You want to start writing a story, so you immediately start on it. You put words on a page and the story flows. At least, until you get to a point where you need to explain what is happening.

This is the point where lores comes in. You need to have lore for every story. It gets easier if the story is set in locations that actually exists, or a historical fiction with portion of the history having already been set. But when you’re writing a fictional story from scratch, in a completely original world or universe, lores are much, much more than just history. 

An example I will give is in my new series, The Chronicles of Tearha. In the world of Tearha, sexism isn’t that big a thing. Women and men were treated the same and given the same opportunity, though there is an understanding that men would prefer certain jobs while women would prefer others. But at the end of the day, if you do pick a job dominated by the opposite sex, your gender is not a point of topic to the quality of your work.

So in a world without rampant sexism, certain phrases can no longer be used. “Oh boy/brother/man” and “bitch” are just some of the few. You have to come up with gender neutral terms and insults then. This might not seem so big of a deal, but it creates something very important in fiction story that most people don’t expect to be there.

Consistency.

Which is weird, because fiction is basically something that is a lie. So why do we need to make it so detailed? Can’t we just add things on as we go along? Well,  that’s because a complicated lie is easy to unravel.

Imagine you’re constructing a building. You don’t have the blue prints. You don’t have the calculations. You’re just building it as and how you’d like. It’s like stacking Jenga blocks. You take a piece from the bottom to reinforce the new lie from the top. Eventually though, everything will come falling down.

But it’s not just language and history that is part of the lore. It’s not even just the culture. There are the little things as well. I have a material in Tearha called aeronium. And only certain cultures use them extensively, because of their source. So you won’t find items made of aeronium to the west or north, because those places don’t have it.

Think of lores like the physics of the universe. Whether or not you have discovered them yet, they are there. They would not be revealed to the reader, but the fact that they are there, and have you writing around them, makes the world more whole. More whole by missing a piece. Does that make sense? I hope it makes sense. It’s late. I’m sleepy.

Two of the more important lores I’ve yet to cover in The Chronicles of Tearha are the Exseeders and The Battle of Gods. They are part of the near and far history of Tearha, and their stories are pivotal to quite a few of the more important mechanics of the universe. Enhancements, Titans, Spellblades, the epitaphs, and even the kingdoms. Though I’ve yet to reveal any of them, or even plan to reveal more than 5% of that lore, writing with them in mind creates a solid world, the feels like there’s more to it than meets the eyes.

Anyway, this week will be a busy week for my serialization. I have the afterwords of Keep Walking to write, 2 chapters of The Number 139 to publish in celebration of the end of Keep Walking, and of course, the epilogue of Keep Walking itself. So, until next time, remember the law of the lore, and create interesting worlds.