Character and Plot
I went to college to learn the technical aspects of doing art, I had good instructors and I learned a lot, enough, and with the modest talent that I had, to stay employed full-time for 45 years. As for being a writer, I only had a couple of creative writing classes in high school, so I was not prepared as much as an artist, as I was for the writing thing. Over the years of being an artist I have learned how to learn. When computers and their drawing programs began to change the face of how to do art, I readily adapted, my drawing abilities changed from pencil, brush, pen and ink and the like, to the mouse. It was larger then a pencil but my artistic ability and dexterity transferred well enough to that ungainly blob of technology.
When I got around to writing, I had no idea of how to create characters that would drive my story line, especially female ones, so I had to learn. Having been married for some time, I knew a little about women, but to write actual characters, that was a challenge. I ended up using as a model, a young friend of mine from work, and another female character was the sum total of a lot of young Mormon women that I knew through high school and college. One male character was based on a Japanese family that sort of adopted us when my wife and I were newly married. A small group of football players I observed at a dinner in St. George once, with their easygoing, friendly camaraderie, inspired a Navajo character, and a lot of research did the rest. I used bits and pieces of myself for the main character but I actually became the basis for an alien artist in my third book. Names were taken from the whole of my life, past and present, here and there, all meaning something or other in the writing process. The aliens in the books were freely borrowed from my old friend, Alan Dean Foster, a master of writing alien races. (Borrow from the best, don’t hesitate about it).
The plot has, from the beginning, been based on a introduction by Arthur C. Clarke to a collection of his short stories. In it he talked about a alien technological civilization unchecked, chewing its way through the galaxy from one star system to the next. This was so long ago I do not recall the book or the entire gist of the introduction. It just made an impression on me and I added it to the future narrative of my stories. The original outline for my novel was good, but as I began to write I found ways to enhance the direction and of course, sometimes, the characters would do something different then I intended. But it turned out that they knew what they were doing much more then I knew and so we kept a friendly attitude about it all. There seems to be a lot of creative cooperation when writing, so I just went with along. If it works, go with the flow, a good lesson I have learned along the way to being a writer.
(Below, a black and white ink illustration that I did for an early version of the story line.)
