Early Variables Concept Drawing

When first developing Variables, it was a small self-contained story that took place from 2006-2008. I’d like to tell more about it but that arc is actually one of the crucial storylines that will be explored down the road so the details will have to stay under wraps for quite awhile longer while work on 1992 is completed (so, maybe in… 2013?). We’ll get to it down the road but as you’ll read in this article, choosing where to start can be just as difficult as writing the story itself.

As the world of Variables started expanding and I began pulling more elements from the various creations I had started up over the past 20 or more years, the story took on the form of a sprawling epic that could balloon up to hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of content before I felt “finished” with the universe and its characters. Right now, there are at least 25 characters that will get significant face time and that list continues to grow as I expand upon story threads and come up with new ideas to explore within the universe. By the time I’m finished, there could easily be 100 or more characters if I don’t find a way to rein myself in a bit.

That led to me a very important crossroads in the creation process: where the hell should I start this thing? Do I write The Hobbit first or do I jump right into The Lord of the Rings?

I spent weeks vacillating over where to begin the story. Do I start in 2006 with the original story? Do I start at the very beginning? Do I start somewhere in between (including the future)? There were several good options and sometimes, it can be fun to just toss the reader right into the middle of something huge and let them sort it out over time. It certainly worked for Star Wars. On the other hand, this is a new universe. It can be easier (and sometimes better) to ease not only the reader, but yourself, into this tangled web of stories and begin anew with the universe itself. Ultimately, this is the road I decided to go down with Variables. Starting out fresh with the reader allowed me to avoid dedicating past universe events this early in the writing process in favor of laying down the ground rules for the universe over time.

One of the major drawbacks of this choice in storytelling is that it can be boring. Instead of having 10 characters to interact with, you have three to tell a story and during the first few pages, there isn’t even a story to tell because nothing has started. I wrote the first draft of the 1992 script and it read like a bad imitation Hugo novel. The Blake story was about ten times longer than it needed to be and half the dialogue was consumed by irrelevant details that not even I cared about that much. But it was a starting point and I needed that frame of reference to start working. So, after a week or two of looking over the script and realizing that the Canada/South Dakota portion of the story involved dozens of pages of people standing around doing nothing but talking, I decided to toss out the entire Blake story and start fresh. I completely changed that arc and shortened what was about 20 pages into roughly six blessedly short pages. After those six pages, the ball really starts rolling on that story and hopefully, the reader will find it more engaging. I’ve been actually drawing Variables 1992 for three months now and I look over those pages and see that very little has happened. It’s an unfortunate side effect of the decision I made eight months ago when crafting the first concepts for Variables, a decision I still stand by today. It makes for a slightly awkward first 10-12 pages but after that is over, I think giving the reader the ability to learn everything about the universe right along with the characters will pay off as the tale begins to gain momentum.

Why did I choose to write about this today? Well, I decided on this blog because I realized that after page 12 is completed and posted to SelfCentEnt.com, the introduction to Variables is out of the way and the real story starts to unveil itself. Things happen, characters find themselves in very bad situations, guns are fired, people scream, yadda yadda yadda, and the overall arc begins to unravel into something more suspenseful and enjoyable to read.

And it’s about damned time. No one is more anxious to see this happen than me but sometimes, it’s best to lay a little groundwork before blazing full speed ahead.

PS. I hope you enjoy the image attached to this post. It’s a concept drawing I did early on in the production of Variables of a character who will play a very prominent role in the universe for many years.

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