Four Key Elements of a Great Storyworld

Great storyworlds don’t just happen. Okay, you can take an exciting story (like, say, the movie “Star Wars”) and then cobble together a cohesive universe around it after the fact. But if you’re not George Lucas and/or oozing money from your very pores, it’s far more efficient to create the storyworld first.

When doing so, I suggest focusing on the four most important elements:

• setting,
  
• characters,
  
• conflicts, and
  
• story seeds.

Element One: Setting

I’ll probably be harping on this quite a bit, but I’ll say it first here:

A storyworld is not a setting, and a setting is not a storyworld.
That said, a good setting is an essential part of a storyworld. A good setting establishes the storyworld’s location in time, space, and genre. Without it, the audience will be lost (“Is this set in the present? If so, why are there no cell phones? And why is the President a giant talking lizard?”)

Element Two: Characters

You can’t have a story without characters. Ditto for storyworlds. When making a storyworld, decide what types of characters are scampering through it. When I say “type” I mean just that — archetypes, rather than specific characters. What types of characters will be the heroes, the villains, the well-meaning but bumbling comedic sidekicks?

Are there rich nobles? Mystic warrior monks with energy swords? Scheming doctors? Brave colonists? Schoolgirl mech pilots competing for lucrative military contracts?

Focus on the types of characters that are unique to your storyworld. Yes, it may have greedy politicians who give off lies like plants give off oxygen, but that’s hardly unique. Now, if those politicians are giant talking lizards… that’s worth mentioning.

Element Three: Conflicts

Conflict drives stories. Without it, your storyworld is stagnant and dull, like a bowl of pudding with a skin on top. Therefore, you don’t want conflicts in your storyworld that can be easily resolved — once they’re gone, your world turns to conflict-free pudding. (Individual stories may have simple conflicts, but conflicts that define the world should never be simple.)

Like characters, conflicts should be broad and archetypical: Oppressive governments oppose freedom-loving folks. Rival corporations fight for market share. Feuding families compete for power.

Also like characters, the specifics of the conflict should be unique to your storyworld: The oppressive government is in space, oppressing space cowboys. The corporations are rival robotics firms. The feuding families are giant lizards.

Element Four: Story Seeds

At this point your storyworld has a setting, a cast of character types, and an array of interesting conflicts (which, not coincidentally, are the three elements you need for any story). Together, they combine to form story seeds.

Mixing the elements should inspire any number of exciting new tales, each unique to the world you’ve developed. These tales (not yet written, but merely inspired) exist as potential stories. They’re seeds. And your world should be riddled with them.

After all, creating stories is the whole point of making a storyworld in the first place. In the end, the world is only as good as the stories it supports.