Hello and thank you for reading!

Today’s writing tip topic: Environments.

Stop. Before you do anything else: World-build your environment. This is the part of the world where you decide what biome and what kind of environment this world exists in. You might be building the whole world, but you still need to consider the environments at each section of your world. Or you might be only world-building a small section – maybe just one country, or maybe three or four. Regardless of what you are world-building, environment influences everything.

From the smallest ant to the largest elephant, fauna and flora are heavily determined by the biome. These are the small details, that can be ultimately very important. The flora and fauna tell you what the culture eats and sometimes what they can build. Or course, this isn’t the only consideration. The bigger picture here is what is naturally occurring in the environment.

Take the steppe biome. A very recent problem I can across was how to the individuals, who live their build their homes. There’s no trees to build log houses. There’s no mud-brick to build buildings from. There’s no cliffs to carve their homes in. Having done my research, I knew that Native American, who live on the steppes of the Great Plains, built Tipis and nomads, who lived on the steppes of Central Asia, built yurts. However both of those required wood. Where did they get the wood from?

[The Mongolian Steppes near Hovsgol Lake]

Well, there were two answers and both had to do with the surrounding biomes. The Northern and Central Great Plain Native Americans walked all the way over until they hit the mountains and gathered Lodgepole pine wood from that biome. The Central Asian nomads traded for bamboo from East Asia or wood along the Silk Road. This highlights an important consideration for your cultures: when they don’t have what they need, how do they get it? There are often multiple answers to the problem, but where what they need is and potentially who has it.

This is hardly the only influence your environment will have on your culture. Religion and daily life is also influenced by the environment. The man living in the temperate forests lives a very different life from the man who lives in the desert. There are different dangers each biome provides and as such your daily life will be affect. If your main concern is water, most of your day will be about finding water. If your main concern is snow, your concern is about how to store food over the winter. These concerns will be a strong part of the religion, the stories they tell each other, and the cultural knowledge each individual holds. This will also majorly influence the clothes, your characters will wear.

Since environment influences culture, and culture influences almost everything else, it is very reasonable to suggest that environment, by the transitive property, influences everything else.

Environment is a good base to start with as well. It’s the easiest part to research – there’s plenty of information out there to tell you all about each of the biomes and what grows or lives there. Due to this, its also easy to make up your own creatures and plants for the biomes. Just take a look at what actually lives and grows there and what they do to survive. The evolutionary pressures become clear, when you know the environment well. For example, if they live in the forest, most of the creatures are designed to be agile, not chargers. This is likely obvious, since they have to dart around trees. There’s one requirement you know your forest-based creature needs to have. Continuing to research what lives in a forest will give you other requirements or other ways that animals and plants have learned to adapt to their surroundings.

Start with your environment, even if the only thing you decide is what biome they live in. That in of itself contains a lot of information and is a great building block.

As always, remember, in writing there’s no such thing as absolute advise. Enjoy your story and have fun writing!