Welcome One Whimsical Writer back to the blog to continue her mini series! Once again, you may want your notebook and pen handy. In case you missed the first one, here it is: Picturing Your World.

With the beginnings of your land forming in your mind, I encourage you not to give up and to move on to the part that may be even easier than the last few steps. Naturally, your land will need people, and those people need to be unique to your land. So, how do we make them unique but also believable? What are they going to be like? What will they do? How will they live?

Answering these questions is what we are going to do today. In your own words preferably. When making a people, you need to decide what they will look like, what is normal for them, what their livelihood is. And also, their culture; where they differ from real ones or others that you will create in your book. Let’s have some fun!

Start by deciding which area of your land they will be inhabiting; this helps you narrow down the answers you can give. After you know where they will live, you will have a better Idea of how to decide what they are like. Although some things are still up to your imagination, like their height and size. Thankfully, some of the things have a bit of a guide.

For example, if these particular people are living in your dry climate that is hot, but not really considered a desert, they may have darker skin, textured hair and almost always have dark brown eyes. But, if they live in a cold area on top of a mountain that gets only eight hours of sunlight (for whatever reason you come up with) your people will, by cause, have lighter skin and a much fairer complexion than your other group of people.

Building community for your people must be your priority, if the people are to be believable. They need things in common. Things that are simple. Even everyday activities. Usually based on bigger things, these communal activities have to do with their livelihoods. Your people need a livelihood to survive.

Deciding what your people will do for their livelihood, you the writer will need to use the land they are in as a guideline. Since you already decided what it was like in the first blog, you should be ready. Thankfully, this has a bit of a commonsense guide to it, too. Since we already came up with them, let’s pretend that your mountain dwelling fair-haired people are our focus. What do we know about them that could help us? They live on a mountain. With eight hours of sunlight. And it’s cold. Because of these things their main livelihood isn’t going to be growing vegetables.

Consequentially, they need to use what is around them, perhaps this mountain has a quarry that is laden with marble, and they cut it and sell it to traders. Or perhaps metals commonly used for making weapons, so they are blacksmiths and sold weapons to knights and kings. Passing on their livelihood, the fathers passed down a legacy that lasted through the entirety of the era of kings, making this village a stable home for generations. Touching on one more thing, we need to realize that their livelihood is directly connected to their culture.

A great deal of this is who is in charge, and how they rule. If this same village we have created is ruled by a king, and has many knights and squires wishing to be knights one day, business will be prolific. However, if the village is ruled by a council or court, and the king lives far away with his knights and you have no traders to take the villages wares down the mountain to the king, then your village is dying. Significantly, your fathers will not be passing on their skills, they will be sending their sons to trade and sell or learn something entirely different.

So, keep in mind that your culture is directly affected by what your peoples’ livelihood is. Even the fact of whether the king is fighting and needs more swords and spears will affect how your village thrives.

Where do you people live?
What do they look like?
What is their livelihood? Is it thriving or dying?
Who is ruling and how are they ruling?
What is the culture like?

I hope you are able to answer these questions concerning your fantasy people, and you can see how they differ from the other people groups that you will later create. The most important thing for you to remember is that God created all things already. Because of this, if you ever lack understanding or a new perspective, I encourage you to go study one culture or people group you haven’t heard of yet. Believing God created everything, I know He has the answer for how your people should look, live, and stand politically right in front of you and you have just to find it.

May God bless you on this next step of your writing and use His creation to inspire you toward greater things!