[ SECRET POST #2763 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2763 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.













Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 060 secrets from Secret Submission Post #394.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Creator's Attitudes Toward Their Creations

[(Anonymous)]

People talk about how their characters just come to them fully-formed and claim that my way of building them from the bottom up is mechanical and dull.

Out of curiosity, do they change as you go? I don't necessarily mean in the sense of internal character development, but in the sense that your conception of them changes. Do you build the character to form first, and then set the story in motion, or do you start with a vaguer idea and see how the character and the plot change each other once you get going?

I ask because I'm primarily the latter. I start out with a situation I want to see, pick out a few character roles/types to fill the starter plot, and then start filling things in as I go. Sometimes (or even most of the time), this results in characters wildly diverging from their initial conception, disappearing, being divided into multiple characters, or randomly switching roles with other characters. I made one character up on the spot a third of the way into the story to fill a suddenly apparent gap in the cast, and they subsequently ended up in control of huge swathes of the plot and retroactively responsible for several key events, while also changing gender twice and ending up in one of the sole romantic plots in the story.

I'm always slightly confused when people talk about characters 'springing fully formed' versus characters being systematically built, because I don't think I'm either? The characters evolve too wildly to be fully formed, but I'm not exactly building them either so much as throwing vague roles into the plot and seeing what they end up as.

Re: Creator's Attitudes Toward Their Creations

[sarillia]

I feel like I take a slightly more definite role in the process than you but mostly we seem to be on the same page. They definitely change and surprise me sometimes, but it tends to be the subtler aspects of their personality that changes most. The basic facts about them tend to stay the same.

Re: Creator's Attitudes Toward Their Creations

[(Anonymous)]

Ah. I think part of the reason I might have more basic divergence is because I don't usually have an actual physical concept of my characters until fairly late in the game? It's their roles they're defined as primarily, while things like names, gender, race and occasionally species are filled in later down the line. Personalities actually usually stick harder than other attributes, although they take on different facades and contexts once the other details come in.

I actually tend to retroactively fill in massive world-building details based on what the world would need to do to allow a character of a late-decided race/gender/species to fill the role I've had them in from the beginning. In one case, that completely opened up an entire plot, because a law change in the backstory to delineate a chosen heir rather than a patrilineal blood heir (to allow a female warlord to take her father's lordship instead of her less powerful/sane brothers) allowed me to grant a kingship to an adopted rather than blood heir as well, which gave me a lot more openings during the succession crisis and meant I could have one completely separate (male) character openly take the regency rather than having to try and work behind the scenes. None of this was even remotely in my head when I put the law switch in the backstory, that was all purely so I could establish a precedent for several of the borderlords, and also establish that particular lordship as having an alarming amount of influence over the crown.

As another interesting effect, it also rendered one pair of characters' tragic backstory as a completely military/political issue rather than an issue of heredity, which did cause some interesting changes in their personalities and the longterm nature of their goals.

As I said, this is probably the main reason things shift so wildly in my stories. Single changes tend to snowball, sometimes massively, and mostly because I don't generally physically imagine my characters until relatively late in the game.

Re: Creator's Attitudes Toward Their Creations

[sarillia]

That's interesting. We seem to be exact opposites. I do discover some of the world-building along the way but I also tend to work on that in the beginning along with the things like gender and race that you said tend to come later for you. I like to figure out in the beginning how patriarchal the society is (if at all) and how isolated or multicultural it is and things like that because it will influence the character differently depending on the other choices I've made about their background.

Re: Creator's Attitudes Toward Their Creations

[(Anonymous)]

I do tend to draw up some broadstrokes worldbuilding first. For example, in the story I mentioned, while gender was a late gamechanger, species was fixed almost immediately because it defined a massive section of the overall political situation, which was what was driving the intial starter plot. I don't think any character in it changed species (there are two dominant ones, with political subdivisions within them) anywhere along the line. The starter plot and its requirements tend to drive most character considerations, although once I've started defining characters more, the plot itself also starts shifting.

It ends up that I usually don't start the actual writing phase until I've gone through about four or five divergent iterations of the story, and in some cases the story diverged enough that I've gotten two completely different stories out of the same starter plot as a result of throwing different characters into it.

I sometimes wonder if any two writers ever write the same way, or if it's all just a myth and everyone muddles along at their own pace/in their own style regardless.

Re: Creator's Attitudes Toward Their Creations

[sarillia]

I tend to think we're all different and that's a wonderful thing. I'm always fascinated by accounts of how other writers do it.

Personally I tend to dive right in to the writing part once I have the basics down and figure things out as I go rather than doing the different iterations before writing that you do. I do this though: and in some cases the story diverged enough that I've gotten two completely different stories out of the same starter plot as a result of throwing different characters into it. That's always fun.