Feo Takahari
Auror
This is another dissection, focused on the old computer game Alpha Centauri. Since it didn't have a single plotline, it didn't have the luxury of showing characters grow and change through their interactions with each other. Instead, it tied character-building to world-building, such that the descriptions accompanying new technologies were sufficient to build the personalities of its protagonists. Each of the below quotes comes from a different character--can you tell what sort of person each is?
Different goals. Different ideas. Different word choices. Even different sentence structures! Everything about their speech shows something about what makes them unique.
How dense is your character development? Do you think all your scenes develop your characters, or are some specifically set aside to do that? Do you develop them in detail, or are broad strokes enough to support your plots or your worlds?
The managers always talked about having the view from 30,000 feet. The only problem with having the view from 30,000 feet is that at that height, everyone looks like ants.
Richard Baxton piloted his Recon Rover into a fungal vortex and held off four waves of mind worms, saving an entire colony. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character with a multi-tiered media campaign . . . They don't need to know how he died, clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales and dampen the spirits of our customers.
Already we have turned all of our critical industries, all of our material resources, over to these...things...these lumps of silver and paste we call nanorobots. And now we propose to teach them intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need for us?
Different goals. Different ideas. Different word choices. Even different sentence structures! Everything about their speech shows something about what makes them unique.
How dense is your character development? Do you think all your scenes develop your characters, or are some specifically set aside to do that? Do you develop them in detail, or are broad strokes enough to support your plots or your worlds?