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As a fellow artist who has crafted her living out of words, I want to tell you a big secret: whether you make your art out of paint, animation, architectural design, words, or anything else, your creative talents and persistence are not only important to the world, but necessary.  Artists take everything, from the everyday to the extraordinary, and render it in a fresh way.  Artists make us turn our heads, open our eyes, and experience a truth or emotion or perspective we'd once known but forgotten, or hadn't known at all.  The way I see it, artists keep us alive.

As you know, I'm a writer.  Like some of you, I came to my passion for my art early in life-in my case, when I was seven.  But the realization that I was a writer didn't come about because I'd actually done any writing; it came in a far sillier way.  I had become weary of adults asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up; I wasn't interested in the standard girl-answers of that time - nurse, teacher, or ballerina.  So one day, while I was taking a nap with my mother-or, really, when she was taking a nap, which meant I had to lie down too so I'd stay quiet-I was on the sofa beside her, looking up at the ceiling, and I noticed the ceiling was full of cracks.  I tried to find some meaning to those cracks, to organize them in some coherent way, and I suddenly realized that when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I could say "a writer."  The connection between cracks in the ceiling and writing might seem obscure, but in retrospect I think I'd intuited that art creates coherence out of the chaos of the universe.  Why did I pick writing rather than painting or interior design?  Got me.  But I did.

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In the last post, I began a calm tirade about characters making the story.

That opinion hasn't changed.

Never will.

What I would like to talk about in this post (before I go into any Zoë details and ask for questions) is one method that can be used in learning characterization-in other words-how I build characters.

Anyone that knows me knows it's no secret that I'm a Gamer.

Not so much the stereotypical gamer-locked in a room or a house for hours with my hands melded into the controller, joining the ranks of the unwashed masses and a stack of pizza-boxes moldering in the kitchen garbage.

No, I'm talking more along the lines of table-top gaming, or affectionately known as Role Playing Games, or RPG.