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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47547
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

In terms of the story, it should not matter.

You might start with characters that you want to write about. And then figure out a plot to causes these characters to interact with each other. And then the requirements of the plot cause changes to the characters. And so on, and so on.

You might start with the plot and only later after the flow of the plot is in place, do you populate the plot with characters. But these characters must have some quirks to make the whole thing interesting, and those quirks modify the plot. And so on, and so on.

The only real questions are what works for the reader, and what do you as the writer have to do to give the reader a satisfying experience. I suspect that most writers poke at the story from multiple viewpoints: characters, settings, timelines, themes, scene and story structures, senses, culture, politics, and so on. You as the the writer of your stories might not care for some of these topics; you might not even bother to address the economics of a society. Every writer has to decide what to put in and what to leave out.

For your particular situation, try this. For each character, write down what they want (or at least should have to be less miserable than they are at the start of the story) as well as two or three credible obstacles to achieving that state of affairs. Look at ways that two or more characters might cooperate to achieve their goals. Ditto points of competition. Write a scene in which some subset of your characters are thrown together. Do not be gentle with them: strip them naked, flay the skin from their backs, but let them find a way out of the mess that you have handled them. Repeat with a bigger mess.

Some of what you write will be crap, maybe most of it. So be it. The value of written crap exceeds the value of unwritten excellence every time. Written crap can be fixed. Even if it cannot be transformed into something readable, you will still learn things about the world that you are creating.

Original score: 7