Sandbox Discussions

[Anya]

I have a little pocket Anwen Mahariel, my character from Dragon Age, that approves and disapproves at things. It's adorable.

[Kappa]

Oh, yeah, I haven't even gotten into the ways meta instances speak up when I'm living my ordinary life.

I routinely rely on the Joker meta instance (and various sub-instances) for imaginary hugs and moral support. Sometimes I bring in a meta version of Mark too. And I do it often enough that I don't always have to deliberately consult them before they pipe up.

But I have to say the most hilarious thing that's ever happened in this vein was when I was going for a walk and being hard on myself for getting tired easily/not walking often enough, and the Miles meta instance popped up in my head almost completely unprompted to start yelling about how my standards are skewed and in my condition going for a walk at all in the first place is an accomplishment firmly worth celebrating. So now spontaneous pep talks from the Miles meta instance are just a thing that happens.

[atheistcanuck]

That is adorable, and I want a Miles to give me pep talks.

None of my characters have really "woken up" like some of yours. I am kind of vaguely disappointed about this, though I don't know if I should actually be disappointed.

[DanielH]

It is interesting reading all these. I simultaneously thought “This sounds like something I might find in the DSM; perhaps all fiction authors are diagnosably insane” and “I wish this would happen to me”. I feel guilty about the first thought because a) I don’t think writing should qualify as a mental disorder because it doesn’t seen like it interferes with regular life more than any other obsessive hobby, and b) there is a stigma against mental disorders which I don’t want to assign to writing.

The second thought makes me feel like I might not be cut out to actually write, or that it would take a lot more practice than for other people; nobody (character, template, IFS part, or otherwise) has ever woken up in my head.¹ Whenever I do an RPG, I always base my character on myself.² Part of the reason I managed to lose touch with the MWF was that Andrew never woke up. The actual trigger was my reluctance to do a sandbox with him when the party rolled around, but even before that it was an effort to figure out what he would do. I ended up switching between modelling him too much as myself, and deliberately trying to not do that; I think this made him act inconsistently, and definitely caused a few other problems.

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¹ The closest anything ever came was when I needed to handle the Chelsea doc and will for Effulgence Mafia. I gained more empathy for Chelsea then. I might be able to turn that into a fully awake character, and she’s enough unlike Alicorn’s Chelsea that she might be interesting. She still wouldn’t be a good guy (although like most real-world people she’d think of herself as good), but she wouldn’t be as bad either.

² I could try doing this with a fictional story character, but I see three problems. First, it seems a bit tacky for a fictional character. Second, it doesn’t seem likely to help me understand how character awakening works. Third, I’m not sure that my character would be interestingly different from the existing Bell/Adarin/Yvette group of characters with strong, semi-transhumanistic goals. He would definitely be different from the rest of them, but perhaps not interestingly so.

[atheistcanuck]

I have similar thoughts about not being cut out for writing. Not that I needed an excuse to have anxiety issues about whether I am any good at things.

[Kappa]

Awakeness of characters definitely isn't the only way to write, I don't think.

I'm pretty sure that my brain does a thing very similar to multiplicity when I get an extremely awake character going.

I think that writing a character directly as yourself would be a legitimate way to explore writing, if you wanted to do that, DanielH. And trying to template yourself to different settings might trick your brain into figuring out how awake characters work. (Plenty of my character concepts started out as self-inserts.) But if you don't feel like it or don't think it would be useful, of course that's up to you.

[anthusiasm]

My characters don't really talk to me, and I've never been sure if this is because I am Doing It Wrong or because my brain just doesn't work that way.

I'm able to make pronouncements like "Henry likes being put in sandboxes with cute people", "Etsuki will not go in a standard-Earth America because our politics give her a headache", "Sam really cannot stand Milliways like at all", etc, but the experience of getting this information is less like the characters are saying it to me and more like I've watched a staggering amount of security camera footage of their lives and now know enough about them that I'm capable of extrapolating these things with reasonable accuracy. Sometimes I do phrase things as if my characters are talking to me, but I do that because the phrasing amuses me and not because I feel it describes my writing experience accurately. (As a side note, this is why I don't always know my characters' sexual orientations until they encounter another character they like).

Even without my characters talking to me, I can generally tell when a character has crossed over from a concept to a person. If a character is a person and I write them doing or saying something they wouldn't ever do or say, I get a pervasive sense of wrongness. The more person-y a character is, the more specific the wrongness is. (One time I had a Sense Of Wrongness about a particular line of dialogue that seemed to have nothing wrong with it. It turned out that my character wanted to attach the words "you know" to the end of the sentence). On the flip side, if I write something accurate about my character, or see a picture or a quote that I associate with my character, I get a really satisfying sense of rightness, as if my character has noticed what I'm doing and approves. When a character is still a concept, there are weird gray areas between the things they definitely would do and the things they definitely wouldn't do, and the process I use to decide whether or not they would say/do the thing is more constructed than felt. (Looking back on stuff I wrote about characters while they were still concepts after they have become people is really disconcerting).

I kind of wish my characters talked to me, though. It sounds fun!

[Alicorn]

Anthusiasm, what you've got going on sounds near-enough to awakeness. Maybe they'll start talking, but it doesn't sound like you're missing a ton if they don't.

[anthusiasm]

Oooh, good to know!

[Kappa]

Yeah, agreed.