After exploring Stage One — what you already know — it’s time to expand your research into four foundational areas that shape who your character is and how they move through the world: cultural conditions, story location, historical period, and personal occupation.
Cultural Conditions
Culture encompasses ethnic background, social conditions, religious upbringing, and educational experience — and these forces profoundly shape how a character thinks, speaks, and behaves.
A character raised in a loud, demonstrative Greek family operates differently than one raised in a household where emotion is suppressed and silence is the norm. When your character faces the death of a loved one, their religion matters: do they turn toward faith or reject it? Their education affects their vocabulary, their reasoning, their confidence. None of this is decoration — it’s the architecture of behavior.
Story Location
Every location has its own rules, rhythms, and social codes — and specificity is everything.
If your character lives in New York, where exactly? There’s a vast difference between Times Square and Greenwich Village, between the Bronx and the Upper East Side. If your character is from Los Angeles, do they shop on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills or spend their mornings at a coffee shop in Silver Lake? The more precisely you know the world, the more distinctly your character inhabits it.
Historical Period
Time period affects everything — hygiene, speech, manners, politics, possibility.
A 17-year-old protagonist placed in Virginia in 1951 faces an entirely different world than the same character in 1971, after desegregation. In Remember the Titans, black head coach Herman Boone arrives at a newly integrated high school to lead a football team still fractured by racial tension. The historical moment isn’t backdrop — it’s the engine of the story. Knowing the year, the month, even a specific historical date can unlock your character’s behavior in ways no amount of psychological profiling can.
Personal Occupation
Work shapes identity. A character who has spent a decade in the restaurant industry will treat a server differently than someone who has never had to earn a living. A trust fund heir like Arthur Bach in Arthur — happy, drunk, and entirely without ambition — is defined as much by what he has never had to do as by what he does.
Sometimes occupation is the goal itself. In The Pursuit of Happyness, Chris Gardner is a homeless salesman working an unpaid internship for the chance to become a stockbroker. His dream job isn’t just his objective — it’s his identity, his dignity, and the whole reason we’re watching.
The Foundation
Culture, location, period, and occupation are the foundation on which your character navigates their story. Together they determine how your character speaks, thinks, and acts — and without them, even the most compelling personality has no world to move through.
Know the world completely. Then let your character loose in it.