So, the good news is the reason I haven’t written about Part 2 is because I’m busy with my script. The bad news is that right now I’ve hit a really crunchy bt and I’m backing off for a moment, so here I am.
Procrastinating from writing, by writing. This is a first for me.
Anyway, if you take a look at the previous entry, I had three things that happened to shake me out of whatever doldrums had locked me feet down. I’ve talked about one, I’m writing about the second here, and now that I’m re-reading that post, number three may escape me because I can’t remember precisely what it was my advisor said.
Anyway. Have some squiggly mind maps.
An early (and incomplete) mind map of the connections among people on the Riti
An early (an incomplete) map of connections between only the crewmembers of the Riti
The thing with a story that relies on tensions among characters for its very existence is that it needs characters. I’d been talking about bringing Neyu’s sister Pukka back from the dead, in the sense that she never dies at all (initially, she bought the farm just before Neyu stowed on board the ship). And then I thought, since I have four crew members, maybe have four stowaways in total. Originally, I had three, but a fourth ended up arriving. Just sort of showed up on his own. It happens.
But here we’re just talking about a tug of war. The crew will have a fairly unified goal, despite their internal differences, and the stowaways will have a fairly unified goal, despite their internal differences.
So why not have some passengers, too? It takes the tension from a back-forth tug of war and triangulates it, and gives more opportunities for divided support and conflicting goals. It’s the kind of thing I should have considered early on, but I write up the background of the ship in such a way that I was tethered to a concept, or an assumption, of how the ship operated.
Nonsense. There’s no reason a tramp freighter can’t take on passengers. Modern day cargo ships do it all the time.
And the moment I began playing around with all these characters which more or less line up into three distinct groups, I had politics. I had conflicting and aligning goals. People started doing things. Now my only trouble is keeping the scope of the story under control given the time and resources available for production, which is actually kind of a nice place to be.
And there’s the whole analysis thing, too, but I’ll worry about that once I’ve got the refined initial drafts done.