...or characterisation, depending where you're from...
[As it so happens, this answers the question of 'how did you get started in writing', which is the first of the 100-days-of-writing questions... I'm not forcing myself to conform to that, but still -- it's nice when things line up.]
--
Anyway... I was asked to explain the way I chose my characters the other day... specifically, how I decided which characters to make represent people in my actual life... and that is going to take some explaining. Here's the backstory:
In the region of 2015/2016 I started writing Dragon Age fanfiction. It was predicated on the way I loved those games and the way my life was in shambles at the time. Shambles is probably sort of dramatic...I wasn't happy -- let's say it like that. (I'm going to write a whole entry on drama soon; it's a draft at present.) I was going through a transitional period, professionally and personally, and it was a time when I was forced to look at myself critically because I didn't handle most of it very well.
Since, like I mentioned in my previous entry, I have had narration as a feature of my life as long as I can remember, I decided one day to try to put the events of that period into the format of a story. I did this on a plane from Chicago to Boston, with a nosey lady looking over my shoulder the whole time, and found, immediately, that it was too exposing to use my real name, my real shape, my real attributes... the whole thing fell apart...
I'll never know if it was because of the nosy lady, but if it was, I owe her a debt of gratitude, because she helped me stumble onto something that would change my whole life. I decided to try again... to write it all down from an outside perspective -- to understand it... but this time, I made myself someone I'm not. In fact, the character I chose to represent me is Alistair. If you know the games and you know me, you might think this is a weird pairing... which (finally) brings me back to the original question I set out to answer today...
Why did I pick him to be me?
Although Alistair is, on the surface, this kind of bumbling person, who likes cheese and eschews responsibility, I've never seen him that way. I've seen him as a person who has grown up with a weight of responsibility on him... with familial pressure... and a person who -- depending on your choices through the game -- eventually decides which responsibilities he's willing to take on and which ones he isn't. That was the kind of decision-making help I needed.
From there, I chose Cullen to represent my nemesis-turned-loved-interest because I have always had the feeling that their younger lives might have been vaguely antagonistic. A young Alistair (a young me) held a torch while Cullen impressed him with his determination, his intelligence... and even with his tacit cruelty. There is something compelling about someone who is too-cool-for-school, as they say -- that's the feeling that my real life person and Cullen both gave me... and probably the reason that everything in my stories and in my life had become to difficult to deal with by that point.
Beyond that, I had a whole cast of characters picked out and the writing just started. Over the course of 2016, I published 254,021 words of fiction and wrote countless more. The most important thing about that year, though, was that I realized I'm a good story-teller and that not everything has to be autobiography, but sometimes this form of art therapy is exactly what I need. I did figure it out, by the way -- the life-in-shambles scenario... and I didn't do it only with writing, but the writing helped.
The only outlier to this whole matching program was Anders. I wrote him into all my stories, but he was no one I knew. I made him the ideal love interest for Alistair -- the best person he knows. He was hope personified, but I had no expectation that I'd ever actually meet him. He was, quite literally, my dream partner.
...but eventually, I found my Anders... in the last place I would ever think to look...
[that's another story]
[As it so happens, this answers the question of 'how did you get started in writing', which is the first of the 100-days-of-writing questions... I'm not forcing myself to conform to that, but still -- it's nice when things line up.]
--
Anyway... I was asked to explain the way I chose my characters the other day... specifically, how I decided which characters to make represent people in my actual life... and that is going to take some explaining. Here's the backstory:
In the region of 2015/2016 I started writing Dragon Age fanfiction. It was predicated on the way I loved those games and the way my life was in shambles at the time. Shambles is probably sort of dramatic...I wasn't happy -- let's say it like that. (I'm going to write a whole entry on drama soon; it's a draft at present.) I was going through a transitional period, professionally and personally, and it was a time when I was forced to look at myself critically because I didn't handle most of it very well.
Since, like I mentioned in my previous entry, I have had narration as a feature of my life as long as I can remember, I decided one day to try to put the events of that period into the format of a story. I did this on a plane from Chicago to Boston, with a nosey lady looking over my shoulder the whole time, and found, immediately, that it was too exposing to use my real name, my real shape, my real attributes... the whole thing fell apart...
I'll never know if it was because of the nosy lady, but if it was, I owe her a debt of gratitude, because she helped me stumble onto something that would change my whole life. I decided to try again... to write it all down from an outside perspective -- to understand it... but this time, I made myself someone I'm not. In fact, the character I chose to represent me is Alistair. If you know the games and you know me, you might think this is a weird pairing... which (finally) brings me back to the original question I set out to answer today...
Why did I pick him to be me?
Although Alistair is, on the surface, this kind of bumbling person, who likes cheese and eschews responsibility, I've never seen him that way. I've seen him as a person who has grown up with a weight of responsibility on him... with familial pressure... and a person who -- depending on your choices through the game -- eventually decides which responsibilities he's willing to take on and which ones he isn't. That was the kind of decision-making help I needed.
From there, I chose Cullen to represent my nemesis-turned-loved-interest because I have always had the feeling that their younger lives might have been vaguely antagonistic. A young Alistair (a young me) held a torch while Cullen impressed him with his determination, his intelligence... and even with his tacit cruelty. There is something compelling about someone who is too-cool-for-school, as they say -- that's the feeling that my real life person and Cullen both gave me... and probably the reason that everything in my stories and in my life had become to difficult to deal with by that point.
Beyond that, I had a whole cast of characters picked out and the writing just started. Over the course of 2016, I published 254,021 words of fiction and wrote countless more. The most important thing about that year, though, was that I realized I'm a good story-teller and that not everything has to be autobiography, but sometimes this form of art therapy is exactly what I need. I did figure it out, by the way -- the life-in-shambles scenario... and I didn't do it only with writing, but the writing helped.
The only outlier to this whole matching program was Anders. I wrote him into all my stories, but he was no one I knew. I made him the ideal love interest for Alistair -- the best person he knows. He was hope personified, but I had no expectation that I'd ever actually meet him. He was, quite literally, my dream partner.
...but eventually, I found my Anders... in the last place I would ever think to look...
[that's another story]
—
until next time.