Puzzling It Out

So, I’ve been fiddling with a new idea to go with this game-like approach I’ve been thinking about (I haven’t forgotten, Jodi!) while being offline most of last week to spend time with my mom, her friend, and the kids who were out of school.

I found a great resource Folktexts where they have collected a ton of Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts. I spent a lot of time looking at folktales Wikipedia as well. The English Wiz site also has a very cool section on The Etymology of First Names.

So… I decided I wanted to try to write something around “The Flower Queen’s Daughter”. I don’t know how it’ll turn out, but it’ll be an interesting excercise. DH said it sounded long, but that was probably just my mangling of telling him too many details along the way.

So, yesterday while the kids were in martial arts class, I sat down with my clipboard and started planning. I’ve gone over the story several times to get a feel for what all needs to be included, but beyond the plot sequence, I hadn’t done much else with it yet.

If I was truly going to turn this into a section for a game, I’d need to go into much more detail in mapping out where all the different settings were located and deciding what connected them together that could be interesting or at the least useful. Instead, I came up with 8 locations that can be used and reused during the story.

The Flower Queen’s House
The Hero’s House (more likely his father’s)
The Ditch along the Road
The Road where he’s searching (generalized location here)
The Dragon’s House
Salon/Receiving room
Ball Room
Stables
Meadow
Garden

The characters required seems a large and unwieldy list just now. And they’re not going to be literal representations of how they’re referred to in the book. I was thinking of having the animals/flowers/etc represented in their coats of arms/crests and let it be more metaphorical.

Hero – Alexander
Heroine – Anthea
The Flower Queen/Gyspy — Flora, I’m conflating these two characters
The Dragon Mother — Rosalind
King of Eagles — Arnold
King of Foxes — Todd
King of Fishes — Dylan, Marvin, Morgan, or Meredith
The Dragon’s brothers —
The Dragon — Drake
Hero’s Father —

There are also some items that play roles in the story that will need to be mentioned: a bell, a mare and her foal, and three cloaks (copper, silver, and golden).

I’ve already worked out which characters/items/locations are needed for which of the 16 plot points I pulled directly from the synopsis so far. My next plan is to take those note cards and write Dunne’s Story points on the reverse. I think I’ll also need a few more scenes so that this isn’t completely in the hero’s POV. The heroine needs some reason why she’s just going to waltz off with a man she barely knows instead of staying in what appears to be a cushy place.

So my next step is to lay out the plot points on my handy plot diagram and see where they fall and where I still need answers and ideas.

3 thoughts on “Puzzling It Out

  1. You have a unique way of world-building. I like it. I wish I was as logical. I do have little snippets of paper everywhere, and binder clips.

    I LOVE the colored-fairy tale books. I read them all when I was a kid. My grandma had the whole collection. My favorite is the Light princess, (even though it wasn’t in the Lang series).

  2. I used to read a lot of folktales and mythology when I was in my early teens. I never discovered the Lang books though. We won’t talk about the snippets of paper— no… not today.

    As far as the approach goes, it was very useful for taking a myth, folktale, or legend and turning it into a virtual space where a player could experience a story. Yes, the game was all in text, so everything had to be described in varying levels of detail.

    Doing that for over a decade kinda imprints a certain process on your brain. I’m glad you like it, I’m finding it only gets me so far since there I could rely on the player to bring so much to the experience. I miss the layering effect I had where I could briefly mention some detail and the player could search deeper on their own for it. I guess that’s still present in some ways, just not a familiar one for me. =)

    I did some more work on trying to lay out beats for the various scenes I have laid out so far. The going is slow as I find myself getting sidetracked into the why’s and whatifs.

    I don’t think I’m familiar with the Light Princess. I’ll have to look her up.

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