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Worldbuilding: Food Production and War

August 17, 2026August 16, 2026ErikLeave a comment

A fundamental problem faced by pre-modern societies—and one which our own fictional societies may have to grapple with as well—is how to balance the demands of food production and war. The ways in which a culture managed this problem had deep effects on how that culture functioned, how its members related to one another, and how it dealt with outsiders. Thinking about how your fictional cultures deal with this problem is a useful worldbuilding exercise.

The problem is simple: the ability to produce food and the ability to protect one’s own food sources from other people who would take them by force are both essential to a society’s survival, but they compete for the same human resources.

Food production is labor. In societies without industrial technology, it is the main occupation of at least ninety percent of the population. Food production can take many forms, such as farming planted crops, tending domesticated animals, gathering wild resources, or producing trade goods to exchange for food from abroad. While nearly the entire population of a pre-industrial society must contribute in some way to food production, the bulk of the work rests on the shoulders of healthy adults without other callings.

War is also labor. It demands physical competence and endurance, just like ploughing a field, managing a herd of cattle, or hauling in fish from the sea. The prime contributors to the labor of war are the same as the prime contributors to food production: healthy adults who aren’t needed for more specialized tasks.

War and food production compete for the same pool of labor. Every day that a person spends marching on campaign, laying siege to a city, repairing their armor, or standing watch at an outpost is a day they aren’t milking cows, weeding a vegetable garden, picking mushrooms in the woods, or making trade goods to exchange for food from abroad. To successfully produce enough food to feed itself and protect that food from from hostile outsiders, a society has to find a way of balancing these two needs.

Every culture’s solution to this problem is unique, but we can categorize the possible approaches in a few broad patterns, each of which come with certain advantages and drawbacks:

Raiders. For raiders, fighting is itself a means of food production. A society can afford to spare people from food production to fight if the result of the fighting is bringing in at least as much food as those people would have produced had they stayed home and planted potatoes or gathered wild berries. The upside of raiding is that when it succeeds, the results can be extremely profitable. The downside is that the targets of raiding tend to respond by protecting their resources better or mounting a stiffer resistance, and when a raid fails it can lead to starvation and vicious internal conflicts over the limited resources left. Societies that live by raiding tend to be precarious and violent, and it is rarely a successful strategy in the long term.
Citizen militia. In a society with a citizen militia, the people who produce the food also do the fighting. Most people spend their day-to-day lives farming, herding, fishing, or practicing other essential crafts, but when there is a threat, they are called up to fight in defense of their homes. The advantage of this solution is that it puts a minimum burden on food production. Farmers and herders are not carrying the dead weight of full-time soldiers who don’t contribute to food production, and as soon as the fighting is over, they can get right back to their usual business. The drawback is that such society cannot sustain a long-term military effort or fight far from home. Every person in the militia needs to get back to their farm or ranch as quickly as possible or risk losing their harvest or herd. Societies that take this approach tend to have strong social cohesion and a sense of civic obligation among people, because without it they would never be able to get people to leave their homes and livelihoods to go fight. They also tend to face frequent wars, because the can rarely afford to commit the troops and supplies necessary to decisively defeat their enemies and eliminate threats to their territory.
Warrior aristocrats. Where there are warrior aristocrats, the people who do the fighting have people to produce food for them. A pre-industrial society can sustain a small number of full-time warriors if each one directly controls a food source, such as a spread of farmland or a large herd of cattle, and has subordinates whose job it is to work that food source for the warrior in addition to working for their own sustenance. On the plus side, this arrangement allows for a small but full-time fighting force without taking away from food production. Warrior aristocrats can be prepared to fight at a moment’s notice and can afford to be away from home for long periods. On the other hand, such societies tend to fragment, as each warrior aristocrat has good reason to stay close to their own resources and little incentive to risk themselves in defense of the farms or herds belonging to another aristocrat.
Professional armies. With a professional army, some central authority gathers food from the people who produce it and provides it to the people who do the fighting. Unlike warrior aristocrats, the soldiers in a professional army do not have their own food sources which they directly control; they depend on the state for their supplies. On one hand, this system can create a well-trained, experienced army that can operate in the field indefinitely and far from home, as long as they keep getting supplies. On the other hand, the process of gathering resources from producers, coordinating logistics, and delivering food to where it is needed is a substantial additional burden on state power and usually requires a whole professional bureaucracy dedicated to oversight and record-keeping, which itself is a further drain on the labor pool available for food production. A culture that maintains a professional army requires a high degree of centralized organization and control, which are likely to manifest themselves in other areas of life.

