Creating lore is a very big part of in-depth world building that can really add a lot to your overall story, give context for the way the world is, and provide a lot of immersion for your readers. Many video games tend to have a lot of lore, such as Elden Ring and Skyrim, as these sorts of backstories create a living gameworld. Well, the same principle applies to movies and books as well, as lore in general helps to form a living story. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing your lore for, here is how you can create lore for your story to transform it from just a story to a living, breathing work.
(affiliate disclaimer: some of the links in this article are affiliate links, which means that I make a small commission at no extra cost to you)
Understanding the Importance of Lore
I’ve been talking about lore as a concept, but what exactly is the importance of lore? Why would an author, a game dev, or a screenwriter care to create lore?
For one, world building is a major piece of the story-writing process. Even if you’re not just an author or you’re a writer for video games, lore serves a major part of the world building of your story. Writing lore allows for your world to feel more whole, complete, and significant in the grand scheme of things.
Lore also serves as an important context piece. If a character is spurred on by some ancient prophecy, having lore about why the prophecy exists in the first place allows for readers to see the overall world’s context and understand why this particular prophecy is such an important piece of the world.
Lore also adds much more to the depth of your plot. Lore pieces can introduce plot points, conflicts, and help spur on resolutions in your story. Additionally, lore creates depth to the world.
If you’ve ever played a video game like Elden Ring, you’ll know that a lot of the story is pretty disconnected, thus forcing players to go and search for the story themselves. Lore helps to create a living world for the Lands Between (and more recently, the Land of Shadow). I really recommend Elden Ring to see examples of what great video game lore looks like!
Finally, lore helps draw in readers more to your story. You engage them with your world, and so the reader will feel more engaged and compelled to continue reading your story or playing your game!
Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Lore
Step 1: Define the Scope and Purpose
Before you get super in-depth with your lore piece, you should think hard about what the purpose of your lore is. Additionally, you want to think about the scope of your lore. By this, I mean you should figure out how much lore you actually need for your story. Too much lore can be confusing and overwhelming. Too little lore can feel flat. Try to strike a balance.
Additionally, you should think about the purpose of your lore. You can write lore just for fun, but if you want to include it in your work or your story, you should be thinking about what role this piece of lore serves for your overall story. Is the lore there for your readers to contextualize something? Is the lore going to serve as a bigger piece of the plot?
Step 2: Create a Historical Timeline
The next thing to do is to understand the historical timeline of your story. Lore tends to be written prior to the events of a story, so it exists in the “before” stages. I’m going to have to go back to Elden Ring for this one, but at the beginning of the game, the player learns that the Lands Between used to be a really prosperous place until disaster struck and then Queen Marika shattered the Elden Ring, and so the world you enter is the aftermath of that destructive period in history. All of this wasn’t happening in the game as you were playing, but your understanding of this lore was important!
If you set your lore in ancient history, then this should be about major events. The rise and fall of civilizations, major wars, significant discoveries, the forming of religious systems, etc… These are all ways you can set the stage for the current state of your world.
Recent history would include more obviously recent changes. Shifts in political power, technological advancements, changes in the culture of your society, and more are all more recent things that you can discuss.
Now, yes, you can write lore about current events happening in your story. This would probably be discussing an ongoing conflict or issue with society. For instance, if your story takes place during the height of a war, you’d probably have lore written about that war.
Step 3: Develop the Setting
Another major part of writing lore is figuring out things like the setting or settings where the lore is relevant to. If you’re writing about the formation of a religion or the start of an ancient war–it doesn’t matter–you want to know where all of this is happening. You want to understand countries, continents, natural landmarks, cities, and more.
You should also think about the climate and the overall environment for a more believable feel to your world. For instance, again with Elden Ring, but in Elden Ring, the Lands Between is marked by different locations, geographies, and environments. You have a snowy mountain region and you have your starting location of Limgrave, which is a sunny and standard region. However, this impacts the overall world building because the snowy region is where the giants live but Limgrave is where you’ll find Godrick’s soldiers.
Step 4: Create Societies and Cultures
When you’re trying to create lore, it’s really helpful to have societies and cultures established that can make your world feel more realistic. In our world, there are so many cultures and religions and societies that exist, it wouldn’t be authentic if you didn’t reflect something similar in your story.
Alongside cultures comes creating languages as well. Language and methods of communication are what have allowed for us to prosper as civilizations, so creating a language is important for your world. I’ve also talked about how to make a fake language on my blog before if you’re interested.
Step 5: Establish Mythology and Religion
The next thing you want to think about is religion and/or mythology. Creating a religion is one of my personal favorite things about world building and a lot of my stories have fake religions that I made up.
For example, in my series, The Fallen Age Saga, one of the biggest conflicts revolves around ancient religions that existed on alien planets. The start of Book 2 actually has a piece of lore written in it, which was basically an excerpt taken from a book that exists in the universe of my story. The lore talked about the origin of a lot of the reasons why things are the way they are in the modern-day, involving the figures of that religion. If you want to check out that lore piece, you can check out Books 1 and 2 of my series over on Amazon right now.
I have talked about how to make religions for fantasy worlds, but it also applies to really any genre. The principles will remain the same across the different genres at the end of the day.
Step 6: Design Political and Economic Systems
If the government and the economy are relevant to your piece of lore, you’ll want to understand how they function in your world’s context.
Creating a government involves things like understanding how leadership works, how authority is defined, how leaders are even chosen, how laws are made, etc… You can check out my post for more details.
The economy is also a vastly important one to lore because if your lore involves mentions of wealth, trade, and more, understanding how your world’s economy functions at a technical level will help you write your lore without any confusion. I’ve also talked about making an economy on my blog before if you want more details.
Step 7: Magic and Technology
Chances are, if you’re writing lore, your story falls under fantasy or sci-fi, or both! Either way, magic and technology are both important facets of the lore that you’re writing. If your lore takes place in ancient times, the technology should reflect that. If your story places an emphasis on magic, and your lore is about the magic system in your world, then you should have a good understanding of what your magic system is in the first place.
If you want to learn more about how to make a magic system, you should check this post out!
Step 8: Creating Lore Characters
If your piece/pieces of lore center around people or important figures in religion and history, then you’ll want to spend some time developing their characters. You want to think about who this person is, what their character traits are, how they look, etc…
You also need to think about your actual story’s main characters. How does this lore impact them? What role does this lore play in their lives? What significance does the lore have in their overall development?
If you want to learn more about creating characters, you can check out this post!
Step 9: Show Don’t Tell! You Can Tell Too BTW
One of the biggest parts about writing that I heard a lot when I first got started was the idea of ‘show, don’t tell.’ While I do agree that it has some merit, at the end of the day, we can’t be expected to show everything we’re writing. Sometimes, it makes more sense from a narrative perspective to just outright tell our readers information.
I’ve talked about this principle in this post before, but even then, I do think that it doesn’t always apply to every context in writing.
When it comes to lore, you can just outright tell the readers about something if the characters are discovering it. You can also show it through the narrative as the plot advances. Maybe there are old ruins where text is etched into the walls. Like I said earlier, in Book 2 of my series, you quite literally read the lore before the story begins as an excerpt from a book in the universe.
The important thing to remember is not not overwhelm your readers, so take your time and come up with the lore properly and convey it to your readers in a believable, interesting way.
And before you go, be sure to check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga! Also, sign up for my newsletter so you get updates on all the latest news, information and more!