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…