Food production and war are two of the most fundamental activities for most pre-modern societies. The different ways in which societies have historically reconciled the competing demands of these activities had deep effects on the lives of the people who lived in them. If you are writing about a pre-industiral society in your own imagined world, even if you aren’t writing directly about farming or fighting, it’s worth taking some time to think about how your culture solves this problem and what effects that solution has on the daily lives of your characters.

Image: Cincinnatus Leaves the Plough to Dictate Laws to Rome via Wikimedia (Prado Museum, Madrid; c. 1806; oil on canvas; by Juan Antonio Ribera)

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

Tell, Don’t Show

October 13, 2025March 16, 2025Erik1 Comment

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the old chestnuts of writing advice. Like most such nuggets of wisdom, it has value, but there are also good cases for ignoring it, even sometimes doing the exact opposite.

Telling, as a writer, means giving the reader a direct and straightforward description of a character’s thoughts, emotions, or personality. Showing means providing the reader with tangible evidence of the same things without stating them outright. “She was nervous” is telling. “She fidgeted and took hesitant, aimless steps while her eyes darted about, refusing to focus on anything in the room” is showing.

Showing is valuable in writing because it engages the reader’s imagination. It makes the characters’ experiences more relatable, but also requires the reader to pay attention and figure things out for themselves. When we read about a character fidgeting and taking hesitant steps, we discover her nervousness for ourselves rather than have it served to us. Making little discoveries like this is part of the joy of reading, and that joy is diminished if we have nothing to figure out.

While it’s useful to show your readers things, there is also a good case for telling things sometimes. You don’t want your readers to have to figure out everything for themselves. For one thing, that’s exhausting. For another, it divides your readers’ attention and keeps them from focusing on the elements of the story that you want them to pay attention to. It’s perfectly fine to write “She was nervous,” if the character’s nervousness isn’t the point of the scene.

Jane Austen uses telling rather than showing to excellent effect in her novel Emma. The very first line of the novel tells us exactly who Emma is:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

As the novel goes on, we get plenty of chances to observe these qualities in Emma for ourselves, but Austen starts by telling us straight out who her heroine is. By giving us this portrait of Emma up front, Austen frees us from having to figure her out for ourselves and allows us to focus our attention on the world around her, discovering the characters who make up her life bit by bit through their own interactions with handsome, clever, rich Emma.

At the same time, the straightforward way Austen introduces Emma may trip us up. As the novel unfolds, Emma discovers that she has misunderstood who her friends and neighbors in Highbury really are. By telling us about Emma instead of showing her to us, Austen lulls us as readers into expecting similarly straightforward introductions to the other characters, and so we get to go along with Emma’s own discoveries rather than getting ahead of her.

Showing is a skill you need as a fiction writer, but knowing when to tell is a valuable skill, too.

How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.

Quotes: A Life Was Built on the Back of Firsts

August 13, 2025January 12, 2025Eppu3 Comments

For fiction to work, it has to balance a certain amount of realism with the fictional. A shared experience between the writer and reader is needed to make sense of the invented. Too much of the latter, and the text becomes gibberish; too much of the mundane, and the spark goes out.

Most published writers manage it well, but now and then you find a detail that practically smacks you in the face with suspension of disbelief, but not necessarily through any fault of the author.

Take this section of a sci-fi novel, for instance:

“Everyone remembered firsts. Your first love, first kiss, the birth of your first child, or the sight of your first snowfall. A life was built on the back of firsts. Shining moments, pins in the timeline, holding who you were together.”

–Acaelus Mercator in The Blighted Stars by Megan E. O’Keefe

I have to confess that the first snowfall had me laughing out loud, and long and heartily, too! Not because it’s an unreasonable first to remember per se. (I gather there are a lot of people for whom it was indeed a remarkable moment to witness!) I laughed because this is a case of inadvertent but nevertheless a complete and a total case of nooope.

My first snow would be extremely unlikely for me to remember, having grown up two hours south of the Arctic Circle. As unusual as remembering your first rain for the Irish, maybe, or your first mountain for someone who grew up in the Rockies.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, your audience just completely bounces off your writing. And that’s fine, because at best it’s how we discover the remarkable in our everyday.

