stories for six
Aug. 22nd, 2022 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliCaroline Furlong has some sage advice here:
And why, yes, those sweet, bell-like peals of laughter are my muse's. She's not calmed by the later "ninety percent of the time."
Yes, on my current work in progress, the main character is intact, and I'm still working out the details of his powers from the broad outlines of "good for attack, and extremely dangerous." But I've done the opposite, worked on a story where I knew the heroine's extremely nasty power, albeit in generalities, and nothing more of the heroine than that she was a nice girl. (Why? Because someone had snidely said of a superheroine that she was upset over doing something because nice girls don't do it. And I said, very true, they do not, and put the words into a villainess's mouth.) I had to put some flourishes and fillips on the heroine's powers to file off the serial numbers while creating a character to have a life before she got hit by her powers, and would do the deeds that would get her into the situation and do the deed accidentally. What happened after developed from that. Fortunately, I did not have consider "Who would find these powers deeply significant?" since that was inherent. Since I fed it into an idea about powers that appear randomly regardless of your personality, I didn't have to worry that the power did not fit her personality. (Mismatches can be fun! Though it did force me to use random generators for a supply for secondary characters, because humans don't think randomly.)
I am also doing the opposite in the work in progress. Yes, I defined the hero. But there's a situation where there are some youngsters. Also with powers. One had to have the power to tell that he was in trouble. (Because of them actually.) Another had to rescue him from other people with powers. Others existed, basically, to be rescued but that they had powers was integral to the story. I arbitrarily decided that they would be six, threw powers at them until it pleased me to stop, and then worked on their characters. Fortunately, in this world, powers are inherently fitting to a personality type. Of course, that meant I had to orchestrate their powers to produce six characters who varied, but I knew that I wanted them different in advance. Even as powersets.
Then I decided that there had to be six different reasons for the youngsters' families to say that they could stay with him. So six characters who were originally nothing more than plot devices to get him into and out of trouble need backstories. . . .
Thus it is this author’s belief that extraordinary abilities and their limitations are best considered after a writer has conceived of a character. Or, if possible, he ought to create them simultaneously.
And why, yes, those sweet, bell-like peals of laughter are my muse's. She's not calmed by the later "ninety percent of the time."
Yes, on my current work in progress, the main character is intact, and I'm still working out the details of his powers from the broad outlines of "good for attack, and extremely dangerous." But I've done the opposite, worked on a story where I knew the heroine's extremely nasty power, albeit in generalities, and nothing more of the heroine than that she was a nice girl. (Why? Because someone had snidely said of a superheroine that she was upset over doing something because nice girls don't do it. And I said, very true, they do not, and put the words into a villainess's mouth.) I had to put some flourishes and fillips on the heroine's powers to file off the serial numbers while creating a character to have a life before she got hit by her powers, and would do the deeds that would get her into the situation and do the deed accidentally. What happened after developed from that. Fortunately, I did not have consider "Who would find these powers deeply significant?" since that was inherent. Since I fed it into an idea about powers that appear randomly regardless of your personality, I didn't have to worry that the power did not fit her personality. (Mismatches can be fun! Though it did force me to use random generators for a supply for secondary characters, because humans don't think randomly.)
I am also doing the opposite in the work in progress. Yes, I defined the hero. But there's a situation where there are some youngsters. Also with powers. One had to have the power to tell that he was in trouble. (Because of them actually.) Another had to rescue him from other people with powers. Others existed, basically, to be rescued but that they had powers was integral to the story. I arbitrarily decided that they would be six, threw powers at them until it pleased me to stop, and then worked on their characters. Fortunately, in this world, powers are inherently fitting to a personality type. Of course, that meant I had to orchestrate their powers to produce six characters who varied, but I knew that I wanted them different in advance. Even as powersets.
Then I decided that there had to be six different reasons for the youngsters' families to say that they could stay with him. So six characters who were originally nothing more than plot devices to get him into and out of trouble need backstories. . . .