I write stories about characters. It differs from the stories about plot —where there are things happening all the time, and basically, to go from point A to point B. Writing about characters doesn't mean to forget about the plot, because otherwise the story wouldn't progress, but it means to focus on the change of these characters and how all of this constitutes the plot.
How do I plan the characters and what do they mean to the plot?
I have always written like this. I am not very good at dialogues, action-packed prose. In my real life, I am like a bull, always going straight-forward, charging against everything that's on my way, without having time to think. But when I do, I like to delve into who I am, who are the others. I am this kind of person that likes to hear about people stories because I think that's what constitutes them. So, when I write, I like to pause and reflect. I want to do introspection to understand the characters I'm writing about —and because I think introspection is universal, too, and in talking about one character, a person can see it as its reflection.
That's why, when I started thinking about Rotten Judgement, I knew that forging the characters and the introspection would be much more important than in Instead, they said, because there are simply more characters and because Eren and Mikasa are very complicated in this one (although, to be fair, they are very complicated in all of them, but in Instead they said and in IDNLUT they have each other to go through that).
I knew I wanted to write Enemies to Lovers, which I haven't done, and so that meant to have a constellation of people in which I could narratively rely to portray Eren and Mikasa's relationship from the outside, to have this décalage in between they are saying and feeling, and how people is seeing them. In this décalage, I'm allowed to compare both and not do introspection all of the time, which I know it can be a little complicated to read.
But having side-characters to ease-up your story can be seen as a narrative trick if they don't have struggles for themselves. In a character's story, I believe some of the secondary characters need to have their own struggles. That doesn't mean that they need to change (to be "round"), but they surely need to bring something into the story. So I give a main "topic" to the characters I want to develop further in the story, and this is the topic that I will get deeply into as the narrative progresses. Then, I trace the relationships between the characters, and how those relationships affect them.
So my characters' chart ended up being like this:
Eren Jaeger — Topic: REPENTANCE
Mikasa Ackerman — Topic: FORGIVENESS
Armin Arlelt — Topic: SECRECY
Levi Ackerman — Topic: MOURNING
Jean Kirstein — Topic: DEATH
Historia Reiss and Ymir — Topic: HYPOCRESY
How do I tie the plot from here:
I always like my plot and stories to be circular, or to be well-tied. Having topics for the characters (what they deal with) helps me make round characters (hopefully) and round plots. In this sense, for example —and without spoiling too much— I decided to name the three parts of the fic with each topic from EMA. The plot will grow and delve in those topics from here: Repetence — Secrecy — Forgiveness. So, in some ways, the structure depends on the characters of the story. This is the first time I do this, since in the other stories, what happened to the characters depended on the structure: in IDNLUT, Eren and Mikasa's relationship was tied up with the way of going back and forth in the story. In ITS, the parts were distinguished with stylistic choices, rather than focusing on the plot or the characters.
The topics of Levi, Jean and Historia are crucial to the rounding of the plot, since this is a story, foremost, of life and death, and in any one there's mourning. So while this characters will portray their respective topics, it allows me to talk about this big "topics" and connect them with the main protagonists.
And so, this is how Rotten Judgement started. Let's see how the experiment goes.
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