I want to explain something about the story in my head, particularly the adult characters within it. I usually describe the story as something like "well, it's like me and a bunch of my friends and our kids with kick-ass magical powers in a fantasy world with all sorts of creatures and stuff." I want to make clear that the characters are really only vaguely based off of people I know, and as the characters have developed, some of them have diverged quite a bit from what I thought they would be.
John Green says that in order to understand someone we have to imagine them complexly. I have part of that in the story when one of the minstrels is talking about how he finds stories - he talks about how he has to change the descriptions of people to fit what people want, and also about how many versions of the same person might be featured in several different stories, each story portraying them in a different light, but no story being completely honest about who the person really is. You see, really it's impossible that I could portray any of my friends accurately in a story especially when I'm not that great of a writer. As I meet people and get to know them, I develop an idea of what they're like, a kind of mental projection of their personality. However, this projection is usually flawed somewhat, imperfect and incomplete. Not that it's bad, I just don't usually see the whole picture. These pictures got extrapolated and transformed into the basic forms that the characters started off as. But as the story develops, the character details grow and diverge from that original basic form. At this point, I feel that I need to find names for all the characters ASAP, as I'm no longer comfortable calling the characters by the name of the person they may have vaguely resembled at one time. It used to be difficult to try to call a similar mental image by a different name, but now that the characters have diverged from the people, it's easy.
And the kids? The kids are all their own deal, though some of those kick-ass magical powers I mentioned earlier are similar to those of their parents. :)
Now if only I could come up with last names...
About Me
- Diana
- I'm currently a first-year graduate student at UMass Amherst in Polymer Science and Engineering (PSE). I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2011 with a B.S.E. in Materials Science and Engineering. ("cum laude" which means "You did better than we expected you to, but not as well as all your classmates you studied with that are going on to bigger and better things. You know, the ones that helped you along.") My main interests lie in a strange grey area between materials, chemistry, and biology. Optimally I'd like to wind up in a lab researching biodegradable polymers so there's not as much trash piling up everywhere. In the summer of 2010, I was in Carlsbad, NM for an internship with Sandia National Laboratories, and enjoyed taking hundreds of pictures of my adventures.
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