O’Keefe, Megan E. The Blighted Stars. London: Orbit, 2023, p. 180.

Image by Eppu Jensen

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

Archaeology and Intentionality

November 4, 2024October 27, 2024Erik

One of the themes that guides a lot of what I post here is that thinking historically is good practice for thinking fictionally. As an example of what I mean by that, let me present the question of intentionality in archaeology.

Much of what we know about ancient cultures comes from archaeology. For all that we can learn from texts, there are many things, peoples, and experiences that were either never written about, or for which the texts have been lost. Individual artifacts can be interesting in their own right, but we often get the most valuable insights from studying objects found together as a group. When we examine groups of artifacts, though, it is essential to begin by asking questions about intentionality: were these objects intentionally grouped together by the people who used them, and was that group of objects intentionally placed where it was discovered? How we answer those initial questions determines a great deal about what further questions we can ask.

When thinking about groups of artifacts, there are two important terms to start with: assemblage and deposition. In archaeology an assemblage is a group of objects found together in the same place. Deposition is the process, whether through human or natural action, by which those objects came to rest in that place. Questions of intentionality are important for how we analyze both assemblages of artifacts and the processes of deposition that left them for us to find.

Assemblages can be either intentional or unintentional. Sometimes we find groups of objects that were purposefully grouped together by the people who used them. In other cases, the objects in an assemblage are not connected except by happenstance. Similarly, some acts of deposition were intentional, while others were not. Recognizing the differences between intentional and unintentional assemblages and depositions is crucial for asking the right questions about the things we find.

For example, the objects placed in a grave were purposefully chosen by the family and friends of the deceased and intentionally deposited. We can pose questions about why these objects were chosen for this person, what it meant for the people who gave them to see them buried, and what the whole assemblage conveys about the person they were deposited with.

The goods we find on a shipwreck, on the other hand, were deliberately chosen, and share an important facet of their history, but they were not intended to end up where we find them. We can pose useful questions about how and why the people who laded this ship choose this particular set of cargo and equipment for their voyage, much as we can ask questions about why mourners chose particular objects to go into a grave. On the other hand, we also have to keep in mind that the ship’s crew expected it to reach port safely, not go down and leave its cargo on the bottom of the sea. If we want to understand the objects found on the ship, we have to consider their intended destinations once they were offloaded from the ship, which were probably numerous and varied.

We also find assemblages of objects that were not intentionally put together by the people who lived with them, some deliberated deposited and some not. The objects we find in an ancient settlement’s rubbish heaps were deliberately disposed of, but not purposefully chosen to go together as a set. Such finds are useful for understanding how the people of that settlement used and disposed of their material goods, but we have to be careful not to assume that the things we find in such a deposit were used by the same people, in the same households, or even within the same timeframe. In fact, looking at what kinds of goods people discarded and how they changed over time can tell us a lot about the life of the place they were found in.

The debris we find in the silt of a disused drainage ditch, by contrast, was neither purposefully assembled nor deliberately deposited. Such finds are useful in examining what kinds of objects were casually lost in a particular place that were too insignificant to their owners to be worth the effort of searching for or retrieving, which in turn tells us about the economic life and material culture of the settlement.

The important thread that unites all of these possibilities is that they require us to think about the people of the past as people, individuals who made choices about what to do with the things around them, just as we do. The habits of thought we apply to archaeology and history are ones that also serve us well when writing fiction: just as we have to think about people in the past as people, we have to think about our characters as people with intentions and desires, too. In a work of fiction, everything is intentional from the author’s point of view, but not everything is intentional from the characters’ point of view. Thinking about what choices characters make, and when they are making a choice at all, is a helpful habit to have.

Image: Dishes from the Helmsdale Hoard, photograph by Erik Jensen (found Helmsdale, Scotland; currently National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; 200-400 CE; bronze)

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

Visual Inspiration: Ruins Don’t Need to Be Grey and Dull

July 13, 2022October 15, 2022Eppu

Ruins and abandoned places are often seen as plain and boring. Granted, the color of untreated, inexpensive rock (which the majority of surviving buildings tend to be made from) often isn’t anything to write home about. But in our fiction, ruined areas don’t need to be austere and grim. You can even find real-life ruins in a variety of styles for inspiration.

