So what do I know so far. We have Calliope, Talia. A peer of Callie who’s very different from her. And some sort of Tony Stark\/Handsome Jack\/Elon Musk type character, not sure if he’s the big bad. He runs some corporation that’s presumably exploitative… this corporation will probably be a proxy for Google, Amazon, Tesla, Shinra, Hyperion. This corporation needs to be different from the rest in order for the story to be interesting. It needs to do good things, it needs to be legitimately improving the world in some way. Maybe having just one corporation would be a little too simplistic.
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\nAlso need to think about the government. Natural resources. Religion. What do people believe? How are resources allocated? How developed is AI\/magic? Maybe I need to learn from the corporation in Enders Game.
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\nSo Calliope starts out in some sort of boring suburban sort of setting, but something happens that makes her leave it. I don’t think I can kill her parents off; that would be too lazy. Maybe she’s raised by grandparents? Or if she’s raised by her parents… what are their expectations for her? What is the cultural raga she inherits?
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\nThink about Final Fantasy. Cloud’s dad is never mentioned.\u00a0He leaves his small town to join the army and become a SOLDIER. What happens to the protagonist from Lost Illusions? He borrows money from a friend, has a shitty relationship with his dad who low-key exploits him. But then he exploits his friend (brother in law?).
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\nTerrangima- no mention of parents. Luke Skywalker’s adopted parents die in a town razing. Terra’s father was an Esper, her mother…? Died at childbirth? Died when the worlds got rifted apart?
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\nWhat if\u00a0the people in this world believed that God was a software engineer, or some sort of AI or programmer? “In the beginning there was the command line\u201d\u2026 ah, Google says its Cryptonomicon. I should probably get around to reading that, so I don\u2019t waste too much time trying to reinvent things that I can just adapt and remix.
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\nWhat would be the name of the Musk character? Shall we give him a biblical name? That sounds fun. Bible character names for the evil folk. Solomon? David? Joshua? I\u2019m thinking Solomon. There\u2019s something semi-likeable about that name. I\u2019ll probably also include folks like Elisha or Elijah, Jedediah, Obadiah, stuff like that. Maybe. We\u2019ll see.
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\nWhat else do I want to think about. Okay, so I have Callie, Talia, Solomon. Solomon might maybe have an annoying partner, associate or lackey named Saul.
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\nWhat else? What about their respective families? And what about the peer of Callie that I haven\u2019t figured out yet? I\u2019m guessing that Callie generally has this sense of uncertainty, nervousness, doubt\u2026 somewhat Hamlet-ish in that regard. And so Callies friend would have to be someone oddly peaceful, oddly serene, seemingly a little naive, happy to \u2018walk by faith and not by sight\u2019. What would this person\u2019s name be? I\u2019d like a name that\u2019s bordering on Muslim. In Ender\u2019s Game, this character might\u2019ve been Alai. Scrolling through a list of names, I quite like Afra. Maybe Ofra. Or Nawal, or Nawar. Salwa. Something a little bit subtle like that. But the character can\u2019t be precisely Muslim, that would be a little too on the nose. They\u2019re a little continental \u2013 I\u2019m hearing words like Sufi and Rumi, even though I don\u2019t really know those things \/ people very well.
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\nOkay, we have a bunch of characters. What are the possible conflicts? Very often in stories the conflict is something that rises quite dramatically. Even in Harry Potter, in the first book, Voldemort has technically returned. There was an age of darkness before the start of the book, and we\u2019re returning to it. In Mass Effect, it\u2019s a routine mission and you find out that the end of the galaxy is pending. Something similar with Ender\u2019s Game and the Contact wars. Star Trek was a series, and so we had a character just sort of\u2026 show up.
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\nOkay, pause. I don\u2019t actually need to get around to writing some major conflict driven novel from the get go. It\u2019s tempting to go, oh yeah, this is my first novel, all done! But it would be much, much more sensible to write short stories. And short stories can be \u201cstar trek like\u201d, or anime like \u2013 they don\u2019t need to follow some epic existential risk type scenario; they can be filler episodes. And yeah maybe I should think about this like I\u2019m writing for a TV show, or a weekly Medium series or something like that\u2026 something like Ray Bradbury\u2019s Martian Chronicles maybe? The Callie Chronicles? I don\u2019t have to write everything around these same few characters. But I could start with one for each of them, and then see what crops up in each of those short stories. Or chapters, rather. A book is made up of chapters, and each chapter is supposed to be a near-standalone reading experience.
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\nIt\u2019s very tempting to sort of sit down and write elaborate biographies for each character\u2026 but I\u2019m pretty sure that that would be a bad idea, somehow. Rather I need to think of interesting situations to put them into. What would they be good at? What would they be bad at? What are they happy about, proud of, embarrassed by? And is there a different set of questions I should be asking each character? This is the interesting part where I get to figure out what my process is for making these characters more precise. They\u2019re already sort of \u2018in the ether\u2019, having perhaps coalesced from the source material in my mind. And now I have to get to know them. I might be able to ask one to introduce herself to me, I might have to interrogate another. I might have to spy on one. I might have to chat up another. Each character will probably have a preferred context, a natural element. And it will be interesting to throw them out of it. I should apply the Pixar Storytelling rules \/ filter to come up with something interesting.p<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So what do I know so far. We have Calliope, Talia. A peer of Callie who’s very different from her. And some sort of Tony Stark\/Handsome Jack\/Elon Musk type character, not sure if he’s the big bad. He runs some corporation that’s presumably exploitative… this corporation will probably be a… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[280],"class_list":["post-10432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n