Essay – Creating Pale

This writeup is mainly an answer to questions I’ve had about workflow, brainstorming, character creation, and the ideas that went into Pale.  I’m worried it’ll be a bit disorganized, but I’m a bit disorganized, so maybe that’s valid.

When I approach a new work, there’s a bit of a process that gets me to the starting line.  I’ve talked about some of this elsewhere, so I’ll be brief in framing it so I can talk more about the could-have-beens of Pale and how I approach putting it together, which is something I’ve been asked about a fair bit.

The adage given to writers is that you should try to write the book on the bookshelf that hasn’t been written yet, and the way I tend to find my way there is through negatives.  When I read a lot in a genre I like, I’ll start feeling an inspiration borne of frustration.  Things I wanted to see that didn’t pan out, or frustrations with common tropes.

Comics were a big case of this, because in the days I used to read runs of comics, I’d get frustrated at how they’d handle storylines, handle female characters, and go to boring standbys with powers – even today, if you watch The Boys, Gen V, Invincible, how often do invincibility and super strength come up?    I didn’t feel the great crises that required people to band together were given the weight they deserved.  I basically gave up on comics after several characters (all female, as it happens) had their character arcs pitched into the trash bin.  They were tortured to death, had their character arc turn out to be brainwashing, or they got handed off to writers who clearly didn’t like them and wrote them off.

Which is what led to me writing Worm.

And, on a level, I’ve always been a fast reader who felt normal books ended before I got invested.  I wanted something substantial and short of finding a good series, I wanted more, so I had that push to create that.

A big piece of why I tend to write longer works.

All of that tends to pull me towards certain genres, and I’ll explore in those genres, floating ideas for a long time, waiting for what I call the ‘click’.  That twist, scene, or idea that brings it home.  For Worm, it was thinking “They say write what you know, what if I drew on my experience being bullied in middle/high school?” – from there, I felt pieces fall into place, about power and use of power, institutions, and where I could take the story.  Once that happened, it flowed.

For Twig, it was looking at the hit squads of evil empires in stories, thinking about creepy children in media and how fun they could be, pulling those together, and knitting them into the world I’d written out a year prior, in the sample chapters for Boil, when I trialed stories between Worm and Pact.  It was a bunch of characters I wanted to write, suddenly given an avenue to explore.

For Ward, it was the scene with the window at the end of the first arc, and the implications of that, and how that ties to the greater text, the message for Ward, etc.

For Pale, it came from thinking about writing a police procedural as a more formulaic genre to limit sprawl, and then thinking about the Others and having them be the overarching structure that defined and constrained the investigation.

I recently had that ‘click’ with the sci-fi story I’ve talked about before, and have been experimenting with drafts.  Mainly that I’d like to do multi-perspective again (like I did with the trio), and I’d like to do xenofiction, and I had ideas floating around, but I couldn’t knit them together until I realized I could do it by writing a very different sort of multi-perspective story.  I’ve been waiting for that click for a while.

Often, the click is tied to my motivation.  When writing, motivation is a really bad way of keeping a story alive, because motivation will wax and wane and if that’s the fuel you have in your engine, then when it wanes you’ll hit a steep drop-off and end up stranded.  I see that happening a lot in beginner writer groups and forums.  It’s discipline that keeps you going and discipline that fell apart, that I talked about in my last essay.  It put me in the situation where I had motivation and love what I write but things fell apart regardless.

Motivation does have other uses, though.  It gives you a lot of go to start with, and having a trick or a conceit I want to explore, it sort of encapsulates some motivation and gives it a slow release or a moment later in the story where I know I’ll be deploying it, for another dose of ‘go‘.

Essentially, what’s the twist or conceit that helps me pull this together, that gets me excited?  It hits as a turning point in my involvement with the story that’s so sharp it feels like a switch being flicked.  Click.  The lights start coming on.

As an aside (and I know I have a few nested asides already), I think this is a good case of where, writing something like this helps me to frame my head around these things.  I’ve talked about clicks before but in trying to frame the process by which I approach creating a story, I find myself thinking about the audience.  How the audience will react or be sold on the click is a key factor.

I wonder if, for me personally, the context around which the click was revealed and handled in Ward was a factor in me finding the story such a grind to write for so long- there was an immediate not-great reaction to the protagonist and when we got to that part, it maybe soured some of the reaction.  I got to that point in the first arc and sort of felt like, ‘oh, this will get people more intrigued and be a cool moment that shows why I picked Victoria’ and then a chunk of the audience wasn’t as onboard as I thought.  With the click being tied to motivation, I lost a lot of early steam, which carried into early arcs.