For example, houses in Herculaneum famously featured colorful mosaics and painted murals. In addition, paint was generously applied elsewhere, like these pillars and external wall from House of the Relief of Telephus show:

In Sanzhi, Taipei County, Taiwan, clusters of colorful pod houses or UFO houses once stood:

It’s not always humans who have applied the color onto the ruins either. At the ancient Maya site called Bonampak or Ak’e, in the Chiapas area, Mexico, strikingly orange lichen is taking over building facades:

(Check out the Bonampak Wikipedia article for a stunning relief carving and a painted mural!)

In Dutch photographer Roman Robroek’s shots we can see that a ruin definitely need not be grey, blocky, and boring. Partly overrun by nature could mean an almost orderly takeover, like in the photo of a Gothic-style former chapel built at the end of 19th century, below:

Beautiful, brightly colored arches among rubble from the childhood house of Lebanese singer Fairuz (who was born in 1934) in Beirut form a striking contrast to the greenery outside:

Finally, a still strikingly turquoise—if peeling—underside of a round staircase:

It vaguely reminds me of peacock feathers! I wish the photographer gave us a little more information about the history of this place. Browse more via Colossal or at Robroek’s website.

Since they exist in real life, I would be delighted to read about vibrantly colored and visually striking abandoned places in my genre fiction, too.

Images: Herculaneum by Andy Hay via Flickr (CC BY2.0). Sanzhi Pod Houses by mingshah via Flickr. Bonampak by Carsten ten Brink via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Images by Roman Robroek: Former chapel. Arches at the house of Fairuz. Blue staircase.

Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Quotes: Being Awesome While Female

June 15, 2022May 8, 2022Eppu

Sam Hawke guest posted at Fantasy Book Cafe about tomboy protagonists for the blog’s annual Women in SF&F feature in 2019:

“There is a particular kind of character in SFF. You know her. She’s smart and tough, determined, decisive, and she can kick the collective arses of any takers. She comes in a few varieties—in better stories she’s an Alanna of Trebond or a Brienne of Tarth, with depth and history and more than one dimension; in weaker ones she’s an empty Strong Female Character™ who has no real contribution to the plot other than Being Awesome While Female—but either way it’s her prowess at fighting, particularly against men, that sets her apart. […]

“Instead, I wrote a woman, Kalina, with a chronic illness who couldn’t fight to save her life. Literally. I wrote a book in which the main characters’ problems couldn’t be solved by the strategic and entertaining use of violence even if they had the skills to deploy, and I did it purposefully. I did it in part in response to my own sewing test.

“Let me explain.
“The sewing test is failed when a book deploys a lazy code to tell me how much better, more interesting, more deserving, the female character is than those silly other women by making a point of having her hate sewing or embroidery or [insert other feminine-coded activity or trait of your choice—but you wouldn’t believe how often it’s sewing]. These days, if a book does this, I’m out. It’s not just lazy, it’s not just a cliché, it’s a statement by the author that I’m expected to cheer on one woman by disparaging the rest of them. […]
“Basically, there’s a nasty underbelly to over-reliance on this very limited model of ‘strength’, and it’s rooted in the same insidious patriarchal BS that gave us the old style women-as-objects-to-be-rescued stories: here are traits which are traditionally coded as masculine, which you have been taught are more valuable than traits which are coded as feminine. See how you should cheer on this woman because she’s different and better than those other women, who are weak and shallow and worthless. Reward her for those traits, and punish those who lack them.”
author Sam Hawke at Fantasy Book Cafe blog, 2019

Hawke is perfectly right, if you ask me. As awesome as ass-kicking women are, other ways of being awesome exist and should be recognized more widely. Because the variety of life skills to be excelled in is much, much wider than merely physical prowess, fighting skill, or attitude.

Moreover, as we all know, there are situations where the application of know-how or just the right tool will create such a better outcome than anything else that at best it’s not even fair to compare them. Why should genre literature forget these skills when women stand in the protagonists’ shoes?

I’m going to be adopting the phrase “being awesome while female” for all kinds of amazing things that women do. It’s just that awesome. 🙂

P.S. I just read City of Lies, Hawke’s book with the female protagonist who has a chronic illness. I thoroughly enjoyed her strategic and entertaining use of her brain—and ditto for the male protagonists, Kalina’s brother and his best friend.

Image by Eppu Jensen

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

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