Midmonth Writer Lesson

Today, we’re going to talk today about world building versus characters and when you should do both. World building is super important because we love the world that we’re in. We need to have strong characters. Of course, we do. Characters are who we latch onto, who we connect with, who we follow the journey through the amazing world on the shoulder of, right? But first, we must have incredible worlds.

Worlds can populate multiple generations of characters if they’re done right. Well, we must start with the actual location. Obviously, whether you’re writing historical or science fiction or anything in between, your physical location is super important. However, there’s going to be a boundary to this world, and there’s going to be something beyond that boundary. It’s so crucial to have that when you set your world.

When you set your Hogwarts castle, there’s another element to that universe, isn’t there? There are locations beyond that location and there’s other schools. Hello??? We didn’t know that going in. We didn’t know that there were these cool other schools until we had competition
with them.

We can go backwards on the timeline. We can go forward on the timeline, and we have these incredible stories that are produced from this world. When you’re building your story, your world needs to be grand enough to have a timeline, to have a past, present and future that you can build on that you can take characters from every element of your timeline and build that into an incredible story.
 

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Published by Jaimie Engle

Jaimie Engle built the Engleverse, stories in books, film, and tv. She wrote, sold, and produced Just Jake (2023), sold and developed a story with DreamWorks Animation Studios (2025), and was hired to write an audiobook for Fresh Produce Media (2025). Jaimie founded Chapter Drops™ to help people with stories write and publish books, offering a Pitch Drop service for authors to connect with producers. She has written and published 25+ book, earning awards such as Kirkus Choice Book of the Year (2020), Publisher’s Book Life Prize (Fiction and Non-Fiction 2020), and the Writers of the Future Award (2016).Follow on social @jaimieenglewrites

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