Subject: Developing characters while writing them
Author:
Posted on: 2018-08-06 10:58:00 UTC

That’s what I tried(*) to do: Use every no-permission-required opportunity to write my agents and get helpful feedback from the Board, then distill the character sheets from the stories. The trick is keeping them consistent or showing same character development through stories set in different points of their timeline, or knowing which stories that have been fun to write must be dismissed as uncanonical to get a consistent character sheet. (This doesn’t mean that these stories shouldn’t have been written in the first place; I learnt a lot about my agents and how not to write them by writing parodies of them for the badfic games.) Also, knowing how a character’s experiences formed their personality is more important to me than having a detailed physical description and a complete list of abilities.

I know of at least one other Permission Giver who would read your Permission Prompts first and only then look into your character sheets to check whether they fit or at least don’t contradict what is shown in the prompts, and what other important information is there. We actually don’t need to know every small detail about your prospective agents; we just need to know that they’ll fit in and that we can trust you that you won’t make them overpowered suvians after getting Permission.

Tl;dr: Working from detailed pre-defined character sheets may help many authors to keep their characters consistent, but it’s not an actual requirement for everybody.

(*) I tried, because after three years of writing my non-permissioned agents and doing other stuff on the Board, some Permission Givers just wanted to give me Permission and didn’t even ask for character sheets. (Apparently, Permission came to me with writer’s block, because now I’m responsible to do it right and write stuff that’s worthy of the PPC. After two more years, my agents still don’t have any canonical stories or character sheets / agent pages on the Wiki.)

HG

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