Since I'm not really the biggest fan of this section or the social organization section, I thought I'd squeeze them together. Now, as I keep on saying, just because I'm not a fan doesn't mean that you aren't. If you think these sections will really help your novel, then take your time with them. Don't let me chase you off of something just because I'm not feeling all that 100 with it. I'm also going to give a general overview and then leave a link to the section down at the end.
So, this section deals with a lot of the factors of life in the way that we trade goods and services. One of the general questions dives into deep thought with asking if there's a trade language or an universal language for people that don't speak the same tongue. It's something we don't have in daily life, even though we who speak English think we do, but we don't. So that's an interesting deep thought right off the bat. Do you want a language everyone uses for trade or a common tongue? What is the purpose of the common tongue or the trade tongue? You could spend a few hours of an afternoon on that question alone if you want to really dive into it.
This goes into business and industry, where they ask about unions and cross-crafting, and how trades and crafts go into the different regions of your world. Do smaller cities or towns not have as much as a bigger city or do they just specialize in one trade or craft? Are there different regulations, are their unions, and so on. If you go into the unions, do you want to call them something other than unions? Do you want to say they're craft organizations or... well, you'll probably come up with something more interesting than I could. This mini-part of the larger section also asks about money trading hands and brings up the thought of smuggling. Again, you might or might not need this section. Like everything, take with a grain of salt.
It continues to go into the basis of our day to day public life on a grander scale. We sometimes don't think about how money goes from hand to hand or about unions, unless we're part of one or are in charge of a business, but this is what you need to think of when you're creating a world. You might only want to grace the surface of this section, which is easy to do and you can cherry pick what you want from these sections. For me, I know I would be looking more towards the broader ideas, like a common language, more than a question about shifting population from rural to urban living. You might not care about a common language but need to think more about urban factors. Or rural factors. So think about that as well when you go into this section, especially if you're just coming here around the start of October.
In the end, even though I'm sort of brushing these sections off, they are important if you want to make them important. Kind of like everything else in daily life. If you want or need me to dive deeper, I'm more than happy to do so and leave me a comment below. Until next time, keep on plotting (and writing!).
Exercise: Commerce, Trade, and Public Life from Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions by Patricia C. Wrede.
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