A fictional society is only as powerful as the people who live in it.
You can craft the most intricate laws, the most advanced tech, the most elaborate histories—but none of it matters if the emotional core doesn’t resonate. The world has to feel lived in. Loved in. Feared in. Broken in. Otherwise, it’s just aesthetics.
I don’t build fictional worlds from the top down. I build them from the inside out—starting with fear.
What is this society afraid of? Chaos? Disobedience? Difference? Fear is the blueprint. It shapes policy. It dictates architecture. It whispers through rituals. Entire civilizations are constructed to outrun a specific terror.
Then I ask: Who benefits from the fear? Who adapts? Who breaks?
The emotional realism doesn’t come from detailed maps or family trees. It comes from friction. From characters who are forced to contort themselves just to survive. From people who quietly ache for something more—freedom, connection, truth—and are punished for it.
I also think about silence.
What can’t be said out loud? What truths are buried under performance? Shame, grief, longing, inherited trauma—these things don’t disappear in dystopias. They calcify. They seep into how people speak, fight, fall in love. The system might be cold and calculated, but the people inside it are anything but.
You don’t have to explain every rule to make a society feel real.
You just have to make the reader feel what it costs to live there.
That’s when a fictional world becomes unforgettable—not because of its structure, but because of its scars.