Should the world be based on the characters or the characters based on the world? [closed]

Stories are fundamentally about people, not places. The psychology of why we like stories has been fairly well worked out, and the archetypes of stories are fairly well understood. At its simplest, a story is about a character with a desire, the things that frustrate that desire, the things the character does to overcome those things and achieve their desire, and the final achievement of loss of the desire.

Everything else in a story revolves around this. If a story invents a world (rather than using the one we live in) it is because an invented world is a better vehicle, in some way or another, for the staging of this conflict between a particular desire and the things that frustrate that desire. A fantasy world may create the conditions for a new desire, or new ways to frustrate a desire, or new ways to overcome those frustrations. These need to be analogs of real desires, real frustrations, and real opportunities or the story will not hold the reader, but a fantasy world can provide a new stage on which to tell one of the archetypal stories and to highlight its key conflicts in different ways.

All of which means that character comes first, and the world creates the right stage on which to tell the story of the character.

That does not mean you can't do worldbuilding and then discover a character and place them in that world. But it means that actual storytelling begins with character, not world building.

posted over 8 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

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