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[breakinglight11]

Wrote a good chunk of a character sheet for one of my larp ideas last night. This character came surprisingly easily to me, and early in the process. Still needs work, of course, but I’m pleased to have a solid start on her. Hopefully others will come as well as this one did.

 

I have now decided that instead of the C-store, I am going to patronize the little grocery on South Street in the strip on the other side of the train tracks. Not only is it a shorter walk from the Village, it is considerably cheaper. I’ll bet it doesn’t run out of simple stuff like milk or peanut butter or apples at night when it’s most convenient for me to pick these things up.

Comments

Re: Speaking of process...

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

No worries, I'm always glad to talk about how I write! Especially fun stuff like larps.

With any kind of writing, I always start with a concept that goes to notes and sketches of ideas. I like to know what I'm going to do before I do it. Character sheets came late in the process for Alice, other than a line or two that I wanted to write down before I forgot them, so I was surprised that I was able to write a good chunk of a character sheet at this very early stage. The notes I write mostly consist of what the characters are like, what they might be doing, who is connected to who, and what plots might they follow.

In Alice, the characters all came first, mostly because I knew I wanted to have a character representing each of the major book characters, but that may not always be the case. It often made it hard to figure out what they were going to be doing when they existed before their plot. Sometimes it's easier to have a plot and then figure out who can be involved in it-- like, I knew I wanted to have a drug deal plot, and from there I decided who I wanted to be my drug dealer. But other times, the nature of the character suggests the plot, such as the White Rabbit's personality saying he should have his hand in absolutely everything, or the Jabberwock's desire to get the sword out of circulation. :-)

Research happened mostly early on-- it gave me lots of my ideas! I found it was much easier to figure out plots when I discovered what the background material inspired me to do. For example, (Alice spoiler here) the cut pages came directly from an adaptation of something in Carroll's biography, and the idea of Tweedledee stealing something from Tweedledum came from the source material, in which the former stealing the latter's "nice new rattle" leads them to fight with each other. But I still would do research throughout, if I became curious about something during the course of the work.

Hope that helps!