The world around

I walk into this overfull café. The noise irritates me at once: the mugs clinking, the loud talk, the music underneath… Then, looking more closely, I catch sight of Morno at the table on the right. I am afraid he will see me, I turn back toward the door. Too late: he waves both arms and calls out my name at the top of his voice.

Your character is not the center of the world — only the one through whom you look at it. The world turns without him: actors want, threadsThreadthe tension running from one scene to the next: what stays open when a scene closes, and calls up the following one.part 8 pull taut, questions ripen in the shade.

Here is who lives in it: how you populatePopulate · widen · hook · probethe four families of question: who is there and how he is (coin) · what exists just beyond the frame (card) · what is off (card) · staying with the answer that has already fallen. (parts 1 and 2) it, who deserves to be kept, what you write about those ones.

◆ Populating the world — backdrop or actor

Not everything you come across goes on the standing pageStanding pagethe page that keeps what is pending: living actors, waits, stakes, desires under way, doors closed by fate. There is only one, and it replaces the previous one.part 8. The innkeeper, the guard you dodge, the alley crossed once: Backdrop: pure color, forgettable. What will come back and weigh over time: an actor. A single test decides: what does it want? If you can lend it a desireDesirewhat your character wants. No mechanism, no count: it orients what you play.part 11, it is an actor: enter it on the standing page. Otherwise, it is Backdrop.

An actor is a presence that wants, not an extra, but someone straining toward a goal.

◆ A Backdrop that rises, played

For months Regiord has frequented the starport bar: three words at the counter, never more, before boarding a friend’s starship. The barman? Backdrop. A face behind glasses. Today, the friend does not come.

I wait. An hour, two. Vael’s freighter shows on no screen in the hall. The barman has served me again without a word, as always — I have never really looked at him. Nothing to draw, nothing to ask: I write what comes.

He wipes a glass, at length, then says without raising his eyes: “You are waiting for your friend. The freighter man.” — “Yes. He was to take me along.” He puts the glass away. “Left this morning, early.” A pause. “If you wait until the end of my shift — I run the same route. My starship is small, but she flies. I will drop you off.”

I read my sentence back, and an idea comes to me about this barman: it comes from no draw, it comes from what I have just written. And there, I see him. Really. This man is not a wall: he has a route of his own, a starship, a destination — mine, into the bargain. The test falls of its own accord: what does it want? This one wants something. A desire can be lent to him. I anchor him, not for what he is, for what he wants:

Astore (his name, which I will learn later) — calm, entire, the look of someone who has already arrived somewhere — brought us together without my seeing it coming · wants: to carry every voyage through to its end, to close the circles · what is a man that quiet doing behind a counter?

I look at him differently now. The counter, the glasses, the evening shift: a disguise — I do not yet know for what. “I will wait,” I say. He smiles, barely. “I know.”

An actor does not always arrive with a fanfare — sometimes he has been pouring your drinks for months, waiting for you to raise your eyes.

◆ The surroundings — three points of interest

Populating one card at a time is usually enough. But there is a broader gesture, for the moments when you want a place to teem all at once: look at the surroundings. Draw three cards, lay them side by side (three living things within arm’s reach), and read them quickly, without dwelling: a figure at the counter, a book forgotten on a table, a door that is never opened. Then choose one, the one that calls you, and play it now.

The other two do not go away. That is the whole difference with the openingOpening (the)the gesture that begins every scene: three cards, you keep one, you give up the other two. The only draw where choosing costs, and the only door of fate.part 3, where giving up is the price and where the cards set aside disappear for good. Here nothing is lost: the two cards you do not play stay on the table, points of interest asleep. The sceneScenethe unit of play: you open it, you play it, you close it.part 3 goes on around them, and the day your attention lands on them, they are already there, ready to rise. A backdrop that waitsWaitan open question that nobody else is looking into: it belongs to you, it ripens, it has the right never to close.part 8, not a choice that costs.

at the counter

the work left standing

the door at the back

The surroundings — no card goes away.

