I mentioned previously that I took “some time off” from the WIP by converting all my main characters into FATE character sheets. What I didn’t explicitly mention was that I had a second go at this recently after I understood FATE myself better after watching a long Youtube video from FATE SRD in conjunction with a careful re-reading of the FATE Core rulebook. As a result, I put my two protagonist’s FATE aspects to the limit test as suggested by the rulebook and found that I’m better off collapsing two of my male protagonist’s aspects into one because they are actually very closely related, making way for another aspect that I generated via a random dice roll but was actually there all along in the current decimal draft I have. I also refined one of my female protagonist’s aspects but it was a task much more minor in scope.
A parallel exercise that I did was to study the interaction of my character’s aspects (not just my protagonists but all the key characters) with a particular plot or a particular scene. In general, it works better on a larger plot level rather than the scene level. This is because I took the approach from FATE which is geared towards a general plot as opposed to a very targeted event. But I think I did manage to track down the main conflict for the female protagonist in one scene, that between part of her core identity, the current event in the scene and the implications for her changing relationship with a girl who is a sidecast for the novel. I don’t think it’s directly useful for me to peg down the details of the scene enough to write it but it’s still advancing the scene forwards a little bit.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 