A couple of days ago, I tweeted the following:
Huh. Was going to develop characters when they practically sprang from my head with relationships between them and everything. #amwriting
— Shauna Kosoris (@ShaunaKosoris) April 23, 2015
What happened was that I decided to work on my StoryNexus project a bit prior to #WriteFriday. My plan was to sit down and build the three main non-playable characters (NPCs) for my game. And as I sat down to do so, I realized that two of the three characters had pretty much become their own entities. They honestly did have a relationship between them, and there were ties to the third character as well (who was not as defined).
So yesterday during #WriteFriday, I was thinking I would do what I termed some “game design-y” work. I was hoping that I had a good enough handle on things that i could start laying the groundwork for the actual game.
That didn’t quite work out though. My basic plan is to have the three characters who are each heading up one of the three factions. I came up with three preliminary stats, one to coincide with each of the three factions (I say preliminary because one doesn’t seem quite right, but it’ll do to help me get started designing and writing this game). But then I decided that I really should name my characters and factions.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that naming things is not a strong point of mine. I can come up with a great character, but it takes me FOREVER to come up with the perfect name for them. So when I decided to name all three characters AND all three factions last night, I should have known that probably wouldn’t be happening. But I did luck out and manage to name all three characters.
Hilariously, in doing so, the “relationship” between two of my characters managed to morph again. When it did, it actually made naming those two somewhat easier because rather than being lovers, they were siblings. I say somewhat because now I only needed one last name. Of course, that one last name needed to fit both characters.
With those two characters suddenly being siblings, a lot of other things (in their back stories) kind of fell into place. I knew where they were living. I knew exactly what had happened between them . And I knew how the third character fit in with them. So all in all, yesterday was a very good #WriteFriday.
The next thing I’ll have to do is actually name the factions. It’s not much fun calling them “Faction A,” “Faction B” and “Faction C.”
An Acquaintance with Letters 