Food for my thoughts, anyway.

Anyway!  Pulling all of this together.  Pale.  When first approaching a new story, I think the initial surge of motivation gets channeled into a lot of exploration.  This is my time to figure out the immediate setting, protagonist, directions, tones.  I can fire off 20 drafts and take those places, and it doesn’t detract from the overall story motivation.

Pale’s click was tied to the fact I like exploring Others, I wanted to do more, I’d dipped my toes into creating new things with Pact Dice, writing up Bestiary guides that get into the particulars of various Others, and I itched to do something there.

In approaching what I planned as a shorter story, the idea was to limit sprawl, and so I chose a genre (police procedural/mystery) and a setting that would constrain that- obviously that didn’t work out, but it framed Kennet as a starting point.

The idea was that I could both explore how Others worked on a day to day level -something I knew audiences had expressed interest in before, from questions I’d had directed at me between Pact and the end of Ward- and interrogate those Others, and maintain an interesting and eclectic cast.

With all that in mind, I wanted and needed to come up with a decent spread of Others.  I started out with a grid like this:

(Astute Pale readers may recognize the categories as many of the same ones I used to frame the Information Packet the trio gets on class options before the BHI stay – Deals, Tools, Visceral, Immaterial, Greater Powers is ‘Divine’)

Then, in trying to come up with Others, it was a challenge of, well, what can I drop in there, that’s interesting?  I came up with something for each heading, that ended up at an intersection of row vs. column heading.  My initial brainstorming notes came down to:

Conflict: Dog Tag?  (I’d already written the Bestiary entry – one of the small handful I’d written at that point.  I’ve now mostly written 25+, and released maybe 15-20.)

Miss – An Other with her face eternally out of view.  Cagey, knowledgeable.  (I think this was intended to be Deals.  I don’t think I even had her pegged as a Lost at first)

Visceral – Louise.  Ordinary human who came close to losing her Innocence (Not sure why I put her here but eh – were I writing this today I’d put the non-Toadswallow goblins here)

Immaterial – Ghost pops up later on?  Would love to do Technomancy.  Think about ideas?  Doppleganger, stealing online identities?  Group identities?

Divine – Galatea-esque statue infused with divine power?   (I’d later conceive of this as an ‘icon’)  Bottom-tier god?  Tutelary spirit, adjusting karmic balances?  Astrology entity, like something alive tied into the protective/karmic diagram around town?

Conjure – Edith/Girl by Candlelight – Kindled/elemental echo riding a suicide attempt, she picked up where the original girl left off.

Prices – Matthew Moss, a host with a spirit in him.  Spirit is the Doom that chased the original Edith James and drove her to suicide.  It still wants her.

Tools – Toadswallow, Cherry, and Munch.  Toadswallow is a professional summon, curtailing his goblin impulses to stay available as a summon for goblin princes and princesses.  He’s training Cherry and Munch.  Toadswallow is his ‘stage name’.  The goblins know a little about a lot of ‘street level’ stuff, run errands, etc.

Realms – Alpeana, Mare.  As a seventh daughter she was forgotten.  She’d crawl into her parent’s bed and that was the only time she was held.  She soothed family when they had nightmares, developed a second sense, and fell into the role.

Interaction – Faerie, Summer and Autumn (Already did Spring in a prior work)

Lore – The Hungry Choir – Exists as a floating notebook/cursed item.  Partial instructions within.  (I’ll skip the 10 paragraphs of explaining the ritual, that is basically what was covered in story).

Protection – Komainu/Lion Dog?  A statue set down as a protective, karma-altering fixture for a practitioner family.  Knows a fair bit about practitioners (biased?) and oni.  Becomes a human with the weight of stone.

Those are my early notes and I think you can see some traces of other characters in some entries, showing how the ideas were in the back of my mind.  When I added the new Kennet Others I drew on a similar template, filling in categories.

I put other elements into play, very loosely sketching out Kennet as a small town (again, I wanted a localized, contained setting with less room to sprawl) that was different from other ones I’ve written, far enough away from outside interference that other practitioners wouldn’t stick their noses into things.  I made it a ski town, smaller population, probably run down.

I scratched out the protection and Divine Others- I didn’t have many ideas, and I felt like Kennet shouldn’t have that protection or divine element- if it was too well run, people would want to move in.  I didn’t have great ideas for the Technomancy Other, I really wanted to include it, but when trying to frame everything, I had a table loaded with things in one column, I felt they got redundant and would make certain characters disappear or not have a distinct voice.

