Stories

I spent a good portion of time this evening hashing out a story idea with a couple of friends. It started by me asking one of the guys at work for a story idea. He came up with this...

"What if at night different people came into the office and worked for another company."

...and we ran with it. I won't bother going into the ideas it sparked. That's not the point here. What is important are the two things I realised during the discussion...

1. Collaborative story writing can be really good fun and another person can spin things in a direction you wouldn't even have considered on your own.

2. Doing this over IM can be especially productive as it's easy to refer back to earlier portions of the conversation as well as take a copy of the entire conversation for referring back to later.

One other thing is well illustrated by the following cutting.

<blank> says:
What you need
<blank> says:
is logical stepped out behavior that can lead to a conclusion BASED upon facts accepted as truth. That is true evil.
<blank> says:
When the conclusion makes sense based upon someones perceived reality, and that conclusion is horrible but to them it's the right thing to do.
<blank> says:
That's the crusades and the french revolution and slavery.
<blank> says:
It's -easy- to say people that took part in such things are 'evil', but they were just normal people with rationalization.

The motivations I came up with for the two main characters in the story were not realistic. They read like they'd be pulled right out of a comic or a cheesy movie. Now it's easy to blame that on my influences (comics and movies) but it's something that I need to work on in order to make my characters more believable and make my audience empathise with them more.