I've been putting a lot of thought into character development lately: just what it is that makes a protagonist leave a meaningful impact on a player and what allows us to identify with fictional people around us. I feel like one trap that would be easy to fall into at this point is to focus so much on the world and general story around the characters that the plot drives the people in it, rather than the other way around. I can invest a lot of time into making a great story to the exclusion of all else, but down this route everything just starts to become really boring really quickly.
I'm rather fortunate in that Geoshie is a primarily character driven story. Most of the plot will be told in first person view, read through diary entries. That lends itself to character identification quite well, but it also lends itself to a lot of character scrutiny. Making believable protagonists with complex personalities becomes really important.
When you sit down to make a character, it isn't enough to say, "what is this character about?" because it makes your people too shallow. People in the real world aren't one sided; they contradict themselves, they balance themselves out with both profound and absurd beliefs, and they see themselves not as the embodiment of a trait or goal, but as an individual in progress towards that goal(s) or trait(s). Fictional characters should be the same way.
What I've been trying to do as I get a feel for the mannerisms and feelings of Geoshie's main cast is to start them off at a basic level and follow how they would have developed as they grew and matured in their beliefs. Rather than just labeling a character as representing or embodying something, I want to know why a character would have become they way they are now and how close they are to completely embodying that trait. Worldviews lead to worldviews, so I've tried to follow each idea I give them as far as I can to find out what the logical ending position for a person would actually be.
How do beliefs alter behavior, and how does behavior alter belief?
And again, the idea isn't to sit down and write a religion from scratch. It's to make one in the same way that you would build a character, starting with basic theories and building off of them.
One of the most interesting things for me to mentally simulate here was how the religions have affected each other. If you could stick two dominant religions in one room, two mutually exclusive religions, and lock the door - how would they grow? My theory was that they'd develop 'flavors' of beliefs that patterned away from each other. Core beliefs wouldn't be enough to differentiate between the two; we like dichotomies more than intricacies in conflict. There would be new theories proposed, first as grey areas or subjects of interpretation, and then over a few years both sides would turn them into official doctrines.
Using this as a set of heuristics, I've been sitting down and outlining core beliefs for each religion, then basically throwing them at the other religion to see what it has a problem with and how it would respond to it. Then I go back to the first religion and form some type of follow-up response. It can get really beautifully chaotic really quickly as the two ideologies start to back each other up into walls. You get taboo topics that neither side wants to talk about, and beliefs that are used primarily to outline which side you're showing allegiance to at any given moment, and misunderstandings that each religion has about the other, and then of course, new doctrine gets built on top of all of that.
It's a wonderfully layered approach to building a world, and it fits in perfectly with how I want all of Geoshie to feel: big, complicated, and deep. As you dissect one element of the world, you run into the underlying parts that caused it to be the way it currently is. Deconstructing the world can leave you with more questions than you started with, and I love that.
On top of that, I've been trying to add a lot of what I guess I would refer to as 'noise'. To draw examples from characters again, it's important to remember that people in the real world aren't all that focused or logical. To a small extent, you want your fictional people to be more interesting and deconstructable than the people around you, but there is a danger of turning characters into archetypes; and I don't really like archetypes all that much. You can make these people more realistic by layering character traits on top of their personalities: a set of favorite words, a strong opinion about a minor subject, etc... I think a large part of making compelling characters (and world development in general) is striking a balance between too much noise or not enough of it.
Of course it's still to be seen whether or not I'm actually any good at any of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment