#simicidal

1) How did you come up with such unique & fascinating characters? That, my friends, is a very interesting question because I have absolutely no clue. I personally never thought of my characters as unique and fascinating (apologizes to her characters if they felt attacked). I love my characters to death, but at the same time, I feel like I see them everywhere (in the sense of they are not unique or fascinating).

When I first create a character I always think: “Now I need a [description] character” and even if that main description may hold less power over the character over time, it never ever changes and stays there (Edan is a good example). It’s impossible not to find two characters that have the same trait (either at their core or not), and seeing as I tend to associate my characters to their main descriptions too much, that’s probably why I don’t see them as unique. I also tend to fall into cliches easily for a number of reasons, and that’s probably also why I don’t see them as fascinating.

I don’t really know how I develop my characters though: It either pops in my head by itself or I get inspired. I can get inspired from simple things like pictures or smells. I avoid getting inspiration from other people’s work or real life people though as I feel uncomfortable with that.

A more or less related thing: It doesn’t matter how much I try to avoid it, each and everyone of my characters ends up having something of mine integrated into them. I think that this definitely plays into character development as well. I noticed that the characters closer to me tend to be easier to develop and to ‘deepen’, so yeah. My own experiences are definitely a factor as well.

2) When you started writing your story, what did you take into consideration? Mmm, my main concern was really not being able to render justice to my imagination. I’m lazy, I don’t have a lot of time and not a lot of skills either. I wanted to do something much more detailed and better at first, but I was limited by my skills and the game, so I went for a simple zombie story. Thing is, I did not plan on turning this into a legacy, nor a 40 chapter thing. It was just supposed to be a short story for Simblreen. Now I am worried about the possibility of still illustrating the rest of the story properly.

3) How did you shape each character’s background/family? Just like I develop my characters: Just pops or I get inspired. Sometimes though, I feel pushed to give a historical reason to some traits my characters have so, I’ll have what I call “general historical requirements”. For example, if a characters has trust issues, it will be required for that character to have an event in it’s background that justifies that trait (as in my head, we aren’t born with trust issues). The general historical requirement will then be: an event in which that character’s trust was broken.

4) Do you plan everything before starting, or are you more spontaneous? I have an idea before starting... which eventually become an outline as I start writing, but then that outline is never followed and pretty much everything changes as I keep writing. Therefore, I consider myself spontaneous. I learned quite young that nothing ever goes exactly as planned, and my personality is also pretty spontaneous, so by now I don’t see the point in planning. It’ll either change because Life said so or because I said so XD.

5) Does reality inspire you, or do you rely more on your imagination? Depends what you mean by reality. If you mean actual events and actual people, hardly. I do get inspired by reality: Edan is modeled after someone I know and Thea’s backstory was inspired after a topic in anthropology, but because of the nature of my story, getting inspired by reality is hard and I also feel uncomfortable doing it. However, my imagination usually gets fired up over something I saw in reality. Example: Sees a picture of broken glass: Dimitri. How I got from broken glass to Dimitri is a long story, but...  EH.

I wouldn’t say I actually rely on my imagination, though. I don’t really think I’m a creative person and as I said, I fall easily into cliches. I rely mostly on my ability to make hazardous links between things, just like the broken glass and what is now Dimitri. (Actually, what is imagination? What is creativity? Is making hazardous links creative or just a peculiar arrangement of brain patterns? Are brain patterns considered creativity or logic? *Introspection*)

6) When did you KNOW you were going to make this story? I really wanted to make something for Simblreen so that’s pretty much when I knew. Like... the beginning of that October maybe? But, I found out much later that I was going to turn this into a legacy. When I introduced Cross and Amber actually! I knew by then that I was in too deep to even try to just keep this as a short story.

7) What has shaped your story into being the way it is? Well... I would say mostly my brain? Sorry, ahahaha. Ok, but seriously, I think that what has shaped it the most was really the conflict between the characters and what I wanted to do with the story.

I also think that the fact of always feeling rushed really shaped the story as well. I wanted to finish the generation as soon as possible because I was excited about the others. I also had a huge loss of motivation at one point, so whenever I did have motivation, the story became more intense. Or at least, that’s how it seems to me. If I read my story, I can clearly tell where I was fired up and where I wanted to abandon it all.