After spending years in all kinds of different writing forums, I’ve noticed a trend among writers that’s a little bit alarming. People love worldbuilding. They’ll sit and think about the minute details of how the little world inside their head works, the magic systems, the geography, the class structure, and on and on. These people could probably write a dissertation on the inner workings of their world without breaking a sweat. Sadly though, after spending all this time and mental energy on building a beautiful world, they have no idea at all how to actually write a story that takes place inside that world. When it comes down to the nitty gritty, the characters they come up with feel two dimensional, or the plot seems very thin, or worst of all, they can’t come up with anything at all beyond the physical workings of the world. There’s little emotion to be found in a big, empty place, and injecting those feelings is incredibly difficult when the place you’re trying to fill is so massive. The worldbuilding actually ends up getting in the way of the story because it makes the characters feel like action figures being toyed with. The action feels plastic because it happens in a place you think you understand, but have never actually seen in motion. I myself am guilty of doing this. So the question I’ve had to answer is, how do you get from a big world to a little person without it feeling like a huge leap? How do you zoom in past all the maps and the diagrams and the family trees to get to a good perspective for a story to begin? I have a very short answer for this that I use to go from worldbuilding to stories: the economy.

If you’re a big worldbuilder, you probably already know a thing or two about how the economy in your world works. Maybe there’s a special resource that powers the magic system, or there’s a complex economy among the stars that powers the interstellar regime, or there’s a big desert planet where the main export is a weird psychedelic spice that gives people future sight so they can actually navigate through the stars in the first place. That was a mouthful, but whatever it may be (Dune ripoff or otherwise), there’s probably a major facet of the economy in any good world where a story can begin. The economy is a reliable point where individual stories meet giant, world-shaping events. If you think about the economy as a system of interacting individuals rather than a bunch of disparate markets, then you’ll start to see how it bridges the gap between the biggest and smallest moving parts.

The spice trade in Dune is a worldbuilding mechanic, but by itself, is essentially meaningless. Why would anybody care if spice doesn’t move from Arrakis? Who does this affect? Why do I care about them? To create a story about individuals, starting from a point that covers the entire galaxy, sounds really hard. In reality though, we’re only a few questions away from the level we need to be at to start a story. That level being an individual character’s perspective. For example:

Who cares if some desert planet has the most of a thing? Probably whoever lives there, right? Then the answer is, the Fremen care most.

Why and how would this affect them? Well, as happens in our world today, many places with great natural value end up under the control of ruthless conglomerates and brutal regimes, or worse, they become ground zero for wars.

Who would fight over the spice that makes interstellar travel possible? Most likely, the people with the most to gain from controlling that spice, the people who want the most power, in other words. Those kinds of people are usually not very nice.

Who wants power the most in Dune? The Harkonnens of course, who just so happen to be the antagonists. But there’s one other person who values power even more, and that’s the emperor. The emperor, jealous over the recent rise of the Atreides in both military strength and popularity, utilizes the volatile nature of the galactic economy to set up a war between his rising rivals the Atreides, and the people he knows will fight them, the Harkonnens.

Who are the Atreides and the Harkonnens and the Fremen? There’s no need to answer this here. This can be answered during the course of the story, and it doesn’t matter if we don’t have the answer right now. We’ve reached the perspective we need. The hero can be in house Atreides, and the villains can be from house Harkonnen, and the Fremen are the people who make us care the most. They all meet on Arrakis because that’s where the economy demands they meet. Events will play out from there. These tensions are enhanced by old rivalries and other worldbuilding stuff, but this conflict only happens because there’s a big piece of the economy at stake. All of the protagonists and all of the antagonists are really just agents of an economic struggle.

Maybe that didn’t make much sense, so here’s another example. Lets say there’s a world ready to be filled with a story already. We’ll make it a city so the example isn’t so huge. In this city there must be a market for goods, a center of government, and we’ll also assume there is some important good that people care about. It could be anything, so I’ll just choose food because that’s very simple. This is really all you need to get from a world to a story. Think about the people who utilize this market, and why they might care about the food sold there.

1. The government obviously cares a great deal about the amount of food available to the city, and so there must be someone in government who cares about the market where food is sold.
2. A farmer who commutes to the city to sell their goods cares about the health of the market.
3. A thief who lives in the city and has to steal to survive cares about the state of the market.
4. A guard who keeps the food safe from thieves is paid to care about the safety of the market.
5. A merchant who trades goods with the farmer cares about, and maintains, the health of the market.

I could go on. There’s nowhere else in the city where so many different people gather. Everybody relies on the market, and this is generally true of markets in any story. This is what makes it such an easy in if you’re stuck on worldbuilding when you know you need a story.

The farmer comes to the market one day to sell his goods, but realizes he’s fallen victim to the thief before he can sell all of them. The merchant who already paid for a certain amount of food is very upset by this, and demands repayment. The farmer, unable to repay, gets the attention of the guard, who goes in search of the thief. The merchant files a complaint with the city that their guards aren’t doing a very good job of staying alert. The government representative receives the complaint and drafts legislature that will allow the market to hire more guards. The thief gets wind of this and lets all of their friends know about the new guards, kicking off a crime spree before the government can hire any new guards. The first guard was able to track the thief and overheard this. He warns the government rep that the crime spree is coming, who then uses his connections to rally some guards much more quickly. All the thieves get arrested, the merchant gets his money back, the farmer is off the hook for the food, the guard gets promoted, and the government representative is hailed as a hero for stopping the crime spree.

It’s a simple story, but every piece of the world was connected, and it was all from the perspective of individuals. If I wanted to actually write this it would be a whole lot more showing than telling, but you get the point.

You might think this is limiting, and it is. This is only the starting point for a story, where the world meets all the characters. It has to meet the characters in other places too, but there’s no other place where all the characters can belong at once, and there are few other places where big events can shake every character’s world. This is just how I like to go from world to character, and I’m sure there are other good ways of thinking about it.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley