This is a new technique for me, meaning that I only started consciously using it with the Rook and Rose novels — and, credit where credit is due, I think the idea originated with my co-writer Alyc Helms. It is simultaneously a quick ‘n dirty trick for helping you generate various facets of your worldbuilding (everything from religion to slang), and a way to bolster the feeling that the culture you’re creating is an integrated, coherent thing.

The idea is to pick one or two central motifs, and build outward from those. I wouldn’t go with more than two, maybe three at the most; the more you increase the number, the more you lose that feeling of coherence. On the flip side, though, I’m not suggesting that everything in your setting should be centered on these motifs — not unless you deliberately want to make something that feels artificial! Just that you’re choosing a small number of wells to draw from repeatedly in the course of your worldbuilding.

Let’s illustrate with an example. From the moment Alyc and I decided the divinatory cards in the Rook and Rose books would be called a “pattern deck,” textiles suddenly went everywhere in our setting — that is to say, they became one of our central motifs for Vraszenian culture. Within the deck itself, the suits are called “threads,” and their symbols are a spindle, a weaving shuttle, and shears. In Vraszenian clothing, embroidery and lace are prominent forms of elaboration; lineage is recorded via a kind of quasi-heraldic embroidery on shawls. Men and women alike regularly braid their hair in various ways. They practice a form of knotwork inspired by Chinese tradition. Their street gangs are called knots, too (a term I actually got from historical English slang), and they use knotwork charms to mark their allegiance. Someone seen as a traitor, especially a race traitor, is called a “slip-knot,” i.e. the type you can’t trust to hold fast.

All that and more, from one word for a deck of cards.

Then there’s the significance of the river Dežera in the geography of Vraszan. That intersects with the textile thing at the delta, thanks to the “braiding” of the channels, but the river’s water and wildlife crop up on a semi-frequent basis. Going back to idioms, “playing both sides of the river” is a way of saying somebody is double-dealing. River rats are what another novel might term “street rats,” i.e. orphan children and other such impoverished outcasts; in Nadežra specifically, you might insult somebody by calling them “canal scum.” Somebody who’s “leaky” is untrustworthy, and mud/muck both come up frequently in a lot of derogatory terms. “Pearls” can be testicles. The food very much reflects the importance of the river, with water-irrigated rice, turtle soup, and freshwater mussels. When we needed to name a restaurant, it wound up being the Heron of the South Wind, because our minds immediately went to waterbirds.

If this seems very staged to you, step back and think about where it applies in our own culture. A ton of language and imagery in Catholicism comes back to pastoralism: separating the sheep from the goats, Christ as the Lamb of God, a shepherd leading his flock, and so forth. It would sound very different if the religion had arisen in a cow-focused culture instead! In modern America, where baseball is a beloved sport, we talk about hitting a home run, things coming out of left field, knocking it out of the park, being in the right ballpark of some target, doing something right off the bat, three-strike laws or having two strikes against you, pinch hitting for someone else . . . I could go on.

Choosing a central motif means you’re not always starting from a dead halt when trying to decide on a new element or figure out how to describe things. Why is Nadežra ruled by a five-person council? Because numinatria, the sacred geometric/numerological magic we invented for Liganti culture, was an endless font of material for our worldbuilding, and five is the number associated with authority and power. As you can probably tell from above, I especially like this trick for creating idioms and metaphors: it provides an excellent way to break yourself out of the usual cliches and come up with something that feels specific to your characters’ world.

For this to work, though, you need a fairly elemental motif — something with a broad enough ambit to provide lots of different angles you can take it in. Roses are too narrow; flowers are better; gardens or growth are better still. This is as much a matter of how you think about it as it is the motif itself: remember that if you’re running with a central idea of “gardens,” then that brings in not just the plants but the soil, the water, the sun, the gardener, pruning, weeding, harvesting . . . Now you’re working in a space with a lot of varied potential.

But don’t hammer it too hard. Robert Jordan, in the Wheel of Time series, rather infamously decided that one of his major secondary characters came from a fishing village, and so every third sentence out of her mouth had to do with fish. Sometimes it got leavened with nets and boats and sails, but instead of it being the whole culture — a thing we didn’t really get to see, since we only knew it through a single character now living in a different culture — it was just the way this one person talked, all the time. Even the most ardent baseball fan probably doesn’t talk about the sport as much as that character did!

That’s why I think two (or possibly three) may be a better number than one. If you have only a single motif, then you’re always going back to the same well, or you’re picking unrelated ideas. If you have two — and if they’re suitably different; “fish” and “boats” are not very separate — then they can cross-cut each other, providing variety and keeping it from feeling overly artificial.

Of course, real-world cultures are nowhere near this simple. Even if I limit myself to talking only about Catholicism and no secular part of European society, the pastoral imagery mentioned above isn’t the whole story; martyrdom, for example, is also a huge element of the discourse there. (And that’s before you get into more concretely theological topics like sin and salvation.) Step past religion into everything else, and it gets vastly more complex. But no fictional culture is ever going to be as detailed as reality, as intricate a web of hundreds and thousands of years of history and social change and cultural contact and so on. What this technique does for you is provide a touch of centralizing force, a way to feel like you’re not just creating a hodgepodge of unrelated shiny ideas — and also traction for that moment when you’re flailing and trying to figure out what should be at a holy site or craft a more original phrase than a frightened person being “white as a sheet.”

(Fair warning, though. You may instead get stuck trying to figure out what the lore of pearl ghosts is, since you just said someone’s as pale as one.)