Welcome to my Blog!

Hi, my name’s Austin and you’ve stumbled across my first post! I’m excited to be putting together this blog so I can share my experiences as a science fiction & fantasy writer and an anthropologist.

Throughout these posts, I’ll be delving into the topics I’m really passionate about and exploring the common ground between them. This means I’ll be talking about the craft of writing fiction, travel, and culture & history. All these things feed my creativity by informing the way I view the world and inspiring my approach to storytelling.

Why Writing and Culture?

I’ve been writing fiction for a long time, certainly before I went off to college. But after obtaining a master’s degree in sociocultural anthropology and spending time abroad studying and doing research, my eyes opened to a world of possibilities.

I gained new knowledge and tools that helped me understand culture and human behavior. As a result, this has added depth to my character development and worldbuilding in stories. As storytellers our primary goal is to immerse the audience in the world we create for them—whether that’s on the page, the screen, or over soundwaves. And I’d argue that the best way to achieve a sense of immersion is to develop characters, societies, and worlds that are as deep as they are believable.

This is where understanding cultural dynamics and social behavior can really benefit your ability to create convincing worlds. And it’s exactly why I want to pair it with the craft of writing. We can become much stronger writers simply by exploring the diversity of behavior, beliefs, values, social norms, and livelihoods of our world.

People, societies, and cultures always exist within a specific context. If we pay attention to that context, peeling back the layers to discover why things are the way they are, we’ll be better equipped to create people, societies, and cultures in our stories that have real texture. And a textured story is often an immersive one.

Will Every Post be an Essay About Culture and Writing Fiction?

Definitely not! A lot of the time I will just be talking about the craft of writing, focusing on how you can become a better writer and storyteller through different approaches, techniques, and principles. But, occasionally, I’d also like to discuss how examining and researching culture can also strengthen your writing, especially when it comes to characters and worldbuilding.

Like I said at the beginning, I’m passionate about writing fiction, traveling, and experiencing other cultures. Those all arise from my desire to chase a sense of wonder, which is also what drives my creativity. So, for me, these three things belong together and build on each other.

By exploring more of the world, I get to see other ways that people live, and that enables me to write more vibrant and diverse stories. Part of the thrill of writing and reading fiction is exploring a new and exciting world. Building those worlds comes from ideas, and ideas come from the net of experience. The wider the net, the more ideas you’ll collect.

What stories might you invent after visiting a temple in the Himalayas and witnessing a shamanic trance? What about after a trip to Japan where you become fascinated with the art of Kabuki?

Hopefully, along the way, I’ll also explore some of the different kinds of storytelling traditions that exist in other cultures. The craft of writing I cover throughout this blog is a deep subject, but it’s also rooted in western traditions of storytelling. Other ways of engaging in narrative exist all over the world. Examining them provides a good opportunity to learn something new about creating compelling stories.

How Do I Apply Cultural Dynamics in my Story?

The real answer is that there are virtually endless ways this can be done. The idea is to explore the aspects of other cultures, or critically examine your own, and try to tease out how those things affect the actual people.

Let’s take, for example, two extremes: one involves an industrialized society that emphasizes individuality and runs off an economy based on wage-labor. The other extreme is a nomadic society sustained mostly by herding.

Now, how do you think the lived experiences of these two groups of people will be different? How will their cultures shape the way they see and act within the world, and how will it shape their behavior and the way they relate to others?

This is just brushing the surface-level of culture. How will roles within those societies determine differences in experience? How will a wealthy person in the industrialized society embody interact with their culture compared to a poor person who can’t secure a job? How will their beliefs, values, and ways of socializing change based on their role in the society?

These considerations are crucial to writing dynamic, three-dimensional characters. And, in the case of science fiction & fantasy, I’d argue it’s even more important because you’ll often invent your own cultures through your worldbuilding. But maybe that raises another question for you, which might look something like…

If I’m Creating my own World, Why Do I Need to Learn About Other Cultures?

The fact is we don’t create anything from scratch. No matter how imaginative your fictional world is, you still build it based on patterns in the real world. And we tend to default to the patterns that we’re already familiar with. So, if you want to create a fictional world that is immersive, diverse, and believable then a good method is to explore outside the boundaries of your default patterns. This means learning about other cultures, peoples, and ways of life that aren’t familiar to you.

How would life in a mountain-dwelling herding society that is ruled by a religious elite affect the character you create who is part of that society? To answer that convincingly, there are probably other questions you’ll want to ask yourself: what is the religion like? What does it mean to be an “elite” (wealth, status, role, etc.)? How do they interact with their neighbors? What are the different segments of society; is your character from a poor family of herders or are they artisans, merchants, laborers, or something else? How does their position in the society impact how they are treated and how they socialize?

All these questions are exercises in worldbuilding, and it’s a great idea to draw inspiration from societies and cultures in the real world that might fit this mold. By doing so, you can really dig deep into some of the little details that add so much texture to your world. The various foods they eat. The spices and fragrances that are common. Small habits of daily life such as religious observances or traditions. The kinds of celebrations they hold. Maybe plum blossoms are common every spring during marriage season in this society, so plum blossoms are a fashionable imprint on clothing.

The point is that exploring the nuances of another culture can you give a new pattern and framework to guide your worldbuilding. But now I want to give a word of caution. You must be very careful not to simply appropriate another culture for your fictional one. This is an extremely complex and hot-button topic, and one that I can’t do justice in this post. For now, I just want to raise the issue in the hope that you’ll look further into it as you begin drawing on other cultures to inspire your worldbuilding.

At the risk of over-generalizing, I’ll say this: what you don’t want to do is portray a real culture in your fictional setting by relying on assumptions and stereotypes, exoticizing it, or casting it as one-dimensional (e.g., this is the land where everyone is war-like, or modest, or prone to wild parties, etc.). Without proper research, which includes engaging with members of that culture or background (seriously, this is important), you run the risk of representing that culture as a caricature or collection of stereotypes; this is often damaging to those communities because it portrays them in a problematic or misleading way.

So, do your research, make intentional decisions, and be critical with yourself; are you building a fictional culture based on a real one in a way that’s sensitive and responsible? Don’t hesitate to share with others, particularly people from that culture, to make sure that you are being sensitive.

It can be a daunting task, but most great writing evolves out of research and due diligence. It’s not easy portraying other cultures and backgrounds—patterns—that are different from our default ones. But if you turn to them for ideas and inspiration, your fictional worlds will take on so much more texture and depth.

After all, humanity is not a monolith. Its incredible diversity should inspire us to stretch beyond our comfort zone. There are enough stories about knights, magicians, and dragons set in the equivalent of medieval Europe. Of course, there’s still plenty of room for those kinds of stories if that’s what you want to write. But there’s so much more ground to cover.

We live in an exciting time where science fiction & fantasy is becoming increasingly diverse, both in the kinds of stories that are being written and in the authors who write them. Don’t be afraid to step outside your own box. Not only does this contribute to richer and more varied stories, it provides us the opportunity to represent peoples and cultures that are often left out of fiction.

One of the most important lessons I learned both as a writer and an anthropologist is that we use stories to create meaning in our lives. And stories are so much more powerful when we can see ourselves in them.