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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47460
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47460
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

## First of all, learn about the fantasy species you want to write about

You want to populate your world with the traditional fantasy species, but your own perception of them appears to be based on only a few pop-culture reference points. As an example, you talk of dreadlocks-wearing orcs as if this was a common trait. However, this is merely how Peter Jackson depicted them. Not how Tolkien wrote them, not how a hundred other authors wrote them. Maybe someone else did write orcs with dreadlocks, but why be limited by that?

So, start by learning more about each fantasy species. Find out what their mythological originas are, as @Oxy points out. Find out how different authors treated those same species - @Laancelot mentions this. Get a grounding in what each species that interests you was, and how it changed. Terry Pratchett, for example, plays with all those elements a lot, in particular giving us an example in _Lords and Ladies_:

> Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.  
> Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.  
> Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.  
> Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.  
> Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.  
> Elves are terrific. They beget terror.  
> The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.  
> No one ever said elves are _nice_.  
> Elves are _bad_.

Pratchett plays here with both what Elves originally were, and what they became in our perception, and in the process he creates the Elves that are _his_.

The more you know, the more material you have to play with, to adopt, hint at, or deconstruct at will. You needn't be confined to the best-known stereotypes - you can create something that is completely unique, while at the same time being absolutely true to what we "know" about the species.

## Step two: decide what makes each species unique, and what they mean to your story

As @Amadeus says, if your elves and your dwarves and your goblins are just differently-shaped humans, what do you need them for? As @Laancelot says, what makes each species "special" is not their appearance (although their appearance might well be derived from what makes them special).

Tolkien's elves are super-wise and super-beautiful and super-artists because they represent a yearning for the past, specifically for a past that is more magical and more heroic and more beautiful - the past that we read about in romances rather than the past as it was. They belong to that past - there is much talk of them fading, their age ending, etc. They themselves are nostalgic, busy with remembering how things were 3000 years ago.  
Because this is their part in the story and in the world, they are beautiful, and also not very active - they offer council, but don't actually do much. Them being pale-skinned is is secondary to this, but also makes sense in this picture: this is how an early 20th century Englishman would code nostalgia.

In your story, Elves might mean something different, or they might mean the same - but being a different person, you might code it differently. Either way, nothing says they have to be pale-skinned, unless you choose to say they are.

Most important, so I will stress it again, **find out what each species means to your story, and why it is there. What makes them unique, why they aren't humans.** Everything else will be derived from it. (Although, you can first write the first draft, and _then_ find out what it all means. As a discovery writer, that happens.) To use Neil Gaiman's words,

> There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean. [...] And I'm not talking about allegory here, or a metaphor, or even the Message. I'm talking about what the story is about, and then I'm talking about what it's _about_. (Neil Gaiman, _The View from the Cheap Seats_, Confessions: On _Astro City_ and Kurt Busiek)

## You can talk about racism and deconstruct "racial" perceptions

@ChrisSunami mentions _Shrek_. In _Star Trek_ the Ferengi started out as small, ugly, money-loving, suspiciously Jewish characters (all the more visible since Jews as an ethnicity were rather conspicuously missing from the series). Then the series started deconstructing the "racial traits" of the Ferengi as a bad thing. Tolkien has the orcs discuss how they're not at all happy fighting for Sauron, only it's not like the other side would be nice to them.

There is no reason why each of yous species shouldn't be complex and interesting, while at the same time maintaining certain unique traits. Since the species has unique traits, you can examine them, note the good and the bad, note why those traits came to be and why they are perpetuated, and how they affect things.

Original score: 14