Build a World From a Real Place
World building in a screenplay sounds like a job for fantasy writers with maps and invented languages. For most of us it's smaller than that, and harder. You decide the three or four rules your world runs on, and you take them from somewhere real.
A rule you made up at your desk sits still. A rule a real community actually lives by already has a price attached, and the price is where your scenes come from.
[HIREN: add 1 or 2 lines here about a world-building draft you've read or written, or a place you know so well you could write its rules from memory]
What does world-building mean?
World building is deciding how your story's world works before your characters walk into it. Who holds power, and what everyone in town knows but nobody says aloud.
On the page it isn't description. A screenplay has no room for three pages on the history of the kingdom. The world shows up only when a rule presses on a character and forces a choice.
So a world, for a screenwriter, is a short list of rules plus the people who suffer under them. Baaki sab decoration hai.
Take your rules from somewhere real
Dharmaraj Shetty's new Netflix series Akka, produced by YRF Entertainment, is a clear example of where good rules come from. Shetty wrote and directed it. It premiered on 30 October and is set in Pernuru, a fictional kingdom in 1980s South India where women hold power. Keerthy Suresh plays Bhavani and Radhika Apte plays Rudra, two women on opposite sides of that power.
The series is only a few days old, so I'll stay with the premise and what its writer has said.
In an interview with the Free Press Journal, Shetty was asked whether the women-led rules of Pernuru were inspired by dating-app culture. He said no. The rules came "mainly from research": he had read that "one of the communities down South had these rules". No marriage. Lineage passing through women. The family property or house never split.
Look at what that gives a writer. Pernuru is invented, and its rules are not. Each one comes with generations of real consequences behind it. If property is never divided, every sibling is tied to the same house forever. If lineage runs through women, a son's place is decided by his mother and sisters. Shetty told THR India he wanted to "give the gangster genre a world with its own rules". He found those rules in a real place, and a gangster story about a house that can never be split already has its conflict built in.
Study the place, then rewrite
Bhediya (2022) shows the same idea from the other direction. Directed by Amar Kaushik, with story and screenplay by Niren Bhatt, it follows a road contractor sent to Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh to build a road through a forest that the local people want left alone.
Bhatt has said plainly that the place changed the script. Speaking to PTI in July 2021, he said: "We studied the whole place during our stay, rewrote the script and began shooting." He added that he was writing about a culture he didn't know, and that bringing that culture into the story was the biggest challenge.
That order matters. He didn't write the world first and then find a location to match. He went to the place, learnt how it worked, and let it rewrite his pages. The whole film turns on that road and the people who don't want it cut through their forest.
I wrote about a similar idea in Make Your Town a Character, about Haridwar in Dum Laga Ke Haisha. Setting gives a film its texture. World building goes a step further and gives the setting its laws.
How to write a world building?
Start with these three steps.
Pick a real place or community you can study. It can be a district, a mohalla, a joint family, a hostel or a trade. Read about it, and if you can, sit with the people who live there. Note the rules nobody questions.
Keep four rules at most. A reader can hold four. Write each one as a plain sentence a child could follow: "Property is never divided." Bend or exaggerate them for your story, but keep the real root.
Make every rule cost someone. A rule nobody suffers under is only background. Ask who wants to break it and who gets crushed by it. Your main characters should stand on both sides of that line.
[HIREN: add 1 or 2 lines here about a real place from your own life, a town, a street or a family house, that could hold a story, and one rule it lives by]
In advertising we learnt that a brand with fifty values has none. A world works the same way. Four rules that bite are worth more than forty pages of lore.
What are the four Cs of worldbuilding?
The fantasy author M.D. Presley describes four Cs in a 2021 post for Fantasy-Hive: Creative, Complete, Consistent and Compelling. Creative is how far your world departs from reality. Complete means it feels as if it existed before the story started. Consistent means it never breaks its own rules, and Presley notes that readers in his survey complained about inconsistency most. Compelling means it keeps the audience willing to believe.
For a screenwriter, Consistent is the one to tape above your desk. Once you announce that Pernuru's property is never split, the story can't split it quietly in episode four because the plot needs money. Someone has to pay for breaking the rule, on screen.
Try this
Take one index card. Write your world's four rules on it, one sentence each.
Under every rule, write one scene where that rule hurts a character. Name the character and say what they lose. "Rule: the eldest daughter inherits the house. Scene: the younger son signs away his share so his sister can stay." If a rule doesn't have a scene where it hurts someone, cut it or sharpen it until it does.
Then check where each rule comes from. If you can't point to a real place, community or custom behind at least two of them, go and find one. A library book, or ek phone call apni nani ko. Kahin na kahin se mil jayega.
Quick answers
Do I need world building for a realistic drama? Yes. A small-town family drama has rules too: who can marry whom, and who inherits the shop. Write them down the way you would for a fantasy kingdom. You can build those rules into a character's backstory as well.
How many rules should a fictional world have? For a film, three or four the audience can feel. A series can add more over time, but the opening episode should still rest on a handful.
Should I invent a fictional place or use a real one? Either works. Akka invents Pernuru but borrows real customs. Bhediya uses the real Ziro. What matters is that the rules are rooted in something true.
Building a story world that holds together is part of The Foundation of Storytelling, my live online course in Hindi and English.
Send me your four-rule card on WhatsApp, with one scene under each rule. I'll tell you which rule is doing the work and which one is only decoration.
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