In an interview with the Creative Penn podcast, Michael Kilman discusses how writers can use anthropology — the study of human cultures — to build richer and more convincing worlds for our stories.
For example, Kilman says that understanding the importance of artifacts to a specific culture can help you craft interesting MacGuffins for your plot. “What does it mean to the culture that originally built it? What does it mean to the people who are chasing it?” he asks. “Those are the kinds of questions that obviously a lot of thrillers are asking, but how is it constructed? Or why was it constructed is another question.”
Anthropology can also help with world-building. “When you’re building a city, you have to think about how are people going to get clothing? How are they going to get food? Where is it manufactured? How is it distributed?” Kilman says. “So if you’re thinking about building a city in another world, you’re going to have to think about these kinds of things, and what kind of systems are in place.”
One way to manage this without info-dumping is to make your details important to your characters’ daily lives. “You can just give that feeling and drive a lot of tension and action simply by showing what it’s like to be a person in your city,” Kilman notes. “You can even use that character for one chapter and then kill them off in maybe a prologue or something like that.” He also advises you spend time understanding the connections between various elements of your world. “Think about how much has our culture changed, introducing the smartphone. Every arena of our lives has been altered by the smartphone,” he says. “A new religion coming to town would then affect the political life of people, it would affect gender systems, it would affect their sexuality, it would affect a class, for example.”
