The first step in developing an artificial culture for a created world involves learning about cultures in the real world and pin-pointing individual aspects of those cultures. This step should be on-going, but once a writer begins to easily identify single elements of real cultures, researching real life cultures simply becomes an interesting and enjoyable pastime.
Even if the writers's background involves dealing with multiple cultures, identifying key elements that create a culture can still be difficult, but the writer will have more first-hand material from which to draw. Travel guides and children's books are an excellent place to start when researching real world cultures. Though these books often contain simple breakdowns of various cultures; the goal here is to learn to create these simple breakdowns. For example, a Thai travel guide will often describe the wai, a simple gesture of bringing one's palms together coupled with a slight bow. The wai, when described in a travel book, sounds quite simple, but all sorts of factors are actually involved in the wai. The age of the person performing the wai and the age of the person receiving the wai both matter. The position of the person receiving the wai may also determine how deep the bow is performed by the person doing the wai. These aspects of the wai do not matter as much for identifying cultural traits of Thailand compared to actually knowing that the wai exists.
