Creativity

Way With Worlds: Sex and Worldbuilding – Let’s Get Social

by

Crowd

So you’ve got sexually reproducing beings in your setting. You’ve worked on their psychologies, understanding just how sex, really the most primal communication a being has, affects them.

Of course when you deal with sex and psychology, it’s all because beings have to interact to reproduce. Where you bring together two more more beings with some mutual goals and drives (at least reproduction) then things get complex. These creatures have to interact, get along, and work together to survive – and thus reproduce. Once you have sex you eventually have a crowd and they’re going to need to work together.

In fact, working together benefits everyone. You need some level of cooperation among a species to A) reproduce and B) not kill each other off.

At some point, you start developing a society. Be it a pack level behavior or a human-like capacity to hyperadapt and run culture as if it was a program, sex leads to social behavior.

What can I say? Sex makes things complicated. But you knew that.

A Quick Note

I’m going to be talking social behaviors here, and I’ll be referring to this as society, since it’s likely that you’re focusing on sentients in your settings and because sentience is when things get more complicated and when we write. However a good chunk of this applies to less-sentient, animal-level behavior that has social behavior even if it’s not a society. I’ll refer to this as “society” for the sake of not constantly clearing this up.

In short, i’m using the word society in the broadest sense.

So What Is Society?

So let’s ask just what a society and social behavior does.

Society is how living organisms arrange themselves and communicate among themselves. No man is an island, and a creature living on its own is probably dead in the end. But a society allows for members to interact, share, survive, and prosper – oh and of course have sex.

When it comes to sex, society lets them hook up, reproduce, and carry on the line – and the society. You can’t separate the two if you think about it. Society lets you reproduce easier (and deal with the results of reproduction).

Sexual organisms at the very least need some social elements to let them connect, have sex, reproduce, and raise the young (as much as is needed). When you have sex you have society of some kind. Some creatures just take it farther than others – like humans.

Society is sort of the “next level” of psychology for a species. It’s that principle that lets them get organized, communicate, and pass on information – and genes.

Consider how having these social instincts contributes to survival. The ability to bond and socialize, social behaviors, allows creatures to further grow and survive. Highly social creatures are almost an organism all their own, each being a cell, moving forward, growing, and surviving – even as some cells are born and die.

In fact, society itself really is about the transmission of information. Behaviors, language, rituals, training all allow for survival but are also communicated due to social abilities. An individual, be it a poet or an animal that passes on a clever hunting trick, outlives their time and perhaps even their progeny by passing information along.

In a weird way, society is almost a “second level” of sex. An individual can have vast influence beyond their individual reproduction, and ideas, concepts, or even simple learned behaviors can echo for ages in descendants yet unborn.

As I said, living beings are all about communication. Sex is just the first kind.

But that leads a lot to explore, and when you talk sex and society, there’s a few things you’ll want to explore when you world build a society and the way it affects sex.

The Biological Level

On one level you have to ask how much of the social instincts creatures you design are innate and how they vary.

It’s very likely any reasonably complex sexual species is going to have some hardwired social instincts just so they can survive and reproduce. These may be rather basic, but are likely to extend beyond the individual psychology of raw sex drive and need. After all if they’re not hardwired enough, that drive probably isn’t going to get expressed very well.

This can get rather tricky as now you have to ask where the core biological drive ends and learned and social behaviors begin. Ask yourself, in your experience, what are the basic human social drives and you’ll see how complex it gets.

Note that these social instincts do not always involve sex. Sure sex is a big part of living creature’s behaviors (as we know) but they also have behaviors that help them get along. I suppose you could note once you start reproducing you’ve gotta start getting along.

EXERCISE: Look at the way you spent your day today. How many things did you do that were more learned than instinctive? How many were more instinctive than learned? That point you yelled at someone for cutting you off on the freeway may have been pure territorial rage . . .

The Developmental Level

The next question in designing sexual species’ social elements is asking what traits that have that can be developed that are part of social (and thus to an extent) sexual behavior. What are the creatures wired to do or able to do, but that is highly variable or can be “filled” up?

