Check-In Post #3

[slashmarks]

Week two is now complete! Each week, I'll make a new check-in post with a few optional discussion questions. You can use this post to update us on our progress, complain, celebrate, or talk to other participants! Also feel free to discuss each week's questions in our discord server.

Comment to share how your week went!

Optional Discussion Questions:

1. How do you name original characters? If you use name lists or other resources, what are your favorites? What's your process of character design or development like?

2. Writers: Do you write backstory, brainstorming or other "extra" material, or does all of your writing going into the story itself?

3. Comic artists: What kind of visual design work do you do before you get started? Do you work out designs for characters, settings, etc.?

Comments

[chacusha]

1. Naming characters is hard. Honestly, I often name characters after people I know (who probably won't read the story) or have come across their name somehow, which I think is cool/fits the feel of the story. Sometimes I ask friends for names, or I make one up by taking a word I like and tweaking it a bit.

2. Yeah! I think brainstorming the backstory to a fic/characters is really fun, when it's the kind of story that needs some details filled in (not all stories need it). For a longer fic, I usually have a reference doc that I throw all my worldbuilding and brainstorming and background things I need to decide on before writing certain parts of the story.

3. For this comic, I drew each of the characters needed in the comic a couple of times from references, just to kind of get a feel for them, and also collected a ton of reference photos from the canon for the settings/backgrounds. I kind of wanted to create a stylized cartoonish design for each character and then use that in the comic, but I ran out of time and I think I am not good enough at stylization right now to make it viable anyway...

[lonelyaura]

1. I mostly name characters by a) culture, b) the sounds their names make, and I'm happy to rename them until I'm happy, and have waited until a day before posting to change a name to something better. I just have to pick *something*, though, or I stall out.

2. Sometimes! I think I should do more deliberately so I can enjoy specific characters enough to run an ensemble cast with them - I run into wanting to do very single-character focused things, which is fun but doesn't work so well for longer works most of the time. Or at least, not for what I want to be writing!

[sansigma]

1. How do you name original characters? If you use name lists or other resources, what are your favorites? What's your process of character design or development like?

Names! I don't have a system for coming up with names, and I find that some names come much more easily to me than others. For a project unrelated to this event I have (this far) renamed one of the characters five times, poor sod.

I find it easiest to name my characters in stories that take place in contemporary Sweden, because I have a cultural feel for the names in use for people of different ages here and now in a way I don't for other times and places.

My FO project is set in a fantasy world veeery loosely based on historical Scandinavia and I'm doing that fun fantasy thing where you take real life names and play around with the spelling and pronunciation until you have a fantasy name instead.

For more general character design I tend to think of characters as tools for telling a story, and design the characters based on the story beats I want to hit, rather than designing a bunch of characters and then seeing them loose to form a plot.

For fanfic however, where the characters come ready made, I am much more likely to come up with stories based on the characters instead.

2. Writers: Do you write backstory, brainstorming or other "extra" material, or does all of your writing going into the story itself?

Nah. All the backstory I have come up with for this project will most likely be directly mentioned or at least alluded to in the finished story. I've never written anything intended to be "extra material". Sometimes I brainstorm a bit in my notes, though, if a new thought strikes me as I'm writing something else down.