Series Three: The Courting and the Making
Post Two: Courting the Idea
Written By Jonathan Chandler
Sometimes it’s a character. Sometimes it’s a scene–replete with a flashing of steel and the screams of awakened horrors in the dark. And sometimes it’s a question, a wandering musing on a ‘what if’ that won’t leave me alone. Whatever it might be, that background engine of Free Imagining will strike me with something, every now and then, that I can’t ignore.
However, like a maiden at the center of a ballroom, seen from a far wall, the thing’s beauty is only vague. A beacon, sure, but impossible to talk about to someone else. And so the questions have to start. If I want to be able to make something of the striking idea, I have to ask myself–ask it–the same question I asked to learn about writing itself. Or rather, I have to acknowledge that, as a thought, it is trying to tell me something about the world around me and the one within.
I have to flirt with it and learn about what experiences and people it was born from. Is the strong-man character born from the time I couldn’t climb that gym rope? What does that say, or what could it say about the character that overcomes that kind of weakness? Is the eldritch horror sourced in my childhood fears of the dark in my bedroom’s misshapen doorframe? How did that fear motivate me to act in those days? How could that fear make a character act in a world where such a thing was real and could crawl up their skin like I always feared the dark would?
The point is, the first step to making any story is learning about the idea that inspired it, about the life that helped shape it, and maybe about the very person that was struck by its debut in that courtly ballroom of their mind in the first place.
Vault of Orendathos 