Human language is a classic example of this. It’s amazing, but we have this ability to create symbol systems and thus pass on information. These words you are reading are in a language that evolved for aeons, allowing us to employ our natural communications abilities.

A similar example in humans is developing social roles. Though we have complex, varied societies, we still seem inclined to form social bonds and roles. It’s as if we slot ourselves into them happily – even if said role is that of an outsider, we almost need others to announce how “outsidery” we are.

This is an extremely challenging area as you have to enter a liminal area between biological traits and the larger society beings form, to ask what they’re INCLINED to do. However I find this area very rewarding to explore as you have to enter this unsure area and really ask how the life forms you designed adapt – and in what parameters.

EXERCISE: Name five human skills/traits/abilities that you think are natural and hardwired, but are also highly developmental. What role do they play?

The Social Level

Ultimately, when you get to sentients or complex social beings, you end up with a society.

A society is a strange thing really. It’s composed of biological creatures with some hardwired traits, who have learned various things because they’re inclined to, and now pass the society they constructed along. Society is both something they give birth to and that is their parent (to keep the whole sex thing in the picture)

At the same time, a society is a powerful thing for a species to develop. It can literally be like a unified yet adaptable organism, it vastly outlasts any of its components, it can change quickly since it’s not as tied to biological components, and it can propagate information effectively. A society is the ultimate reproductive/communicative tool that can send probes to distant worlds, seed TV signals into space, and write words down that survive thousands of years later.

Thus when you design organsims that have sex, they develop individual psychologies, they have social instincts, and ultimately they create a society.

Which if you think about it makes sense. A society is built on communication and propagating information, and because of that it allows for survival, and thus reproduction (even if its not biological). A society is in a way the sophisticated triumph of sex, the primal communication.

Of course that gets complex, but first . . .

EXERCISE: In the next five minutes, list all the ways an identifiable society is like a living organism.

EXERCISE: Now that you listed the similarities between a society and a living organism, list the differences.

The Social-Sexual Level

The thing is that sex is hardwired into beings that reproduce. So ultimately the society that they evolved is going to involve sex because its so primal, so hardwired, so vital to living beings.

Once you toss a bunch of beings together, the hormones (or equivalent) get going and there’s mating behavior, competition, childrearing, and more. So society, that giant organizational tool of living beings is going to have to cope with sex and make sure it’s handled properly (well what people deem properly). Sex got us to society, and society will usually have something to say about it.

This makes perfect sense since sex is such a primal part of living beings. If you’re going to get along, this core urge and process will be regulated, encouraged, discussed, etc. Thats jut part for the course. Sex doesn’t happen in a vacuum, unless you’re writing some interesting spaceborn pornography – and even then its not a social vacuum.

So ultimately when you design living creatures and their society, sex is going to come into it all the time. YOu can’t avoid it because sex is how you got here.

EXERCISE: List all the sexual taboos in your culture you can think of. Why do they exist.

EXERCISE: What is the most nonsensical sexual taboo you’ve seen. Why did it exist, and who may think it made sense.
Conclusion

Once you have living creatures that reproduce you eventually get society. It seems that’s kind of inevitable because sex requires socialization, and society just kind of follows.

Ultimately this loops itself and the society has to handle sexual issues as well. It’s sort of a perfect oroborous really.

Of course, when you get to society and sex, there’s plenty of areas society has to handle, so we’ll get to that next . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Way With Worlds: Sex and Worldbuilding – All In Your Mind

by

BrainSparks

OK we covered the biology of sex, which if I did my job, proved to be completely unarousing unless you have a major science fetish. If you do, then you’re welcome.

The thing with writing sex in your settings, with creating and understanding the sexuality of the beings and creatures in your setting, is that it goes beyond biology. Think of it as a continuity – the biology is just the start, but it leads to other things.  Biology is the foreplay, if you want to dangerously skirt metaphors I have no intention of expanding on.

Once you have creatures reproducing, be they human or otherwise, once evolution kicks in (or the gods take charge or whatever) then you may have sentient creatures dealing with sex. That’s when things get a lot more complicated and less scientific.

Sex is part of our minds. For some of us, an extremely large part.

Now things get personal. Literally.

