Worldbuilding: Creating a culture that values artists

Transcript so you don’t have to watch/listen:

When worldbuilding for fantasy or other speculative fiction, one of the hardest things to do is to find our own blind spots. There’s so much about our own culture that we just take for granted, and we don’t even realize we could invent a culture that does that thing differently.

Take the notion that some jobs just pay way more than others, and you “simply can’t” expect to make a living as an artist of any kind. In my Eidolonia books, that is not true—all the human arts are a valued commodity by the fae, so artists are a vital part of the culture and are recompensed fairly. That’s been something that’s actually confused some of my readers—“How is this character making enough to live on, as ‘just’ a maker of jewelry, or ‘just’ a musician, or ‘just’ a theatre actor?” Because this is a culture that does things differently than ours, that’s how.

And listen: we need you to envision other such cultures. Dystopian fiction is helpful as a warning, about how far things might go with the trajectory of our current culture and tech, if we’re not careful—but we need more than warnings. We need a detailed, imaginative view of how a culture might do certain things better. We need to see how that might actually work. So get out there and world-build, my friends. Do some witchery. We need you.

Paint on brushes: photo credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/assorted-color-paintbrushes-_Yc7OtfFn-0?utm_content=creditShareLink&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash