Using Character to Create a World

A worldbuilding technique from John Truby

Imagine with me, if you will, a world in which love conquers all. Everyone believes in true love, and all the characters have found someone worth loving. A character has lived in this world their whole life, and they know that true love is for them. It’s just around the corner. So when a handsome young man arrives in this world and takes her breath away, she knows they are simply meant to be together.

Sure enough, they are, and they all live happily ever after. The end.

That’s not a very compelling story, is it? We can talk about it in terms of character lessons — our character is missing a wound, or a ghost, and thus she has nothing to learn.

But the reason she’s missing a wound is because she lives in a world that has always believed in the thing she finds. It is something she finds, rather than a lesson she ends up learning, because she was simply biding her time, waiting for her prince.

The Anatomy of Story

John Truby’s screenwriting book The Anatomy of Story* is one of the deepest looks into how story works that I’ve encountered. Unlike Save the Cat or even the beat sheets proposed by K.M. Weiland I often rely on, The Anatomy of Story is less formulaic. His approach is to have the right mix of elements that come together to tell a good story.

He also spends almost the entire book on pre-writing. Truby believes that stories that are designed, rather than cobbled together, end up feeling more organic and natural than they could have otherwise. This week and next, we’re going to look at two ways that designing a story can result in a richer, more nuanced tale.

Characters Dictate World

In the story I opened this article with, we had a nondescript character in a nondescript world. More importantly, we had a character living in a world that had no relationship to what she was going to learn. This made initiating a character arc difficult. Good character growth — and therefore good story — is built into the fabric of the world your characters live in. As Truby says it, “in good stories, the characters come first, and the writer designs the world to be an infinitely detailed manifestation of these characters.” (Truby, 145)

What does it mean to create the world as “an infinitely detailed manifestation of the characters,” though? Does it mean that everyone should look and sound like the hero? Everyone should constantly be telling the hero what they’re missing out on? Far from it.

Let’s go back to the story at the beginning and give our heroine and hero some names. Jill is our hero, and Jack her love interest. We had Jill growing up in a world where everyone believes in happily ever after — and they have good reason to. Everyone around Jill found true love, and it worked out for everyone.

But we need Jill to learn a lesson. I’m going to pull this two directions, to show how this pre-writing work can provide templates long before work gets onto the page.

The Romance Arc

First, let’s say that we want Jill to learn that love is real and there is a happily ever after waiting for her. In order for this to be a lesson, we need to start with Jill — and her world — living in its opposite. Instead of living in a world where Jill is surrounded by true love, perhaps her parents are divorced, her best friend is in an abusive relationship, and Jill’s last relationship came to a disastrous end after five years together, just when Jill thought they were going to get married.

This is not a woman who believes she’ll find true love. So when Jack comes into her life, she’s guarded. She doesn’t trust his intentions, and she has a vested interest in remembering that true love doesn’t happen to her.

To make it even more interesting, let’s say Jill works as a divorce lawyer. This way, her entire world is proof that true love doesn’t last. And this way, we have a story to tell, one where Jack and Jill will face, uh, an uphill battle to find love.

The Tragic Love Story Arc

But this isn’t the only direction we can take the story of Jack and Jill, and the world I built in which everyone around Jill is living proof in true love isn’t necessarily the wrong choice for every story. Let’s go back in Jill’s life by five years. Her parents are still married, her friend just met someone, and Jill is aching for a love story of her own. She’s in her last year of law school, her parents have a vow renewal in Hawaii coming up, and she desperately needs a date for it. Now she doesn’t want to avoid love, she wants it.

Enter Jack. Jill’s heart is open and she’s ready to receive this perfect man into her life. But he isn’t what he seems, and their relationship starts to expose the cracks not only in Jill’s own life, but in the world around her. An argument at the rehearsal dinner between Jack and Jill gets her parents fighting with each other. They end up not only forgoing their vow renewal but taking steps to dissolve their marriage altogether. Her friend’s partner is becoming more and more problematic, and Jack is only making things worse. Jill needs to learn to leave true love behind and find herself in the wake of a messy relationship or they will all come tumbling after.

There’s No Wrong, Only Wrong for Each Other

I’m not talking about Jack and Jill as characters, when it comes to “wrong for each other.” I’m talking about characters and worlds. The Jill from the romance story arc doesn’t fit into the world from the tragic arc, because that world doesn’t challenge her. The Jill from the tragic arc doesn’t fit into the love story for the same reason. She would find a love she’d been expecting.

This is why it’s helpful to build characters and worlds in conjunction. But how does that happen?

Build a World from Theme

I implied this in the stories above, but, as Truby says,

“You don’t create characters to fill a story world, no matter how fabulous that world may be. You create a story world to express and manifest your characters, especially your hero. …You define the story world … by dramatizing the visual oppositions.” (Truby, 153, emphasis in original)

That is, the world becomes the manifestation of the opposite of what the character needs to learn. It becomes the source of their ghost. And we can build the world to be a playground of natural symbolism for how a character feels.

Give a character who feels trapped in his life a cramped apartment — or give him an aesthetic, pleasing, open, modern apartment that feels sterile and without personal meaning. Give a character who aches for adventure the strictest family in the most boring town. If you have someone who longs for the forest, trap them inside the walls of a chateau (that’s what my enchantress story does). If you have someone who longs for luxury, put them in a jail cell.

Above, I go back and forth between choosing worlds that complement the character’s current mood (the cramped apartment) and contrast it (the boring town). In every case, though, the world I build is intentionally chosen to be that reflection of character.

Moving beyond setting to a world of character, my enchantress has literal magical powers in a world where, as a woman who doesn’t truly belong in the nobility, everyone else has more effective power than she does. She wants to develop her magic because she sees her enchantments as the only way to compete in a world that was not made for a woman. As I realized during pre-writing that I wanted to explore power dynamics, the powers each person wields (her mother’s subtle influence, her brother’s brute force, a scientist assuming a man’s identity to pursue her career) became an integral part of Celeste’s world.

Changing the Hero and Changing the World

The best worlds, though, aren’t static places, just as (the vast majority of) the best characters aren’t static. As characters change, the world changes. That is,

“In most stories, because the hero and the world are expressions of each other, the world and the hero develop together. Or if the hero doesn’t change … the world doesn’t change either.” (Truby, 182)

If we release Jill to understanding the power of true love through her relationship with Jack, perhaps her parents reconcile (or meet someone new) and her best friend realizes she deserves better than the relationship she’s been in. Jill learning a lesson changes her whole world.

The tragic arc above showed how Jill’s fallout from her love could change her world for the worse, but, on some occasions, it is possible for the world to change for the better when a character does not. Romeo and Juliet is an example of this. Romeo and Juliet don’t fare so well, but their love, we learn in the short ending, results in the world built around hatred and rivalry being changed for the better.

As you create your world to match your character, it’s helpful to ask yourself: will the world change because of the character’s change? Will it be for better or for worse?

Worldbuilding and Structure

I’ve talked so far about “the world” as a singular place, but unless you’re following Aristotle’s rules of drama to the strictest letter, and setting your story in one place at one time (and honestly, even then it’s possible to play with sub-worlds), you’re going to have different locations that stories take place in. Instead of simply acknowledging that and moving the story wherever you feel like without thinking it through, creating sub-worlds that reflect a specific structural event will make the story feel even more cohesive and profound.

“Each step of [story structure] tends to have a story world all its own. Each of these is a unique visual world within the overall story arena. Notice what a huge advantage this is: the story world has texture but also changes along with the change in the hero.” (Truby, 191)

The climactic moment in stories is often when a character feels trapped between a rock and a hard place — they have a decision to make, and none of the outcomes look good. Trapping a character physically while they’re feeling mentally trapped is going to add to the atmosphere, if not the stakes.

I take advantage of this in my enchantress story in a metaphorical way. The climactic moment takes place when she is backed into the threshold between rooms, just as she feels on the threshold of belonging and not, of doing good and taking justice too far. Although it’s changed since then, when I originally built the scene, it had been some weeks since Celeste had been indoors at all, thus making the ceiling of a building feel all the more constricting to her.

Another way world changes mirror changes in the character is in the forest. At the beginning of the book, when Celeste longs to be there, the forest is inviting and happy. Near the end, this same forest has changed — along with and because of her. Instead of being a peaceful place, it’s become nightmarish as Celeste moves further into her fall arc.

What If You Already Built Your World?

Okay, Rochelle, you might be thinking at this point. This is all well and good, but the world came to me first! I built a vast fantasy world already. I’m not going to tear it apart just to make it fit a character.

The good news is you don’t have to. I’ve met some incredible people who build out worlds and histories and even languages before setting stories inside of it. In this case, the inventing is already done. When you go to set a specific character inside that world, the question is then a matter of where and when. Which country, which class, which profession, what kind of parents, what kind of town, are going to give this character the best chance to grow?

What location should you set the battle in? If your character is afraid of water, maybe it should be by the vast lake you have separating two countries, so she can prove her growth in that way. Or perhaps a character learned agility and needs to climb a mountain. You already have the world and sub-worlds, and you probably already have a compelling character. Reverse-engineering this process is a matter of playing mix and match until you find an intriguing mix of location and character, where they can be inextricably interwoven, one relying on the other.

Do you tend to intentionally build your worlds and backstories, or let them fall as they may? How can you take aspects of Truby’s worldbuilding ideas to enhance the story you want to tell?

*All quotes taken from John Truby, The Anatomy of Story (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

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