I enjoyed the rest of my time in Honolulu, and spent the rest of 2023 preparing for and enjoying the holidays. There wasn’t any active focus on my writing…
…but ideas were bubbling under the surface that whole time.
While I was in Honolulu, I had come up with the three principle characters for the story, as well as an antagonist that at first would appear to be the primary villain but would be revealed to be the secondary threat, the true threat lurking in the tall grass the whole time. Once I finally got going with the outlining, I started coming up with all sorts of characters who would have key roles to play in the story.
I had ideas for rogues and villains, and how they were connected within the story. I had ideas for objectively good and moral characters, who weren’t necessarily the protagonists. And I had a whole array of my favorite types to write, the morally gray — those who are neither good nor evil, but will do either if it aligns with their goals and needs.
I also started coming up with hierarchies for these characters I was developing. I’d have characters who were driving the action from scene to scene. These were the base, superficial layer of characters. A layer below them were a series of characters who were either subordinates, or served to bring out an aspect of one of the base layer characters. And I also had a layer above the base level of characters, characters that the base layer were either working for, or at the very least needed something from, and so were forced into the actions they would take in the story.
Essentially, I had a layer of bosses, middle management, and subordinates, although their roles and relationships in the story might not have been so clearly defined or official.
It was great. The more I was outlining, the more ideas I was having. But I realized that if I didn’t started focusing, if I didn’t organize all these ideas, it would create problems for me down the line when I started to write the story. I needed to make sure that this wasn’t getting so massive that I couldn’t capture everything that was necessary within an approximately 90 page screenplay.
I was going to have to hone things down to the bare essentials, and then work on expanding and adding details to the script from there. I was going to have to focus on what made these characters essential to the story, what made them fit into the narrative.
And I had found the perfect tool to do so, which I’ll get into…next time.