My Writing Techniques

In this article I aim to explain some of my techniques I use for character and world building.

For me, the world around me is like a Roman wall or floor mosaic; if you have ever looked at one in detail, you will notice the thousands of small glazed pottery shards or tiles that make up the "picture."

May of these mosaics are of people and some of the things going on around these people; so I treat writing just like a mosaic; a real person's, or a character's life is shaped by all the small moment that came BEFORE the present. Each of these moments shapes our psyche.

On a slightly different note, I have Asperger's Syndrome (now grouped in with Autism), so I tend to be OCD in some aspects of my life, but I also have these flashes of pictures or small action scenes that come to me during certain parts of the day, especially during times of mental sluggishness, such as after eating my lunch. Many times, just like autistic people get OCD stuck on a subject, some of these visions stick in my mind like a non-removable sticker!

I figured out a few years ago, if I write the vision or scene down, it clears out of my mind better/faster. Over the years I have accumulated hundreds of flash fiction, vignettes and short stories, scribbles and drabbles, and I figured it is time to write a novel, since many of these will actually fit together (with some modification or edits)!

So, when I need to figure out why a character is the way they are, or why a location has certain features, I tend to have a flash in my mind, and I write this down as a scribble sometimes, and sometimes I write a scene in my novel, and something doesn't work quite right, so I fall back to looking at the problem like it's a mosaic - and I figure out what that missing shard/tile is, and sometimes I have to add several of them to get the part I need, but eventually all the mosaic tiles form and shape the character or location into what I need for my novel.

My character life mosaics are my most fun projects, I get to explore these character down to their details, and there is a new tool that makes it even more fun to explore my character - AI like ChatGPT or Google Gemini - you can load your character sheet or mosaic into the AI, and then have a conversation with your character. Learn something about your character, make a tweak to your character profile, start a new chat with the revised profile, and start a new conversation - AMAZING.

---TBC---