hi! just read the newest chilliad update (amazing stuff btw!!) and was struck, not for the first time, at the depth of character and world building that's been put together. i'm also working on a large-scale fiction project based on the lives of a college baseball team and others in that orbit. i was wondering whether you had any tips on managing so many characters with personalities/individual lives, as well as the believable college atmosphere (especially when building the world and atmosphere basically from scratch). hope that's not a big ask, i'm just really inspired and admiring of your work :)
goshhhhhh thank you so much! i wish i had a really smart, collegiate (ha) answer to this but i fear mostly it's a combination of deciding who the people are ahead of time and then how i'd need them to move the story along. so it's not just who are they, but who are they to each other? dité has to push helen to behave in certain ways; why would she do that in this scenario, and why would helen let her?
a lot of the time when you work out what a character needs to do, it will tell you a lot about who they have to be to make their role make sense. so maybe that's kind of backwards to what feels intuitive but that's usually how i do it!
as for the atmosphere, i'm glad you feel like it's believable! i think it's quite heightened but it's based on an epic poem so i felt like maybe i could get away with that.