The Person, not the Thing

It's time for yet another episode of "things I should have realized a long time ago."  :P

A while back, I talked about how many of my ideas start from a single point: a person doing a thing.  I'm not sure which entry that was in - I've talked a lot about how I try to get things to work because most of what I've done for the past two years is trying to get things to work.  Trust me, it's out there.  But like everything else that's part of the writing process, I've learned more about this concept as I've worked with it, and recently I've realized something important about it:

The person is what's important, not the thing they're doing.

I've got a project I've been working on that's going reasonably well.  Let's call it Project H, for reasons that would take too long to explain.  Project H started with one single image - a person of a fantasy race doing something people of that race don't usually do.  Something about it struck me, and I knew I wanted to tell her story.  When I started developing the idea, everything came from that image, and it all led toward the main character doing what she needed to do.

Everything I created was for a world where this character could do the forbidden thing that started her story.  But if I'd decided to develop the world in general terms, without knowing who she was, what she was going to do, and why it was forbidden, I would have come up with something completely different.  And odds are good it wouldn't have worked.

This feels like something elementary.  And yet, if I'd realized this months ago, I probably could have saved myself a lot of heartache.

I like world-building, kind of a lot.  Part of the fun of developing STARWIND was coming up with all the different places the crew would go and what those places were like, what had happened to make them what they were.  But I also know that a lot of the trouble I've been having over the past two years stems from not being able to find the story - from having a whole lot of 'where' and 'what', and nowhere near enough 'who'.  Hell, I have a fifty-something page document that's full of seven different attempts to rework a world that's based around what I thought was a great concept.

Only one or two of those attempts has an actual story anywhere in it.  Because I couldn't create a world worth writing in without anyone to live there.

I have something else I'm working on - let's call it Project K, to prevent confusion - which is the first thing I've done since I realized this.  (I didn't realize it all that long ago.)  There's also all kinds of weird world stuff to do with this one, and to make things even stranger, it's a world that has nothing to do with the main character.  But a lot of the design I've been doing has one goal in mind: what do these places need to be to serve the main character's story?

And I'm pleased to say one thing about Project K: so far, so good.  If I have to keep learning stuff that feels like I should have learned long ago, at least I can do it right.