: Should the world be based on the characters or the characters based on the world? What are the pros and cons of basing the world on the characters found in it and conversely what are the

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The advantages of building a world and then basing the characters on it is that this is generally the direction that the real world works. Your parents were not chosen based on what profession you were supposed to enter. They were your parents first, and they shaped your profession. Building in this order typically helps make very credible worlds because you're not cheating when you build the world.

However, few stories are focused on the world. They usually center around characters and a plot. In these cases, you tend to want to avoid weakening your plot just to fit the world. Nothing's worse than building up your story of the boy turned king than finding out that the world brought the black plague to his castle and he died a horrible death just before the plot really took off. Many stories rely on exceptional happenings, and it can be hard to build a world and then find those exceptional events. It can be easier to bend your world to fit your characters. However, this comes at a price: the believably of your world can go down because the characters start "getting lucky" too much.

The ideal solution is to balance both approaches. Make it so that its hard to tell from your final product whether you took the world first or character first approach. Create a beautiful gleaming plot with rich characters, and make sure the world fits that. Make sure that the world looks like it really could have generated these characters.

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