When creating storyworlds, one of the early steps in the process should be selecting the storyworld’s genre. Genre will play an important role in designing settings, characters, significant objects, themes, plot points, and all of the other aspects of the storyworld and the stories that emerge from it.
Genre also defines the expectations of your audience and will play a significant role in defining who that audience includes. For example, film noir is, according to film critic Roger Ebert, “locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, or apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.”
Story development — whether it is a film, a novel, or a short story — often begins with an idea for a character or a storyline and moves outwards from there to gradually develop the storyworld. This can work well, but from a transmedia storytelling perspective this process can create problems.
Focusing on a single character or one storyline can narrow the author’s vision, stunting the other characters and limiting the number of stories that can be told. Going back later and retrofitting a story as a transmedia narrative can result in a storyworld that looks like it has been cobbled together out of bits and pieces.
A much more effective approach is to create the storyworld first and then see what stories emerge from it.