On Creating Culture

I'm reading Holly Lisle's Create a Culture Clinic, and came across this gem:

So you head into your own work, and you're writing along, and maybe everything feels fine, or maybe you get an inkling that you can hear guys pulling on ropes and scooting sets into place on the other side of your nice little backdrop. So you stop. You read back through and look at what you've done and you discover, depending on the genre you're writing in, that:

• Your fantasy novel contains only paladins, clerics, bards, rogues and healers, and maybe the occasional barmaid or whore.
• Your literary novel contains only university students, postgrads, professors, and maybe the occasional irritated parent.
• Your romance novel contains only twentysomething women and well-employed thirtysomething men, and maybe the occasional unplanned pregnancy.
• Your suspense or mystery novel contains only scumbags, victims, and detectives, and the occasional useful cop.
• Your science fiction novel contains only geniuses—whether human or alien—and one token woman.

Or something very like this. You discover that you don't have a world.

You don't have a culture. You don't even have a societal cross-section that could survive for a week on a desert island. Nobody knows how to cook, nobody knows how to start a fire, nobody knows how to find food, or how to tell what's edible, nobody knows how to keep excrement out of the drinking water (or the genre equivalents). You aren't writing rich and full and round. You're writing a skeletal
woman on a catwalk, and if you take the time to listen, you can hear
the wind blowing through her ribs.

That's not gonna be good for anybody.

In writing, skinny is horrible, thin is bad, stocky is survivable, fat is where all the flavor is....but bloat sucks.

I think I relate to this because I've definitely written a few that fit that pattern (*ticks off: fantasy novel, literary novel screenplay, science fiction novel — though, to my credit, there were THREE women…)