You'll go blind
I've been roleplaying quite a bit for the past... er, well, thirteen years. But my involvement with and the nature of Harry Potter roleplaying fandom has meant that in the past six or so years, I've done a lot of hopping into and out of games - there have been a few long-running campaigns that have been wonderful, just great adventures in group storytelling, but in general, the area as a whole is characterised by the way games coalesce and disintegrate, and people drift hither and yon. This means lots of creation of new characters, adaptation of existing or previous ones, and - even if you're not the one doing the moving about - reconsideration of storylines for your characters as others come and go.
It needs flexibility, but it can be its own sort of exciting, as an important element of your character alters, and new possibilities and interpretations open up. I have had so many conversations with people that go along the lines of, "Well, they could be friends, or they could be enemies, or they could be past or future lovers, or they could be complicated frenemies who are engaged in an ongoing potions duel but go for smoothies. I know how each of these is made possible through my character's history and personality, but I don't know which I like better."
Emphasis added, because that's the point here. There are so many options, and once you've been RPing for a while, you play a whole range of different sorts of storylines (well, you do if you're actually doing it right - whole different rant) and you come to realise that every option - every option - has its own varieties of delightful and delicious to explore. And this is the problem I'm finding. I can see the wonder and opportunities that lie down every branching of the path. It's fine when you're in a game with other people - you wrangle and negotiate and brainstorm and come up with a way that's maximum fun for everyone involved.
But when I'm writing prose, it's just me standing at the fork in the road, looking into multiple distances that all look equally splendid and not taking a fucking step because I can't make a bloody decision. RPing, you have broken my certainty of the singularity of story.
In the particular case that has made me finally realise I have this problem, I'm toying with a new story idea. (Not to abandon my current work for, but to scribble down as notes in the margin and return to later - especially with full-time work, I find I often have more dreaming than writing time, and if I just dream on one project I get too behind and tangled.) Except that I can't even bloody decide the genders of my main characters, which makes it hard to build anything resembling specifics of story (because story should spring from character in conflict and the conflict of character with society most often hinges around gender and expectations).
Here is what I know about the story: Character Y and Character Z (why should A and B get all the fun?) are young siblings, each starting to step into the adult world. Y is younger, our main protagonist, and most passionately interested in dancing. Z is older, a combination of foil and red-herring and villain, and just starting serious training in music (probably violin, since that's what prompted the story and what I used to play, but I did take a lot of pictures of lunatic instruments in Brussels, so maybe not). In the course of the story, Y will dance along/over a mosaic in the ballroom of a ruin, and wrench open the capacity for magic within (yes, I did like Amber, what of it?) and Z will begin to unearth ancient and wild magic buried within music. Y will be (forcibly) recruited by the waning magicians guild and trained in patterned, controlled magic, and this is where the villain aspect of Z comes in, as a user of wild magic. There is a lot more story wrapped around and culminating from this, but that is what I know.
What genders are they? Some steps/considerations I've been over:
Originally posted on Dreamwidth
It needs flexibility, but it can be its own sort of exciting, as an important element of your character alters, and new possibilities and interpretations open up. I have had so many conversations with people that go along the lines of, "Well, they could be friends, or they could be enemies, or they could be past or future lovers, or they could be complicated frenemies who are engaged in an ongoing potions duel but go for smoothies. I know how each of these is made possible through my character's history and personality, but I don't know which I like better."
Emphasis added, because that's the point here. There are so many options, and once you've been RPing for a while, you play a whole range of different sorts of storylines (well, you do if you're actually doing it right - whole different rant) and you come to realise that every option - every option - has its own varieties of delightful and delicious to explore. And this is the problem I'm finding. I can see the wonder and opportunities that lie down every branching of the path. It's fine when you're in a game with other people - you wrangle and negotiate and brainstorm and come up with a way that's maximum fun for everyone involved.
But when I'm writing prose, it's just me standing at the fork in the road, looking into multiple distances that all look equally splendid and not taking a fucking step because I can't make a bloody decision. RPing, you have broken my certainty of the singularity of story.
In the particular case that has made me finally realise I have this problem, I'm toying with a new story idea. (Not to abandon my current work for, but to scribble down as notes in the margin and return to later - especially with full-time work, I find I often have more dreaming than writing time, and if I just dream on one project I get too behind and tangled.) Except that I can't even bloody decide the genders of my main characters, which makes it hard to build anything resembling specifics of story (because story should spring from character in conflict and the conflict of character with society most often hinges around gender and expectations).
Here is what I know about the story: Character Y and Character Z (why should A and B get all the fun?) are young siblings, each starting to step into the adult world. Y is younger, our main protagonist, and most passionately interested in dancing. Z is older, a combination of foil and red-herring and villain, and just starting serious training in music (probably violin, since that's what prompted the story and what I used to play, but I did take a lot of pictures of lunatic instruments in Brussels, so maybe not). In the course of the story, Y will dance along/over a mosaic in the ballroom of a ruin, and wrench open the capacity for magic within (yes, I did like Amber, what of it?) and Z will begin to unearth ancient and wild magic buried within music. Y will be (forcibly) recruited by the waning magicians guild and trained in patterned, controlled magic, and this is where the villain aspect of Z comes in, as a user of wild magic. There is a lot more story wrapped around and culminating from this, but that is what I know.
What genders are they? Some steps/considerations I've been over:
- When I first daydreamed the kernel of this story, Y and Z were sisters. This has the 'tighter bond' (quotes because I don't necessarily believe that) and the ability to highlight their similarities and juxtapose their divergences more dramatically because of it. Z can be such a strong role model and heroine to Y, which feeds their drama when they start facing off.
- But can't that be the case even if Z is male? The brother/sister relationship can be just as close (even without incestual overtones, and it can be done) or even more so for the power of Z not being a 'second-mother'. (Good point: if I go with sisters, might their mother need to be dead or absent to give the requisite strength?) And this gives me the chance to play on gender politics or conflict - though Y is the dancer and Z the musician, she is the patterned/mannered/reasoned magic user, and Z the 'natural'.
- But what if Y isn't female? I mean, it's far more common for a female author to write a female protagonist (though Tim Pratt has given me a jolt of "yeah, why not?" on that this week) and there's the being-a-dancer thing - though now that I'm considering it, I could really have fun with a world where the performing arts have become so important/popular (through fashion or religion or religious fashion) that families give their children to them. (Also, I think there will be a love interest with a more-experienced magician, and that could either be gay, or an older woman, both of which ideas please me... dammit, another decision! Though I feel like Y having a love-interest of the same gender as the important older sibling really ups the ambiant possibility of incestual tension, which seems strange when I didn't feel that when Y was female, but there it is.)
- So, male!Y and female!Z? Now we're back in a more standard gender model as far as the concepts of their magic use go - Z is intuitive! Y tames it through study! - which doesn't necessarily have to be boring. The girl being older gives us that nice traditional tension of "she's older but he's the heir" that's always good fun. Also, she gets a air of mystery through being older than him that feeds into the 'wild music magic' trope nicely.
- Male!Y and male!Z. Total sausage-festival, leaving at this point only antagonistic (including love-interest) and supporting roles for women. Not particularly interested, here for completeness.
Originally posted on Dreamwidth