I have come to a cross­roads. I am cre­at­ing my Arbi­ture char­ac­ters and although I have a gen­eral idea of what and who they are, I am find­ing it hard to dis­cern whether my char­ac­ters should influ­ence the sit­u­a­tions pre­sented to them, or whether the sit­u­a­tions and choices unfolded before them should alter the traits of their personalities.

For exam­ple, if my char­ac­ter (in this case, X) is already a battle-hardened, cold and down­right unemo­tional crea­ture then he will approach events with this suit­case of traits in play. He will endeav­our to get the job done — ruth­lessly — and in no way fail. This causes the sit­u­a­tion to bend to his will, as is inher­ent to the nature of char­ac­ter con­trol within the story. It means no mat­ter what: the ups and downs, he will remain as he is and unflinch­ingly remain so.

In the sec­ond exam­ple, char­ac­ter Y will begin this game as an inex­pe­ri­enced, yet hearty indi­vid­ual. He will approach sit­u­a­tions with gusto, but not always with the tal­ents and skills to suc­ceed. In this case how­ever — and to pro­duce a grow­ing char­ac­ter — he will be affected by the story. He will learn and grow and make mis­takes, and these mis­takes will influ­ence future choices.

I like the ideal of char­ac­ter Y more than that of X; the thoughts of growth is obvi­ously an intrigu­ing thing to fol­low as a stalemate-personality can become exactly that — stale. How­ever in say­ing that, char­ac­ter X does have his own charms. He knows who he is, what he is capa­ble of and how it will end (for him any­way). He will not make as many mis­takes, but may miss out on other opportunities.

Besides this fleet­ing enigma (or so I thought) is another lapse in imag­i­na­tive guile: I can­not decide in what kind of real­ity this is set. I am aim­ing for a vis­ceral, punchier exis­tence for my crea­tures, but some­thing keeps telling me I can­not have it this way. Angels, wings, realms of exis­tence and oth­er­worldly devel­op­ments — how can I be so grungy when the foun­da­tions of my story are so… ethereal?

As well as the idea of ground­ing my char­ac­ters and that basis being a post-requisite of the very real­ity and rules they abide by, this fur­ther indulges my con­fused cog­ni­tive rea­son­ing and makes me won­der, how true to them­selves and their emo­tions can they be? On a stage with pup­pets, I’m try­ing to fig­ure out how in-touch with the human emo­tive response they are.

Sorry if this has got­ten a lit­tle exis­ten­tial, but I’m play­ing with angelic crea­tures based in a human-painted world. I want build­ings and vehi­cles, but in what man­ner do they exist? I’m try­ing to imag­ine what a world of angels would be like with­out the clouds and the human-afflicted tapes­try of our own weath­ered planet.

Maybe I’m try­ing too hard to cre­ate a pseudo-understandable realm of exis­tence for this story. Per­haps I need to make is sim­pler… but that doesn’t feel right. I can sense an answer; a one true vision that encap­su­lates every­thing I’m try­ing to accom­plish. At the moment though, I feel like I’m ram­ming ingre­di­ents together and hop­ing a pie will sud­denly appear.