretation of virtue, or rebels against it, it's still a defining motivation. And sorting out your personal moral code from what’s been handed down to you is a personal journey that’s fuelled a great many memorable characters and powerful narratives. 

Language for building characters

Did you know that multilingual people exhibit different personalities in different languages? That's the power language has not just over our words, but over our thoughts. 

As writers we know that our characters are entirely made up of words. Dialogue, sure, but also thoughts, reflections, descriptions through the lens of a character's eyes. And this makes language a hugely powerful tool for us to convey character. 

How does your character's culture and background affect their language? Do they use the longest words possible, or keep it simple? Are there people who they refuse to speak to? Who are they polite to, and who are they rude to (and why)? What are their touchstones for similes and metaphors?

If they're speaking a language which is not their native tongue, how does this affect the way they communicate? Are they terse or long-winded, hyperbolic, rhetorical, or painfully literal? Greek, for example, is a hugely rhetorical language, and those speech patterns are baked into the way people communicate, even when they’re fluently speaking another tongue.

Idioms, sayings, and folklore

And speaking of language, idioms and sayings are a great way to convey cultural background, and make characters feel distinct. Game of Thrones does this with its mottos, although for me, the real gold is in sayings like " fear cuts deeper than swords" and, my personal favorite, "as useful as nipples on a breastplate". Both idioms mark the character as being from a martial or warlike culture; you could use them to reinforce the image of a warrior, or put them in the mouths of someone surprising, like a priest or a princess, to reveal deeper truths about where they came from.

Old wives tales, nursery rhymes, parables - all of these reveal the culture. The songs of our childhood become the touchstones of our nostalgia and, often, an emblem of innocence and safety. Working these into your characters, both into internal thoughts and into dialogue, will give beautiful depth and individuality as well as embedding them within your setting.

Embracing taboos & superstitions differently

Taboos represent what a culture finds too repulsive, offensive, or too sacred. Occasionally they also involve things allowed only for certain people - e.g. a specific caste, or gender group. 

Some of the key taboos to consider surround food, sex, religion & blasphemy, honor, death, and social taboos (what happens if you lick a stranger’s face, or refer to someone's baby as hell-spawn from the nether regions of Satan's underpants?). Depending on what genre you're writing, and on your worldbuilding focus points, choose some relevant areas to really dig down in for your cultural building.

But what's important for characters is which taboos they observe and which they don’t. After all, different people in our world embrace or avoid taboos differently, and their violation means different things to different people. Some people swear like sailors, and others never do. If you don’t swear, do you judge those that do (or vice versa)? That probably has something to do with the culture you’re from, and your background. 

Or what about hugging? In the western world, it's common to divide ourselves into “huggers” and “not huggers”, and hugging a not-hugger is a social violation. But for a Muslim, that could be a religious violation - after all, devout Muslim men are not allowed to touch a non-mahram woman.

You can see how this space can set up fascinating character interactions, and tell us more about characters too. Which taboos from their culture are important to them? Which have they rebelled against, and why? And how does that mesh with other characters they meet, both from inside and outside their cultural background? 

Make sure looks have meaning

I’ve left visual cues until last, because they can be very overdone. “The guys in the funny hats” is an obvious way to distinguish characters of different cultures. But this can also be done sensitively, adding layers of subtlety and meaning to dress, tattoos, piercings, haircuts and facial hair and the accessories. Some of these should be obvious to outsiders, but you can keep some differentiations only for characters in the know. 

Beyond dress, nonverbal communication can be a goldmine, too. Beyond physical trapping, gestures and facial expressions are an important part of culture it’s hard to get rid of. Raising eyebrows can mean, in different cultures and situations, surprise, mischief, evil thoughts, seduction, or disagreement. Nodding means yes in most cultures, but no in a few. Hand signals for eating in India are an expression of frustration in Italy. And while some cultures wave their hands and yell in casual conversation, others appear straight faced and emotionless. This brings confusion and conflict, but it also builds character differences.

If your character has disabilities or physically distinct differences, how are those perceived? And how has that affected them? Not all physical characteristics are considered the same everywhere. Consider, for example, this quote from a person with albinism in modern day Uganda:

Some say it’s a curse, others say albinos are blessings, others say that when you sleep with an albino, you get wealthy, others … [that it] cures AIDS; others consider them spiritual persons. Some communities can even worship us. Therefore, different people have different perceptions towards the concept of albinism.

Avoid cultural monoliths

And speaking of cultural complexity, it’s important to note that while cultural traditions can unite people, and cultural stereotypes can often prove true, not everyone is the same. For example, there's a stereotype in our world that Germans are always punctual. I know many who uphold the stereotype of punctuality - but I have friends who break the mold, too. 

When you’re worldbuilding cultures, you can certainly add stereotypes. But when making characters, present different people from the same culture with different personalities, traits, and proclivities. Not all dwarves in a fantasy world should quaff beer, have a beard as big as a badger, and be obsessed with gold. Introduce artists, rebels, wine drinkers... Anything to highlight the differences between people of the same culture. 

Culture is worldbuilding & storytelling gold

There’s a lot of worldbuilding questions in this article designed to prompt you - and I won’t apologize for it. I didn’t want to make assumptions about your culture, dear reader, and where you come from. After all, that can be a taboo all of its own. 

And that’s not surprising - our culture and background is woven into the very fabric of our psyche, from the way we swear, to how we coo at a baby. And as writers, we must embrace this show-don’t-tell, worldbuilding gold - it can speak volumes about our characters, without ever bloating our word count!

How have your characters (or well-known characters from popular IPs) been influenced by their cultures?

About Janet

Janet Forbes (she/her) is not just a multi-lingual, multi-cultural mongrel, but a published fantasy author, professional worldbuilding consultant, and game developer. In 2017 she co-founded World Anvil (https://www.worldanvil.com), the award-winning worldbuilding, writing and tabletop RPG platform which boasts a community of over 2 million users.