Jan 01 2010
Plan Thoroughly
I was talking to a friend the other day about how thoroughly you have to plan out characters and settings. I was picking up a notebook of graph paper to map out layouts of houses and ships that are in a few of my stories and also in some games that I have going on, and we were talking also about the importance of knowing your characters inside and out, being able to picture them and know how they’ll react even if it’s not going to be mentioned in the story it’s often important to know certain motivations.
I was explaining in “Sanctity” that the character of Hajime is adopted, that’s a minor factor, she’s an Asian child with white parents. They couldn’t have children, but then add to that the extra layer that when she was twelve her Mom got pregnant and had a son, and then within two years had another daughter, and then had her tubes tied, that adds more depth. She’s a graphic artist, she’s marginally obsessed with the Japanese culture having spent so little time there and trying to understand more about her biological heritage. She’s also very determined when it comes to things and harbors various insidious feelings towards her family that she can’t help, because she finds herself fearing that she may be displaced especially as she’s going away to college and they’re there by themselves now that whole biological family and her the outsider. While those fears may be unfounded, I feel that her family, of course, love her as their own, because they’re not so shallow people, they’re still a part of her.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time deciding how the college area will look. I admit a lot of the idea of it came to me while I was at college myself and I’m bound to use that place as a basis for a lot of things, but there are other things to look at, are their copper sinks or stainless steel ones or are they porcelain? are the staircases wooden or stone? what kind of bricks are on the outside of the building? are the windows square or rounded? what do the gardens look like? is the entire campus isolated or is it integrated throughout the town it’s in? what is the town itself like? what sort of shops do the students have access to?
All these things are important to figure out because the college itself is as much a character in the story as the people are, and the way the town is set up affects very much the way certain parts of the action are going to pan out.