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Further Thoughts On The Brainstorm Book

by

Origin Flare

Some time ago I wrote up how I used my Brainstorm Book.  I even did a video on it. Since then I’ve changed and tweaked my techniques, expand them, talked to other people, and found what did and didn’t work. So, a few years later, here’s my improved techniques.

The big change? I found that even after you go through brainstorming, that you still need to sort ideas. Some of this merged with my love of the Getting Things Done Method. So let’s take a look and what I learned!

THE GOAL:

The goal of the Brainstorm book is to capture ideas. Not to generate ideas, capture ideas. Its a way for your to record your great ideas so you get them down, don’t worry about losing them, and you can get to know and trust your creative abilities.  Creative generation is something to cover for another time.

STEP 1:

Get a small notebook – I usually prefer 6″ x 9″ or the 5″ x 7″. They’re just the right size to put in a backpack, briefcase, purse, or large pocket. Keep a pen with it at all times – and it should be a pen, no erasing, just crossing out.

STEP 2:

Keep this notebook with you everywhere when at all possible. If you can’t have it with you at all times, have a smaller backup book like one of the tiny Moleskins.

STEP 3:

Whenever you have a Big Idea -one that seems great, right, amazing, worth recording, put it in the Brainstorm book with as much detail as possible. When in doubt, record it just in case.  Better to err on the side of inclusion than exclusion.

Don’t get critical or self-edit the idea (though including additional commentary may help), just get it out of your head and into coherent form that you can understand later.

STEP 4:

Every few weeks (no less than once a month), review your Brainstorm book. Take the ideas in it and sort them into ONE of these categories:

  1. Your current to-do lists and tasks if they’re something you really want to get to. An example of this is an idea for next week’s column or a short story you can write.
  2. An Incubator list of ideas you review regularly to see if you want to do them. This is something I take from the Getting Things Done method, and I review my Incubator once a month – and sometimes review thing.
  3. An organized set of storage files to store the ideas for reviewing “whenever” – I keep ideas for various works sorted by what they may be used in; one for books, one for columns, etc.
  4. Any other area that’s important or appropriate. An example myself is I have a file for recipes that I may put ideas into because I review and make cooking plans regularly.
  5. The idea really wasn’t that great, not worth it, etc. Just ignore it.
  6. The idea is good but not really you. Go share it with someone – or keep a list of ideas to give out and write them up or post them or something.

#5 may sounds strange, but sometimes it happens.

I would also note that as you get this going it might be a good idea to do this every week until you find your groove. Maybe every month works, maybe every week is right for you.

STEP 5:

When you fill up a brainstorm book, store it, and start another.  Keep the old ones so you can always review them later.

STEP 6:

Look back at old Brainstorm books when you can.  It teaches you about how you think, lets you reflect on old ideas, and spot trends in imagination.

STEP 7:

Now and then review your Incubator and other storage files and look over ideas you’ve had – this can be done “whenever” but i’d recommend once a year. Purge them of any ideas that you’re really not going to use, re-sort them so the best ideas are at the top, etc.

WHAT DID I LEARN?

So what did I learn in my Brainstorming Book practices that changes, or that I want to share?

  1. Review rates really vary for people and sometimes situations. i used to do every two weeks, tried monthly, and found that my need to review varies with time, situation, focus, etc. By setting an outlying boundary I am assured I don’t forget – but it may differ for you.
  2. Sorting items into the categories of will do, may do, want to record, and won’t do is very helpful. I don’t try and capture everything, I decide where the idea fits in my life and make that judgement call so I don’t worry, and I think about the idea’s role.
  3. Sorting item also avoids “idea hoarding” where they sit uselessly in files.
  4. Regular purges are needed to see what you’ll use, won’t use, and so on.  You may also learn a lot about yourself and your intentions and goals this way, such as wondering why you were really big on an idea.
  5. Regular purges also help take pressure off of you to use the idea.

At times if you use a discipline like a brainstorming book, you can overdo it, underdo it, have piles of ideas, or have ideas that are sorted too finely.  Good reviews, thoughtful inclusion, and appropriate divisions really make a difference.

Hope this helps . . . well until the next time I come up with some new additions to the Brainstorm Book . . .

 

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.