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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38844
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Don't write characters, find characters.

I'm a strong believer that open-ended stories should exist in open worlds. Rather than telling a unique and pivotal tale of daring-do they tell the story of a group of people whose deeds may be extremely impactful but are also just the stuff that happens to _them_. They are actually unremarkable in many ways; such things are also happening elsewhere to other people in that same world all the time. This approach requires that the world of the story be extremely fully realised with many things going on, only some of which effect a group of characters involved in any tale set therein.

Once you have a world like that you can pick out individuals and tell their story for as long or short a period of time as you care to, making sure that the world develops as you go through time in that universe. The best two examples of such extremely well developed worlds I can think of are [Bas-Lag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas-Lag) and Paolo Bacigalupi's biopunk post-apocalypse world where _[The Windup Girl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl)_ and _[Ship Breaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_Breaker)_ etc.. are set.

In both cases tales told in that world can only be placed in time when compared to other events mentioned within the texts rather than being interdependent on each other. Any and all the narratives not starring the same characters could in fact be happening simultaneously. The worlds are complex enough to allow parallel groups to have all their very own adventures without them necessarily overlapping in any way.

Once you have a world complex enough that events can and do unfold _without_ POV characters you can pick up the people involved in a given string of events and tell their particular tale. This is what I mean by "finding characters"; you aren't writing a group of characters that need to do particular things but rather telling the story of a group of events that happen to involve the same character(s). This is then a story and character(s) that can go on as long as you can A. maintain a concrete world-line _and_ B. keep the characters alive and interesting in that world.

Hopefully that makes sense and helps with your problem, obviously hit me up in the comments for extra details on anything that needs clarification.

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