When I'm ready to start thinking about where and when my story takes place— when I'm ready to start designing the setting— I am a god. I can create a world & populate it. I can create culture & history. I can give them new flavors of ice cream that we don't have. I can spend 100 years on Wikipedia, learning about sewage systems (because apparently that's important to the story I'm writing, I don't know why, I'm so bored, why am I still looking at this??).

I love settings! I love researching how you can use a location to tell a story. I've done years of field research on this subject. I was a tour guide & scriptwriter at Disney World. I have a seasonal gig at a local escape room: the Bureau Adventure Games, in Orlando, over on I-Drive. (Use the name “ian” as a discount code, and you'll get 30% off any game you play!) I've designed haunted houses, I designed a museum exhibit. I love researching all the unique ways that you can use a location to tell a story.

But when you're designing a setting & you've got this godlike power, it's so easy to go off track! It's hard to know where to focus. You're probably not going to create the whole universe. You just have to create the part that the scenes take place in, and you can imply stuff that's happened outside of the scene & before the scene & after the scene. But you don't need, like, a concrete history book starting from the date zero up to now. Just the parts that are relevant to the story!

So this is another place where I think Frank Daniel's Conflict Mad-lib, “Someone wants something badly… but they have trouble getting it,” is really useful. Because if I have that one-sentence summary, it can keep me completely focused on whether or not I need to be developing this part of the universe that my story is taking place in!

When I'm ready to design the setting, I think of it on two different levels. There's the set (the actual physical location that the audience is sharing with the characters). And there's the world (where you take the audience on a tour of the setting). It's all the fun fictional details.

The set, and the world. The physical location, and the fiction layer that you wrap around it. What the audience can experience while they're observing your story, and what they observe in the story.

So let's talk about the set first!

When I'm ready to design the set, I'm thinking of it as a physical location. And in this location that I'm building, I'm telling an interactive story. Because this is a space that the audience shares with the characters. This is where the audience is watching from. So when I'm designing this space, I'm always asking myself:

• Where is the audience watching from? Where are the characters performing? Those give us the vantage points.
• How do the characters move through the set? How does the audience move through the set? That's the blocking.
• And what's the vibe? What's the atmosphere of the set?

Those prompts help me remember that my audience is playing an active role in the story. They help me remember to encourage the audience to play along with me!

And when I'm designing the set, when I'm figuring out how to use this location to tell the story about my protagonist who wants something badly… but they have trouble getting it, I have a really cool toolbox of artistic languages. Basically any spatial artform! Architecture, landscaping, interior design! I can shape the geography of the space. I can use props, I can imply urban design infrastructure. God powers, when you're designing a setting!

So once I figure out where the most interesting place for my characters to be performing the story is, I can start populating the space with bushes for characters to hide behind, balconies for them to climb up, with moats for them to shout across, with trampolines for them to tiptoe across. (I dunno! I dunno what's in your story!)

And the easiest way to figure out what prop, what architecture, what thing to put where in the set that you're building, is by asking myself where is the audience observing from? The vantage points. How do the characters move through the set? How does the audience move through the set? That's called blocking. And what's the vibe of the set? How is the audience supposed to feel during this part of the story, and how can you reflect it in the way that you decorate the set?

For example, let's say I'm telling a story about a bodyguard & a murder victim. The bodyguard's gonna fail the murder victim. The murder victim is dead, by the end of the scene.

So let's work backwards. In the scene, the bodyguard and the murder victim get into some kind of argument. Murder victim storms off & gets murdered elsewhere, Because the bodyguard doesn't follow him. Bodyguard's pissed off at him. “Yeah, go ahead and get murdered, that's fine. Oh my god, he got murdered!!” But the audience's vantage point, we stay with the bodyguard so we can feel that. We can be with him when he realizes how badly he's screwed up. This is probably one of those tentpole scenes that defines the character arc that the bodyguard is going through.

So where does this scene take place? Well, I want it to be a mystery who kills the murder victim. So probably we're going from a room where you can have an intimate argument… a kitchen, a hallway, a bathroom at the club. Then— so there can be enough space for the murder victim & all the murder suspects— that's probably a crowded room with a lot of activity going on. A ballroom, a graduation ceremony, a discotheque.

So suddenly I'm designing a bathroom in a discotheque! Can we get neon urinals?? What type of graffiti have the locals put on the walls? What curiosities are there in the trash can? Suddenly we've got not just an aesthetic but also a vibe, a way for the audience to feel in this grungy discotheque bathroom (with surprisingly thematic graffiti)!

And then let's say the bodyguard hears the commotion and realizes, “Uh-oh, my murder victim might be in trouble!” And so he rushes out into the discotheque and we follow him out onto the dance floor, to discover the murder victim and realize how badly he's screwed up… while in the background, “I Will Survive” is pumping on the stereo. That's blocking: how the character moves, how the audience moves.

We could have stayed in the bathroom with the bodyguard. The bodyguard could have just heard the murder happen outside the door & peeked his head out & said, “Oh, dear!” If you had to, it could work. But if we can follow him onto the dance floor and miss the important action? “There was an action scene and we missed it? What am I paying to watch this movie for??” then we in the audience can feel a little bit disappointed, which— if you do it well— can transition into the bodyguard feeling disappointed that he didn't do a better job of protecting the murder victim.

So in short, when I'm designing a set, I'm picking the most interesting place for the characters to be at this particular part in the story. And I'm asking myself, where is the audience observing the action from? How do the characters move? How does the audience move? And what's the vibe of the place? How is the audience supposed to feel? And how can the decorations & the design of the space help them feel that way?

When I'm ready to start world building, this is where I have to be really mindful. I, yes, technically I am a god, but really I'm a god who's serving the audience. Which is a strange job description, but there's actually a really good term for it. It's called tour guide! You are a tour guide for your setting.

