Setting and Worldbuilding

“Why can’t they just use magic to fix that? How does anyone have a job in that world??”

Sci-fi and fantasy are fun. They also create in-world shortcuts for characters to take. How do characters have quests and ambitions if their every whim is catered to by magic, or technology that is so advanced that it might as well be magic?

I was desperate to tell stories that were more than just some upset villain grabs the biggest tech or magic and tries to destroy the world. But in order to learn how to tell a wider range of stories than just end-of-the-world tropes, I went on a multi-year journey to understand the logistics and history of our own world, so that I could better answer the question:

How the heck do we have the world we have anyway? What would it take to keep a fictional world running? Turns out that it takes an immense number of people living lives that have nothing to do with ending a world-domination threat, and many of those lives are fascinating.

This category of training revolves around understanding how much every-day heroism and smarts go into creating a functioning society, so that you, the writer, know the pressures that are already (and ever-presently) pushing down on your characters, even before they reach Page 1.