Rule 10 of 24 · Chapter III — Peoples, Pasts, and Tongues
Give the world a history it half-remembers
Why this rule exists
Real places are layered, built on the ruins and habits of what came before, and invented places feel real when they carry that same sediment of the past. A world that seems to have been created the morning the story opens is a stage set; a world dense with old wars half-forgotten, faiths that curdled into custom, and words whose original meaning no one recalls, feels like somewhere people have actually been living. The reader need not learn this history in full, and usually should not; they need only sense its presence, the way you feel the age of an old house without reading its deeds. Depth of time is one of the cheapest and most powerful illusions of reality a writer has.
In practice
Sketch a rough past for your world, the big turnings, the fallen empires, the disasters and golden ages, then bury most of it and let only fragments surface. Show history the way it actually reaches people: as a ruin nobody can explain, a holiday whose reason is forgotten, a grudge two villages still nurse, a proverb that no longer quite makes sense. Let different characters remember the same event differently, since a contested past feels more real than an official one. You are not writing a textbook; you are aging the furniture, so that the present sits convincingly on top of something older.
When it doesn't apply
A story can open on a genuinely new world, a fresh colony, a just-born reality, and make that newness its subject. And too much history, paraded on the page, becomes the very info-dump that kills immersion. The goal is the felt weight of the past, implied and glimpsed, not a chronology the reader is made to memorize.