Hello and thanks for reading!

Today’s Writing Tip: History! The actual world-building of it!

History has a number of ways it can be built.

If you are absolutely insane, like I am, you can start all the way at the beginning. And by beginning, I do mean the dawn of man (I don’t delve much into evolution though – just cultural changes). I’m going to go through the less insane ways instead, since I suspect most aren’t planning to take years to world-build their universes before starting into the story. If you would like to know how to build from the dawn of man, leave a comment below and I’ll post in a later week on advice for how to do that. There are some short cuts I’ve learned that you can take to reduce the heavy amount of work it can be.

There are a few ways to go about building your history. From the dawn of man is the Build Forward Technique. I will dive briefly into this technique. The other two effective ways I’ve found is the Build Back Technique and the Major Event Technique.

We’ll start with the Build Back Technique. This requires you to know your current social climate, political climate and whatever else you want to include in your build back. If you do this technique, building your history must be done last or near to last.

This process is fairly easy. Think about what can cause your current climate.

Let’s take for example a war, because its easy and I like easy examples. Let’s say your current social and political climate is a human war with demons, because I also like cliches. Building back requires you to think about what caused the war.

Assuming you aren’t being lazy and saying its only because demons are evil (that doesn’t mean your characters can’t think demons are evil though or that demons can’t be evil), then there should be a reason for the war. Perhaps demons came from a different dimension and now that they are here they are competing for resources. Perhaps, demons have been picking at the border for years now and humans got fed up with it. Or perhaps its a shot heard around the world situation and a demon killed an important member of the human society.

Now build back again. Let’s assume the demons came from a different dimension. What caused them to flee their dimension? Maybe it was lack of food. Maybe they were pushed out by another race from an entirely different dimension. Maybe they are refugees of a major disaster or large scale war.

Now build back again. Let’s say it was lack of food. What caused that? Was it a famine? Was it poor management? Was it intentional burning of cropland? Did they not grow enough food, because a significant amount of their fields were used for cash crops instead.

You get the idea. In this technique, the importance is to consider why something occurred. This technique is great for developing a recent history. It’s very tedious for developing ancient history (though you can and I commend you for taking the effort to do so.)

I’m going to briefly touch upon the Build Forward Technique. I start at the dawn of man, because its a clear starting point with a set list of things that needed to have occurred in order for civilization to develop. However you can start where-ever you want with the Build Forward Technique. The basic idea is that you ask how did this event affect things. That is, returning to our previous example, how did the war with the demons effect the next chapter of history. Did the humans win? Did the demons win? Was there a truce. Let’s say there was a truce. How did they divide the land and what were the ramification of that. So on. You keep building this until you decide this is what your modern day is going to look like.

The Major Event Technique, on the other hand, can do recent and ancient history, but it is more effective with ancient history. This is because the Major Event Technique doesn’t build on anything. It’s this is an event that happened in this year. A world war, six decades ago. A civilization was wiped out a millennia ago. Create enough large scale events and you can create an ancient history. You can use this technique with recent history too, but the important note is for recent history it should be combined with the Build Back Technique or the Build Forward Technique. The major event would become your starting point.

This was a brief overview of the three most effective ways to build a history. If you want me to delve into any or give an extended example of how one or more of the techniques can be used to build a world, leave me a comment.

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