The end result looked like this:

In a way, having a framework for brainstorming is really useful, and the categories and things I’d made for practices and Others were a solid framework – anything can work though.  When trying to make Undersiders distinct, I tried using the color tree from Magic the Gathering – not as something to hold hard and fast to, but to see what ideas it spawns.  When breaking things into loose categories, it can help to see where things overlap and where they don’t, and what the relationships might be.

For example, the rows/columns map out a lot of relationships, or working relationships, like John being in the same column as Guilherme and the goblins, the same row as the Hungry Choir.  Others aren’t used that much in the text, but it’s easier to see where there could be a working relationship or interaction, like Alpeana with Edith (both dealing with echoes and spirits some) or Alpeana and the Hungry Choir (many people having nightmares as a result).

Meanwhile, some people are stranded, like Matthew, and Miss to a lesser degree (not necessarily dealing with Alpeana or Maricica much), and I think that played out in story.  There is some overlapping with a heavier residence of three Others in the Immaterial column (reserved for ghosts and other subtler Others) that, in retrospect, left Alpeana without a role for chunks of the story- she disappears while others take front stage.

This was very loosely sketched out- some details were only changed when I got to chapters the characters got more focus or explanation in.  It was very much a ‘let’s put a pin in this, move on to other areas, and see what comes together’ stage of things.

I like putting pieces on the board and seeing how they act, and sometimes I’ll do that when brainstorming.  Already, even when I was just putting down ideas on what I thought might sound interesting, I could visualize how the local others might interact or relate.  I was ready for the protagonists.

With the protagonists, I tried randomly generating personalities and archetypes (packages of natural strengths/weaknesses) from other brainstorming tables I had from prior works & making games.  So I generated the following:

Which, though one or two spots might have been nudged here or there, gives you a sense of the three characters.  Take your guesses if you want.

That’s right, it’s [Zed, Jeremy, and Melissa.] (highlight to read- will appear further down for those who can’t easily highlight)

In the initial attempt at sketching things out, randomly generating entries, I don’t think there’s any point of the process which isn’t valuable on some level.  I can generate some results, see what turns up, see if it sparks anything, and even if I decide against the end result, it’s still a character I’ve outlined that I can use elsewhere.

When hashing out a character from these basic notes, I’ll use what I call the Snowman method- three related spheres in which I’ll work out the possibilities:

•  Background – (Past) – Where the character comes from, their demographics, family, touchstone moments (like the islands in Inside Out, for those who’ve watched that) that they keep going back to, the foundations of who they are.
• Lens –  (Present) – How they view the world, how they interact with it?  What do they prioritize or focus on first, given the choice?  The personalities I generated help brainstorm this up.
• Goals – (Future) – What do they want, what do they need?  Those are two very different things.  It also includes the short term and the long term, major obstacles to overcome (or not overcome).

So in trying to tackle, say, Melissa, I think the context I was dropping her into is wanting to do a high school environment where the bullying isn’t overt, where cliques work differently.  When I wrote Worm, I based a lot of it on what I experienced in high school- but I went to grade/high school in the 90s, pretty much.  Keeping in mind that Canada tended to run a bit behind America in trends, so maybe a bit late 80s, for many readers.  I remember classmates saying you were either a jock, a nerd, a geek, or a ‘spaz’, and I remember that feeling like it was very much the case as far as what people were pushed into.  That was my experience and it informed Taylor’s.

Here, I was thinking about the Dancers, and blurry clique groups, and trying to figure out what applies.  Say she’s a Dancer, but she maybe pushes people away and is sometimes self centered.  What if she’s, owing to her better-than-average athleticism, grace, etc, a decent dancer, cheerleader, but she gets hurt?  Then even in a welcoming class, there’s a huge chunk of the girls who are into this thing, she was into it, and then she falls out and it hurts.  Even when there’s no classical bullying, there are still those left on the sidelines.

I can then map her out, in that snowman outline, where background is the fat bottom end of the snowman upon which everything else is built, I can start filling out other parts of her perspective using a few starting points (natural strengths and weaknesses, tilt of personality) – what does her family need to be for this to really work?  Probably below middle class.  Can I do anything interesting with family or demographics?

What if Melissa, initially a promising dancer that’s in the in-clique who falls out due to injury, is the one black kid in class?  There are biases around black people and athleticism and it could make the fall and exclusion that much harder.

