Your scene is not about your character.

Hello dear reader!

While working through my fourth (Yes, you read that right, fourth.) draft, I decided a chapter needed to be majorly overhauled. I was struggling to figure out how to improve this scene and how to go about crafting a new one. I often consult with my husband Nick who was a DM in his gaming group for years. He said something that really struck me.

“The scene isn’t about your character, because the world exists whether they are in it or not.”

This isn’t to say that a scene isn’t actually about your character, because if they’re not in the scene, then there really is no story… right?

Well, sort of.

What Nick was getting at is that if you really want to add a lot of depth to your world, remember that there are things happening in the background all the time. At the micro level, you’re going to have famers, carpenters, tanners, merchants, etc. all going about their daily lives. Everyone your character passes on the street has their own entire life they’re living out. Dustin wrote a good blog about that last year. Nick was talking more at the macro level of world building. What is happening in the city? In the country? On the continent?

Perhaps there is political unrest? Is there war? Is there famine? Is it a time of unparalleled prosperity in your character’s country? These things can be happening in the background and do not have to be directly related to your character, however your character may be affected by them. Your character may not be going to war, but the sudden increase of military presence in their city may cause problems for them. Perhaps they are traveling through the countryside. If the king decides to move an army from one end of the country to the other, that could cause some problems. Not only people, but animals (or monsters) may be displaced by the movement of the army, or the occurrence of a battle.

What I am trying to say is that not everything that happens to your character in your book has to be directly related to their actions or their presence. Sometimes things simply happen and your character happens to be there and winds up affected by them. That is, there is an entire story going on in the background that is taking place without your character’s involvement. This is the story we need to not forget to include. (It can be especially easy to forget since we are telling a story that is focused on our character and we often want everything to revolve around them.) The more that you keep this in mind and the more you work this into your story, the bigger and more real it can make the world feel.

Till next time dear reader, don’t forget to consider both the micro and macro when designing your NPCs and story or campaign settings. <3 Tiff