If you feel that your world or character is missing something, it is almost guaranteed to be history. We are beings that are driven by personal, professional, cultural, religious, and scientific histories. Nothing bothers me more than when I am reading a story and the characters seem willfully disdainful of history. On occasion, that may be true to their character, but what I’m writing about here are those characters that lack depth and engagement because they have been denied history.

If your character encounters a ruined building, that building can tell us so much about the world. Even if you write notebooks of backstory but then decide to condense the character’s reference down to a single name drop you are still giving them both a history and a place in it. I feel that if your world building or character feels flat that the problem lies in their history. Flush that out, with a focus on how that history would shape that character and you will be amazed at how alive they feel to you.