What if she’s indigenous and dance isn’t just something her classmates value, but something her family values.  The jingle dance is something the Ojibwe of the Minnesota-Ontario area use to help heal… but when dance is so tied to the very thing that hurt her?  And her personality has her push things away?  That could be an interesting avenue.

Whenever stalled in one area, you can move to another- stalled on background?  Look at perspective- how does she act out?  What is she looking for, what tone does she take with herself?  What if because of that self-focused nature, she finds her way to Heartless practices under Matthew?  What would drive her to that?  What would it look like?  Drugs and becoming a Hyde?

In thinking about family, I like to take aspects of a character and split them up- so if half of Melissa’s traits come from her mom and half come from her dad, what does that look like?  If her dad is self centered, maybe he’s away at work a lot, while if her mom has the other chunk of Melissa’s personality, maybe it’s being really inconsistent and pushing her away when mad at her?  (We see a bit of this in story, as it happens)  From there, it’s possible to circle around and look at the other points again – does Melissa want a connection with her dad as a goal?  What does that look like?

I like the approach of focusing on these areas a lot more than I like the long lists that you’ll see on some writers forums.  (“What dessert does your character like?”  “What’s their favorite subject in school?”)   I think, if the spheres are interlinked, and throughlines are drawn from background through perspective and out to goals, it leads to more organic characters.  There should be an underlying logic.

In outlining Zed and Jeremy, I touched more on the backstory Zed describes.  Being someone else online and then ending up in an awkward situation where he needed rescuing, probably from an Other.  I sketched out someone with a good heart and a good brain who wants connection and to fit in but couldn’t get there, and found himself on the sidelines. Then you have the slightly socially awkward Jeremy who has ambitions and some skill, maybe with computers, but maybe not the know-how.

In trying to build out the elements of the outline that might lead to them being on the sidelines, I considered things that lead to people being othered and, trying to think about what would do that in this day and age, in that class situation, I thought about problematic parents (maybe bad reputations?), being trans, for Zed, mistakes in the past, etc.

It was around this time, though, that I was sketching them out and I felt like Zed and Jeremy were too similar in many respects, while I couldn’t see how Melissa would connect to them in the long term.  I looked at the local Others (some of whom I was already starting to try to picture or consider the ‘snowman’ for) and I didn’t see anything major jumping out at me- maybe Jeremy and Alpeana?  If I had a better idea for a technomancy Other, I could’ve done that.  But I didn’t.

I tried writing out an early draft, but it didn’t get far.  I didn’t feel the chemistry.

But, again, I had the steam from motivation still going strong, the backup motivation of being really excited to write up and explore the Others, and it’s never wasted effort.  In my last essay I talked about the failed stories, and the graveyard of those stories with the postmortems on the cover pages like epitahs.  They were still valuable- I figured things out while writing them.  I used the characters I wrote in future stories.

Here, I used Zed, I used Jeremy, I used Melissa.

I rolled again.  Got another trio of very similar people, two of whom became the very bare-bones outlines for Blue Heron students alongside Gabriel (yes, that Gabriel).  Then I rolled those dice again, but the result was too similar to a prior roll.  I had one iteration with someone I called Charles, harsh in personality (aggressive & people-focused while pushing people away), but I didn’t like the other two.  He felt too close to Blake.  I kept him in my back pocket.

All the while, I was asking myself questions and pushing myself to come up with different ways I could approach the topics- and even what the topics would be.  If the local Others are picking kids, what are they looking for?  I was already thinking about kids on the fringes.  What if that was more core?

Then I ended up with the following:

Where the individuals were very different and the question was less about how to make them distinct, and more about how to connect them, and as I considered that, I could see two of them being friends prior, balancing each other out, and the third one joining in.

What leads individual two to be that focused on being wary and toughing stuff out?  What could put individual one on the sidelines in class?  What if she’s not a Dancer at all?

I could see them in a dynamic where the adventurous one pulled the others behind her.  Where the more confrontational one ensured they kept pushing up against plot.  Where the quieter one had them pull back and consider options.  Just so long as they were tied together enough.

In writing each serial, I like to move away from the prior serial, so I don’t lapse back into the voice of that main character.  So when moving on from Taylor, I chose someone who was less strategic and more openly passionate- Blake.  From the worm to the bird.  Then from Blake, a character who couldn’t lie, I went to a kid who couldn’t do anything but- Sylvester.  From the bird to the serpent.  Then from a natural-born villain, I went to a true-blue heroine, Victoria.  Serpent to the lion.  Then, from one stable individual with multiple facets, I split up into three less mature individuals, kids.  From lion to kitten, fawn, fox cub.  In shaping them, I wanted to nudge them away from Victoria further, so that helped create the boundaries in which the characters were created.

