Have you ever noticed how hard it is to come up with an answer to the request: Please tell me about yourself.? OK, maybe that is just me, but this question has me go all blank. I have never sat down to summarize myself or my life’s achievements. I don’t usually have more at hand than my present conundrums. So when I try to answer, out comes a jumbled mess of facts that randomly pop into my head, even though they don’t have much significance, while three hours later on my ride home, I’m thinking: Why didn’t I tell them about X? The same happens to me when someone wants a short pitch of my games or stories. You’d think I’d at least have prepared for that, but then you don’t know me well.
This is the reason why I hate world-building. That vast emptiness of a freshly hatched story scares me. Sure, there are a few pillars of the world and characters sketched out, usually the things I need to support and tell the story. But then what? Where do I go from here?
Now, I’m anything if not methodical. In the past I would create a new document called “World” or “Characters”, spend some hours on formatting headers and text body, getting font and colors just right (how can anyone work in Times New Roman?), and outline in headers what I thought was important to have filled in: History, Geography, Culture. Looks, Past and Quirks of characters. Then I would stare at my table of contents blissfully as if I’d already conquered the hole. Very rarely would I sit down and ask my headers: Tell me about yourself.
You can imagine the kind of answers they gave.
So a short while ago, I decided to try a different approach. Here is how today’s session with Lotte went:
“What did you do before you came to Vienna?” She just blankly stared at me as if saying: What’s it to you? Not having to work much with, I tried to narrow it down to – was she working or not. Being the same kind of pompous ass as other writers, I make my characters superior and cynical and then try to paste some tragic past onto them that however must never question or threaten said superiority. So in my mind I was like: ‘course she was working – what, she wasn’t a freaking housewife! And I began to rattle of professions I deemed acceptable yet not completely unrealistic: Had she been working in a school? No response. I was feeling like she was trying to tell me: dude, this intelligent/ambitious-type-thing? That’s just an act you’re trying to pin on me. – So I took it down a notch: Was she a secretary? She didn’t say no, and I could feel an image of her as a housewife emerging, maybe managing her husbands finances. Would she though? That was not the Lotte I knew. Far too lazy and too much of a oh-look-a-butterfly.
Something else occurred to me then however: Lotte had been married? And of course she said: “I still am!” I could see my brain flooding with questions: Then where is he? How is your relationship with him? Why are you here? And so on.
We had a nice chat after that. In the end I even thought: You’re not such a bitch after all, Lotte Honig!