Something New in Discovery: Quick Starts
Collaboration always has its difficulties, and one of them is getting everybody together at the same time, on the same page (so to speak). This time Toni and I are going full speed, but Krissie is in the middle of finishing a rewrite and moving her daughter home from college along with several other things, and she’s not going to be able to join us until November (aka next week). Toni and I are generating pages of e-mails and chat transcript, and it’s damn near impossible for us to keep it all straight, let alone Krissie coming in cold turkey on Nov. 1, so Toni and I decided a couple of days ago to do Quick Starts, named after those pamphlets that come with new electronics so you can get up and running quickly without RTFMing. So we’re writing Quick Start docs on the back stories for our characters, for the major locations, and for the major concepts, like magic. We’re writing them for Krissie, but what I’m finding out is that putting them together is making me thinking about the characters/settings/concepts in a much deeper way. I knew all of this stuff, I just hadn’t thought about it in the organized way it needed to be presented to Krissie. And the Quick Starts made me go back and look at the composites again and realize that they weren’t communicating character in a fully rounded way, either. I’m not sure I’ll do Quick Starts for non-collaborative books from now on, but I’m definitely doing them for the other stories I’m writing that are set in this world.
The key for me is getting the back story down and then forgetting it until I need it, which might be never because I hate back story. But it’s also getting the intangibles down, what the characters want, what they dream about, who they are at the start of the story. Knowing that, and knowing where they are at the end of the story, gives me their stories in their character arcs. Synthesizing a protagonist down to one short document and one composite image makes me thing really hard about what’s important (it’s not what they look like, usually), and above all, points out what I haven’t thought through at all.
Most of the Quick Starts are too spoilerish to put here, but I think Cat’s is pretty much a “previously in Cat’s life” with nothing of the book to come in it:
QUICK START: Cat Potter
Cat’s a sturdy, cheerful young woman, physically and mentally strong, focused, imperturbable, and completely uninterested in magic or love affairs or anything else but intensely practical matters and her heart’s desire: a safe, beautiful place to live up high in the sky. Cat was born to climb (her mother was a circus gymnast), and from the moment that her dad, one of Phil Blight’s men, caught her on the roof when she was three, he trained her to be a cat burglar. Now she’s the best cat burglar in the Edge (which means in Riven, too, since the Edge is Crime Central), and the second best pickpocket. (Best is Fanny Fingers, but she’s seventy-eight, so Cat’s turn is coming.) She and her father worked for Phil Blight until she was fourteen, when Phil killed her father for double-crossing him. By then Cat knew her dad wasn’t the brightest spoon in the drawer, but even she was surprised he was that dumb. She quit working for Phil then, but to his credit, Phil continued to take care of her and her mother, a circus trapeze artist who’d fallen for a bad boy and never managed to get up again, and who drank herself to death two years later. Phil offered Cat a permanent job high up in his gang—she was fearless about heights and could get in anywhere–but Maggie Strong stepped in and gave the sixteen-year-old a place to sleep in the waitress dormitory and a job sweeping floors at the Ear. Within a month, Maggie had recognized Cat for what she was—strong, smart, independent, and remarkably honest considering her upbringing (she never stole from family, friends, or employers)—and moved her up to waitress. Within the year she was Maggie’s second in command, and ten years later as the story opens, Cat has a rock-solid-secure honest job and only climbs on roofs if she needs something she can’t afford or when she just really wants to go high where the air is quiet and empty and she can stretch her arms out and breathe in the sky. It’s the only time she feels completely free. That’s how she found the bell tower on the ruined, condemned Church of the Seven Sinners. As spring warmed up, Cat began sleeping up there, making friends with a one-eyed raven by feeding it leftovers from Maggie’s Ear; the raven’s name is now Edwin, and he’s the closest thing to a pet Cat’s ever had. Her other pet, sort of, is a gargoyle/drainpipe named Perch. He’s made of stone, but Cat crawls out of the belltower and sits on him and feels like she’s flying on his back, and talks to him and pets him as if he’s alive. So she goes up to the tower and has blissful solitude and space and all the sky she can inhale, with Edwin and Perch to talk to, neither of whom talks back. It’s perfect.
But now it’s September and it’s getting damn chilly. Cat knows she’s doomed to go back to Maggie’s dorm, full of chattering waitresses, if she can’t find a way to heat the belltower while keeping it a secret that she’s up there because it’s illegal to enter the ruined, magic-contaminated church. Then things get more complicated. Cat looks down from the tower through the broken floor of the nave seven stories below and sees people moving around in the crypt. If they see her up there, her secret is blown. Of course, they’re not allowed in the church, either. She makes plans to steal a telescope so she can see what’s going on down there and goes to work, trying to figure out how to heat the tower as she goes. Her story starts that night at work .
Cat is 5’9”, strawberry blonde, round, commoner face (no cheekbones), strong as hell, imperturbable.
Cat’s theme is “God Help the Girl.”
Here’s her composite:
The other Quick Starts have too many spoilers, but here are three more composites, two for characters and one for a concept (romance plot):