I wrote a draft chapter and, aside from Lucy (then ‘Luce’) being meaner, it was very similar to 1.1.

And in practice, I did abandon or focus less on some things- Verona came out more Indirect than Passive – mischievous, deflecting, taking alternate routes, not really looking to bond.  But that’s the point- to find what spaces want to be filled, and create a set of constraints within which creativity and ideas can unfold and then seeing how they might play out in organic ways.

Once I had them loosely outlined, I could sketch out the parents.  Kelsey gets Avery’s restlessness, Connor gets her desire to form bonds and get everything working along (even to a detriment, overlooking Declan and Grumble).  Verona’s dad gets her self-focused nature to an extreme detriment, her mom is distant and deflects.  Lucy’s focus on perception and details gets picked up by her mom, who is attentive and catches stuff (and catches the kids a lot, for that matter).

Outlining it that way feels sterile, but I think, by developing every character, to some degree, with the snowman in mind- where they’re coming from, how they see things, where they’re going, it flows.

In developing one-note side characters, even, it’s worth considering those factors, a random generation on whatever table one can cobble up can spur thoughts.  Then I ask what we’ve seen before that we could do differently, what would add something to the story, or contrast a character we already have.

Then, in designing any character, big or small, I believe in not outlining everything.  If a person can be married to another person for 50 years and still not know everything about them, then I think we can have a character continue to develop and surprise.  With this in mind, in outlining characters like this, I sort of take a three-quarters rule, where the last quarter should go unsaid, be implied, or left to the reader’s imagination.  I didn’t want to overly fill out the characters.  There’s room to change things and pivot as I write, letting them unfold organically.

Still with the ‘snowman’ in mind, though.

I commissioned my artist for the headers, Nocturne, with the following commissions, which suggest my line of thoughts toward each character as I got closer to the start date of Pale:

Lucy  |  Avery  |  Verona

In the end, I had a document with a list of Others, notes not much expanded from the ones above, the three girls with the loose details above, and 20 pages of essays and notes on writing police procedurals.

There might’ve been areas I would’ve liked to draft out more, or iterations I could’ve explored, but the fact is I was scrambling to both end Ward (with all the headaches tied into that) and get ready to start the next serial.  Website made, there was a miscommunication with the artist about the deadline, so I had to push for a rush on that.

Time was a constraint.  I wanted to go straight on to starting Pale.  With where my head was at after Ward, if I hadn’t done it right away, I might not have.

In a way, I think that pressure is a good thing, because it produces results that I might not have otherwise.  It gets things done in the first place.

Now, as I get ready to take a break (albeit with a move jammed in the middle of it), I do have more time to consider and debate.  It’s something I haven’t had since Worm, in a way, because ever since June 2011, I’ve been constantly moving forward and literally everything I’ve been doing since is being done in the background of a project I don’t want to drop the ball on.

I’m left with some internal debate about how much I want to create a backlog for the next story vs. how much I want to draft, and how much I want to explore.  Do I want to devote more focus to outlining something and creating richer characters with themes that are more planned vs. themes that emerge naturally from writing?

How much do I even not write or prepare at all?  Hard to imagine.  I love writing enough that even when procrastinating on writing during a bad week, I’m writing other stuff, exploring potential stories in drafts.  But maybe if I’m just disconnected entirely during the course of a move, not plugging in or checking in every day, it’ll let me store up that need to write.

Question for the comments: What would you do in my shoes?

Sorry that this is messy, I hope the thoughts flow through well enough.  I’ve been asked a lot about how I got to where I did with writing Pale, and took this as an opportunity to do that while thinking a bit about the why of it all.  I think I generally like where it takes me, but there’s directions to adapt the process and change it.

There’s a… for lack of a better way of putting it, a second half to character creation, which gets more personal, and that’ll come next week.  I’ve also been asked about how I adapted Pale out to be longer, and the thoughts that went into that, but I’m not sure there’s a few thousand words of writing in that.  If I get to the point where I feel like there is, there may be a wrap-up essay tied into that.

Thank you to everyone who shared their own experiences with burnout and executive dysfunction, in response to the last essay.  Lots of food for thought.  I’ve still got bookmarked essays that were recommended and I picked up Swimming in a Pond in a Rain, which was recommended by one person.  Stuff to delve into in the months between now and the next story.