It's a messy world

    Dystopian themed novels are quite popular, but writing one isn’t always easy. The dystopian genre is defined as an imagined society where there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.

Creating a world where everything has gone drastically wrong can become problematic. When building your world there must be a backstory explaining to your readers why everything is the way it currently is. If you don’t have the sequence of events worked out it might come back to bite you on the heiny later. If your details can’t paint a picture the readers can understand you’ll lose them quickly. Whether your story is based in a major city or small town created in your imagination, details are important to readers.

If there was a war that destroyed your world then there needs to be a reason the war began and at least a basic sequence of events mapped out for how things occurred during the period the war was going on. Whether your characters fought in the war must be considered, how long ago it happened, and what cataclysmic event happened that ended the world as it was. Maybe a pandemic ended things, how did it begin, spread, and why did it change the world? Has the government become overbearing and intrusive, what are the laws that have made this a dystopian world?

World-building is extremely important to a story no matter the genre. If you can’t tell your readers about it then they can’t begin to understand your story.

Readers identify with characters and the events that shaped them, even if they aren’t living in a dystopian world, then will relate to characters and your world if you give them details and events they can understand and identify with. We currently have a pandemic happening in real-time, readers can identify with pandemic related events, they will understand what your charters are going through to a certain extent. War is relatable even if the reader isn’t a soldier, it’s in the news and they’ve seen images and heard stories about the fighting. Even if your event is something wild and off the wall, you can make it relatable through your storytelling and world-building. Your characters are people with lives, jobs, homes, you can add details readers can identify with so they connect with the characters and feel for them.

A dystopian society can be difficult to write if you haven’t mapped things out to a certain extent. As I said, no matter the previous event that led to creating the end result of a dystopian society, if you can’t explain why things are the way they are then your world won’t be realistic to the readers. Simply writing out, “The war went on for years and after it ended the world was no longer the same.” Will certainly set up the whys of how your character came to live in a dystopian world, but with no details explaining the events, nothing that tells your readers the hows of what happened it leaves your readers to wonder about things.

You want more details, like this, “The war went on for years and after it ended the world was no longer the same. It wasn’t simply the continuous fighting that destroyed the land and left our people devastated, no not at all. It was the governments of the world and the lack of empathy for what their dispute did to the people. Constant fighting and loss of life led to the institution of a mandatory draft, and eventually the lowering of the draft age to twelve. It was devastating for parents to watch their young children march off to war never to return. Entire families were wiped out. And the most horrifying part was how it all ended. A weapon launched by our enemy so devastating it not only killed but turned structures to dust and left the land barren and unable to grow even the hardiest of weeds. They may have won the war, but they destroyed so much, even they were affected. Crops withered and died due to the drastic changes their weapon created in the ecosystem. Forty years have passed since the war ended and people have lost hope. They no longer believe the world can be restored. Around me, I see is blank, hopeless gazes. Yet, I still hold a small sliver of hope in my heart, and each night I pray for deliverance from this hell.”

Details help readers connect not only to the story but the characters as well. They want to help nurture that tiny sliver of hope. They want to see it grow, and they want to see the character’s hope pan out into something more. Something that will help their people move away from that state of hopelessness and find a way to save their world.

Build your world, work out the details, and make your characters relatable and you’ll have successfully created a dystopian world your readers will want to read about.