Unless you work in a contemporary setting, there’s always some world building to do for you. Even if you work in a historical setting, you need to research it to do it right and you will have to convey some of it, the parts which are not common knowledge, to the reader somehow, if they play a role in your story. In short: world building is nigh unavoidable.
To what degree you will have to build your own world very much depends on the setting you are choosing. A fantasy or science fiction world of its own will demand a huge amount of building, since you will have to build it all from scratch. An alternate reality will demand much less world building (which is one explanation for the rise of Urban Fantasy - more on that in a future post). A historical setting will demand a lot of research into what was and a lot of understanding of why it was that way - and then a discreet decision about what to keep and what to get rid of. All of these kinds of world building demand a good understanding of how society works, how technology develops, and how people think about change. That is what you should keep in mind whenever you have to change from the reality as it is to a higher degree (beyond inventing some kind of agency or a town or something like that).
So, let’s look at the first part: how society works. Society is always built around what people think is the most important thing.
In early development of mankind, food was a big topic, so society was built around finding it. First, that meant hunters and gatherers, then it meant agriculture. Those who knew how to grow food were on top of the society, because they could provide what society needed.
Then, over time, things shifted. Today, history specialists think that agriculture led to war - to fights over fertile land - since you can’t just put seeds down somewhere and expect good results. Some land is fertile, some is very fertile, and in some you will never make anything grow. So tribes started fighting over areas of land where food could be grown well. This might have pushed the importance of men, because they were often the ones fighting in those skirmishes (although it’s not unlikely that at least some women might have fought as well). The knowledge of how to grow things was now the second most important thing after the knowledge of how to win fights. Those who were strong and could wield the early weapons well, those who made those weapons, too, were more important than the farmer now.
With the rise of currency, which probably has been around in some way for longer than expected (as having some general object to trade for), those who had more currency also gained more influence. Naturally, those who can buy more also have the ability of making their own lives - and those of people they like - much better. They replaced the soldier on top of the heap and pushed the farmer and the hunter further down.
With growing towns and cities, the need for administration rose. In a small tribe, the head of it can easily do all the organisation in their spare time, but with a city, it demands the concentrated efforts of a few people to keep things running. Reading and writing became important and, slowly, the administrator topped the wealthy one - because the administrator made sure the wealthy one had shops to spend money at. This was the rise of the politician above the wealthy upper class. This is why even poor landed gentry is still higher up society than the average wealthy person - they were once part of the ruling class that kept everything going.
What does it mean for your society? Well, chances are that things will develop similarly, but who rules depends very much on who you want to put on top. In your fantasy setting, women could have been more common among the warriors, so they were never pushed down into the lower ranks. Perhaps money was created earlier and with it came diplomacy and the ability to ‘buy off’ your enemy instead of taking land by force. Perhaps administration happened early in a more democratic setting and there never were big kingdoms, so you have no nobility. There’s many ways to tweak it, but keep in mind that those on top are always those who are most needed to keep society comfortable. Whether that is through food, through war, through money, or through administration doesn’t matter much.
Technological development can be very different in different worlds. Our world could have developed vastly differently, had we made certain inventions earlier or later. Wars would have been different without the invention of gunpowder. Without the invention of the modern car engine, we might have little individual traffic and more public transport, perhaps we’d still have a lot of horse- and ox-drawn carts. Without the invention of electric appliances, we wouldn’t have the internet, smartphones, and many other things. Or we might have a different form of energy and a lot of those things would exist in a different way.
Keep in mind that any kind of technology that proves better in some way (less time to do things, level of energy needed, or level of physical strength involved) will, sooner or later, replace what came before. Humans are like that, if they see more usefulness in something, they’ll switch to it. That’s probably a big thing which pushes us towards where we are now. It’s likely other species with a similar development would see things similarly.
To people, change is always both a chance and something they fear. There’s a level of comfort in every step of the development, it’s always better than what came before. Regularity and rituals give humans the feeling of being in control of what happens - and humans like to be in control. On the other side, every development that makes life better for the majority is something which will, sooner or later, win out. People always like more comfort and security in their lives, so if a new development can guarantee that, chances are they will switch to it sooner or later.
The first to change are usually the younger people, those with less routine in their lives, those who haven’t lived by the status quo for quite as long. They are more progressive in general. The last to change usually are the older people, those who have lived their whole lives without that new-fangled thing which is changing society. They are more conservative in general. Please do not take ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ in a political way here. Progressive means, literally, ‘going forward’ while conservative means ‘to protect what is’. Both are important to a degree, which is why it is a good thing to have both groups in your society. In general, though, because it is supported by the younger generation, progress wins out in the end and things evolve.
With this at your disposal, ask yourself where your world is coming from and where it’s going. It’s not about writing a history where you put down the dates on which important kings were crowned or someone realized that you can eat seafood. It’s about realizing how your world got the way it is and which stations it passed on the way there. How your dominant species reacted to the changes. Who is on top of society and why? (And, please, if your world has magic, don’t put magic users on the bottom - due to their skills, they will always be on top or near the top.) What is their technological level and how did they reach it? Those are the questions you should ask yourself and see answered before you commit to using that world.
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