(so what's update #6 doing here after update #7? I ska-rooed up, dat's wot hoppen...)
Now to give them names and faces, histories and descriptions.
Creating characters is part art, part science, part inspiration.
When I was growing up, I read a lot of stories in Boy's Life, the Boy Scout magazine. Many of them were about plucky Boy Scouts[1] finding themselves in challenging situations where as luck would have it, their merit badge skills and knowledge came through to save the day.
I must've read dozens of these stories, and I can't remember a one: They all blend together in a blur of resolute young lads who never had an ignoble thought or went to the bathroom.[2]
If my characters were going to be memorable, the first thing I needed to do was to kill off all the good girls.
Nobody likes a goody-two-shoes (me, especially) and by making my girls the losers,
the outcasts,
the problem cases
I ratchet up the stakes.
Logically there would be a supervising adult with them, one of the nuns, but my story couldn't use a real authority figure, so I came up with Sister Agnes, a young novitiate who was an upperclassman when the other girls were freshmen.
She, too, had been a problem case and the other girls remember this and have a hard time taking her seriously.
A hard, hard time.
There's no one way of creating a story, you don't always start at one point and build out from there. Once I had my basic idea and knew what type of characters I would be using, the next step was plotting the story out.
This story was going to be more picaresque than something with a more linear plot.[3] There were any number of things that could happen to the girls, so I drew up a list of all eventualities.
Soon they began organizing themselves: These things could only happen while drifting at sea, these would be items of immediate concern once they found land, these were natural perils, these were man-made.
And each idea had the potential for spinoff ideas: The sister demands decorum from the girls, but it's a desert island, how do you balance propriety with practicality?
[1] Wow! What are the odds of that!
[2] Though they could, of course, dig a perfect field latrine and rig a rustic shower out of two saplings and an old bucket.
[3] A mystery, for example, where each clue leads to the next.
(to be continued)
