So the thing about this is that, the grain is a metaphor*. Like, the grain is very much a metaphor. I don’t need a fantasy author to look me in the eye and say it was a guy named Tim. But the everything around food usually forms an enormous part of a society’s structure and culture. What are your fantasy world/kingdom/culture’s food sources? What internal myths do they have around the production of food? Customs? How do people share meals? What’s the etiquette? What are the differences between regions, ethnic groups, or social classes? Who spends their time making meals, and how much time is it? How many people can the food sources you create support? If someone breaks bread with a stranger, is that stranger now their friend? Who disagrees? What does your protagonist think? Why does your protagonist think?
An author doesn’t have to info dump all of this in the first chapter. But there’s a helluva difference between a small agrarian village one bad harvest away from starvation, and Picard ordering ‘Earl Gray, Hot’. (Although the local blacksmith and the annoyed personnel in Engineering being asked to fix another replicator after an irate captain kicked it may share a certain common spirit lol.)
And again, the grain is a metaphor. Except for when you very much should figure out the design of your fictional country. I find designing societies from their food source up interesting. Others won’t. But there should be something that a writer finds interesting about their fantasy that they want to explore. Find your grain.
Terry Pratchett read an interesting fact about clowns and eggs once, and decided to make that everyone’s problem. He famously read constantly, always looking for interesting things to put in his books and in some cases build his plots around. Your writing would benefit from the same mentality. The reader doesn’t need an entire encyclopedia thrown at them. But you should put thought into your setting and how it interacts with your culture, history, and society. If you don’t, or even worse if you aren’t sure how all of these interact, then it doesn’t matter how interesting you make your characters or plot. Readers will identify situations in your story where the characters and plot are in conflict with the setting you didn’t pay attention to.
It’s not that you need to fill out a hundred page questionnaire on your worldbuilding. It’s that your intellectual curiosity and eagerness to explore how things work will enrich your story for the reader. GRRM is absurdly good at the things he’s good at, a list that includes great character arcs, deftly controlling the reader’s sympathy, and intricate plots. His worldbuilding though is abysmal.** In contrast, elements of Anne Mccaffrey’s writing didn’t age well. Her first published book looks like a debut novel, her prose and characterization could have been improved on, and the pacing has issues. But she thought about how her world worked in ways that GRRM simply never bothered to. The effort she put into designing a society that would incorporate dragons into it’s structure, and the consideration she put into the needs of these dragons and their riders and how those would put stress on the social and political systems, is phenomenal. I do genuinely enjoy GRRM’s books lol. But if you wanted to read a novel that had dragons as a feature then Anne Mccaffrey’s Dragonflight is what I’ll recommend every time. Her characters actively use the clues given in how their society is designed to figure out their response to the overall plot, in a way that’s so much more rewarding then having GRRM pencil in years-long winter and then just ignore the implications.
Absolutely get invested in your characters and your plot! The reader will enjoy them all the more for the passion you bring. But your writing will always benefit from your curiosity in how the world you design works, and in how the characters and plot are actively informed by the setting. That’s the larger point. Cultivate that curiosity and willingness to explore and experiment, because that’s what will keep your plot, characters and setting from coming into conflict with each other.
*No it’s not, figure this out lol. Get Tim’s number. Has he figured out grain can be fermented yet. Is he free on Saturday.
**For more, the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is fantastic reading!
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