I got tagged!! Thank you so much. It's actually such a great opportunity to explore and conscientize my process of creation, which I don't always do. I will be tagging: @danjaley so she can feel the pressure from both @nocturnalazure and I (🤭), @simcatcher, @historybunnny, @jolifleurbleu and obviously @selidren.
1) How did you come up with such unique & fascinating characters?
I'm not sure I can say they are fascinating, but unique - yeah, perhaps when it comes to the heirs. It is going to sound cliché but many of my characters tend to be shades of my own father, but the one most directly based on him is definitely Jules: a charismatic adventurer who's always everywhere but home, full of incredible stories about his travels, but increasingly difficult to live with after going through intense experiences that are impossible to grasp for those who haven't faced the same, and whose poor life choices start to catch up with eventually. That’s not the case with Lucien - he's more of a dork, much nicer than my earlier characters, with no greater ambition than to live a quiet, happy life and support his more talented siblings in their own paths.
2) When you started writing your story, what did you take into consideration?
I do like constrains, so I often let RNG decide things like character traits - I always take what I'm given and work from there, asking myself: how would someone with this personality react? What would they do? Since Seli and I are writing a historical story, the context itself is a constrain that ends up giving us a lot of orientation when it comes to shaping our characters.
When NRAS Story Progression gives me something - even if it jeopardizes everything I had planned - I usually keep it. It’s like… life happening. Sometimes life doesn’t go the way we expect, and we just have to deal with it.
It’s less the case now, but I also used to take into account a lot of statistics about 19th-century life - both in France and Canada, whenever I could find the right academic papers. Things like infant and child mortality, deaths in childbirth, survival rates during epidemics… I’m such a nerd I even have soil maps of the region my story is set in, just to check what kind of crops could grow there. I also own documents that can’t even be found online anymore - like an evolutive map of the entire Canadian Pacific Railroad network across North America 🙃
3) How did you shape each character’s background/family?
My story started 5 IRL years, 126 story years, and 4 generations ago, so I intimately know everyone’s background. I have a lot of ideas for the upcoming generation, and I plan to introduce many new characters - not just to add a bit of genetic diversity (Hylewood’s a small island and, well, incest is becoming a problem...), but also for story purposes. I’m quite excited about this, because it means I’ll actually get to give them a background and meet them in a way - since, for once, I wouldn't have known them since birth!
4) Do you plan everything before starting, or are you more spontaneous?
I used to be spontaneous, now I plan a lot, which allows me to be much more ambitious in terms of story telling, shooting, everything basically. Before, I didn't plan anything, I just went along.
5) Does reality inspire you, or do you rely more on your imagination?
I wrote about this in 1) already but yeah, I base myself on reality, and I've found that reality tends to be more complex than imagination. By reality, I mean: real people around me, real relationships, real interactions I've witnessed or experienced myself and jotted down in some notebook, hoping I might use them one day. I have chunks of dialogue that are literal transcripts of things people have said to me. Sometimes, when someone’s talking to me, I’m like: “Ooh, that would make a very good line!” 🥲
As for the geographical and historical context, writing this story turned me into a full-on Québecaboo - a weaboo for everything related to Quebec and to those formerly known as French Canadians, now more commonly referred to as francophone Canadians or Québécois, whether or not they’re actually from Quebec. Fun fact: I’m a French history teacher, and when I first started teaching, I actually knew more about the history of Québec and Canadian troops during WWI than I did about France’s... So yes, reality inspires me a lot.
6) When did you KNOW you were going to make this story?
Sometimes towards 2018, Seli lent me a book that was, basically, a legacy challenge in a novel form.
"Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in [...] Cape Coast Castle. [...] Her sister, Esi, is [...] shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana [...]. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America."
It’s a great book - if you haven’t read it already, I strongly recommend it. It stuck with us, and two years later, in July 2020, we were both inspired to start a legacy challenge in epistolary form. Two brothers would be separated: one would leave for the New World, the other would stay behind, and each of us would follow one of them and their descendants. And here we are today!
7) What has shaped your story into being the way it is?
he many, many conversations I’ve had over the years - mostly over the phone - with Seli, who often keeps me entertained during long drives. We’d start talking about one aspect of the story, share how we each see it, and that often sparks ideas - either for our own branches or for each other’s. Every time I get an idea, I call Seli and ramble for half an hour about something I probably won’t even implement for six months or a year... or several years later IRL. 🫢
Readers sometimes give me insights or theories that help me see things in a new light - things I hadn’t necessarily thought through. I really have to thank @ehllear, who's been a reader since the very beginning, and I believe knows the story better than anyone aside from its creators.
I secretly hope that someday, someone from Canada - Ontario or Québec - will read my story and tell me everything I got wrong. 😅