By thinking of myself as a tour guide for the world that I'm building, I can stay focused on the story that I'm trying to tell. That's how I learned to stop researching sewage systems that ultimately really didn't come into my story that much. And all of the answers that I come up with can be reflected in the set that I build! Here are some of my favorite ways to design the world that I want to build.

I think about the population. Demographically, who lives here? What different types of groups? Different ethnicities? Different cultures? More youngs? More olds? How does this setting shape their identity? Because the olds who live in Florida are pretty different from the olds who live in New York, and very different from the olds who lived back in Eastern Europe, once upon a time. So the setting shapes their identity, and their identity can in turn shape the setting. By figuring out these demographics, that makes it easy to come up with who the background characters are, but also when I need more supporting characters, I can get a sense of who is around to spare!

And once I have these demographics figured out, I can start thinking about how they live their lives in this setting. Their routine, the rules they live by, the resources at their disposal, and what kind of era they're living in.

For example, let me see if I can do this from scratch. A while back I had an idea for a fantasy, and the working title was Gollum Town. Because I love, in Lord of the Rings, how the Ring has an addictive quality & it slowly drives you mad. And I have grown up with the tradition of Fiddler on the Roof teaching me that, “Money is the world's curse!” So I thought it would be a funny idea if— as like a parody of capitalism— what if our currency was like the One Ring? So the more money you collect, the more you become a selfish little goblin monster. As a result, the ruling class are all Gollums! And the middle class are sometimes chill, but sometimes have Gollum tantrums. And the underclass are still humans, but suffering exploited humans. Humans treated as less than human by the Gollum 1%.

So I can start thinking about their routines. How do all of these different groups spend their day? How do they normally use the setting? How have they shaped the space surrounding them? I imagine the downtown of Gollum Town is nothing but Scrooge McDuck money vaults, and gentrified restaurants. And the streets are basically war zones, because all of the rich Gollums are paranoid that the other Gollums are going to do a war raid on their Scrooge McDuck money vaults. All of the service people have to commute in because they can't afford to live downtown. All of the service workers have to commute in through the war zone on the streets of downtown to their individual gentrified restaurant amid the Scrooge McDuck money vaults. So maybe their commute is guarded by troops, who are usually pretty good at protecting the service workers, but sometimes a Gollum gets really jealous & they really launch an attack on another Gollum and… y'know, it's just working in the city, what can I tell ya? By thinking about the routine, I can start imagining battle damage on the Scrooge McDuck money vaults. I can imagine security checkpoints along the trail. I can ask myself, what sort of gentrified food does a city full of Gollums want to eat? Is it rabbitses? Are they raw and wriggling?

So I can get a lot from the routine and I can get even more from the rules. How are characters expected to behave in the setting? What happens if a character deviates from the norm? Are they punished? Are they corrected? Are they rehabilitated? For example, the rules of Gollum Town would have to be very carefully balanced. If the allegory is that it's the 1%, the elite who are ruling the world, then they can get their hands on nukes and my story could be over before it even gets started. So I would need to figure out some plan of mutually assured destruction that we can have in Gollum Town that would keep the story alive and around for long enough.

But rules are about more than just what I can't do with the story, it's a lot about what I can do! If we agree that a story is fundamentally about its conflict, the protagonist wants something badly… but they have trouble getting it, then a rule is the boundary that gets crossed along the way. So for example in Gollum Town we've got this demilitarized zone where the service workers into the downtown can, in theory, safely commute to work every day. I'm not exactly sure if there's such a thing as a Gollum City Council? It's probably more like corporate treaties, corporate ceasefires? But what's the code of honor that all of the warring Gollums have? Well let's say that this is the voice of experience. This rule is the voice of experience. Once upon a time, the Gollums did not see service workers as a protected endangered class and they really culled the population a little too much. But then there was no one to serve them. There was no one to import everything they want. So the Gollum population took a hit and they realized, for their own continued survival, try not to cull the service workers.

By coming up with that rule I can now really clearly start thinking about the resources of the world (in this case, the service workers), and the era of the world. Let's talk about resources first. What does the setting produce in abundance, and what does it lack? That can help us figure out what to put in the space. Sometimes a resource is a traditional thing like lumber or water, but it can get more abstract than that. It can be the service workers in Gollum Town, the endangered service workers in Gollum Town. We're trying to get the population back up! Conserve the service workers!! To be honest with you, the research I've been doing into resources, when I watch the Empire Strikes Back, I kinda think the force counts as a resource. In a sense, both Fiddler on the Roof and Pride and Prejudice have too many unmarried daughters. I'm not saying it to objectify the characters… it's just a thing that the setting has a lot of! And if you're building a set for a house with five daughters, it's going to look very different from a set of a demilitarized zone where service workers commute every day to Gollum Town.

And the last way I think about world building is with the era. I'm asking myself when the story takes place. And the trick to this is comparing & contrasting this era with another era in the location's history. For example, in Gollum Town, they used to hunt the service workers but now they don't anymore. It nearly drove both groups to extinction. So maybe there's part of Gollum Town that got burned down in a big riot, before the story began.

The ruins of a Scrooge McDuck Money Vault is a pretty interesting set! I didn't know we'd be talking about that set today. I didn't have that a few minutes ago. I got it by thinking about the world building, by thinking about the population, the different groups who live there, the routine, how they spend their time every day, the rules in the setting, the norms, the way they're expected to behave, the resources at their disposal, what's abundant around them, what do they lack? And the era, when the story takes place, comparing & contrasting it with a different era in the location's history.

And that's how I approach world building. Now it's your turn to play God! Scroll down and design your own settings! I'm excited to see what you come up with!