A majorMajor Arcanumone of the twenty-two named cards, from The Fool to The World. It does not answer: it names, and it weighs.parts 2, 4, 6 among the three does not bring fateFatewhat comes in when you keep a major at the opening, and by no other door: the moment stops being ordinary. What it closes, only it can open.part 6 in: fate comes in only at the opening. But it marks that point as important: not a passer-by, but someone who will count; not an object, but a charged object; not a door, but a threshold that will weigh. A presence of fate set down in the backdrop, whose reason for being there you will work out later.

◆ The surroundings, under a question

Sometimes a question itches at you during a scene. How do I get out of here? Where do I find enough to last until morning? Which way do I go without being seen? Do not keep it muffled: the surroundings can answer it.

The gesture is the same — three cards, read quickly, one only played — but you are no longer asking the place what it contains: you are asking it what it contains for someone looking for that. Not “how do I escape,” but “what is there here for someone who wants to flee.” The nuance is thin and it counts: put on you, the question admits only answers; put on the place, it lets the place answer something other than what you were hoping for: a guarded way out, a way out that costs, or somebody else trying to flee too.

Where do I find something for this burn, before nightfall? Do not ask the district whether it has a herbalist. It has one or it does not, and there you are deciding on your own. Ask it what it holds for someone looking for plants.

the cultivated yard

what came in at the port

the back room

What the district holds for someone looking for plants.

Three shops, and not one promise in common. The Seven of Pentacles grows things: a yard where they cultivate their own, safe and slow: come back tomorrow. The Three of Wands brings things in: the stall by the port sells what a vessel brought back, dear, and the next one does not arrive tonight. The Seven of Swords asks for no name: that is the one you play, the salve is there before nightfall — and somebody, from now on, knows what you were looking for. The question put to the place did not give back a herbalist, it gave back a price.

Once the question is settled, the two cards you did not play are no longer ways out: that would be two doors open behind a door already crossed. They fall back into ordinary backdrop: points of interest asleep like the others, relieved of the question that had called them up. The alley that was to save you stays an alley.

And if a major falls among the three, it says here that the answer you are looking for will weigh more than you think.

◆ One card for a presence

Two moments call for the same single card, each in its own way. The first is discovering people. The world is peopled, and you do not have to decide alone who lives in it: in a city, a presence goes without saying: draw one card and read who is there, whom you are dealing with. Outside the cities, on an empty road, the meeting is no longer a given; ask the coinCointhe oracle of closed questions: heads the first pole, tails the second. It never resolves an action.part 1 first whether anyone crosses your path, then, if someone does, draw the card that sketches him. In every case, a card to give him a temper is worth more than a face invented out of nothing — chance finds people you would not have imagined.

One card, one presence: what comes into the room.

Five of Wands: five staves knocking against one another without any of them winning. This is not a face, it is a temper, and it is better than a face: the one coming in has a quarrel under way. He carries it on him, he will speak of it before anyone asks his name, and he is not looking for trouble — he already has some. So he is not dangerous: he is busy, and that is the way in. Left to myself, I would have made an innkeeper; with that card in hand, I make someone who arrives in the middle of his own story.

The second is seeing someone again. There, no need to rediscover who he is: what has changed is the moment. Draw one card for his state of the day: what is occupying him, a worry he is going through, a thought he is chewing over. The person is the same; the card says only in what disposition you find him, and where to come in.

◆ Actors — a presence that wants

An actor exists outside the scenes. Note him in one stroke: a name; his push, what he wants, what makes him move; two or three keywords, a way of acting, not a portrait; a bond, what you are to each other, now (see below); an open question, what you still do not know about him.

The push is the heart of it. It is not a coat of arms, it is a desire: read it as a wanting. Loudia does not “embody” authority, she wants to take back, to hold, to let nothing go. That desire colors every scene she appears in, and above all, it makes her act alone in a world sceneWorld scenea declared scene in which your character is not present: the world advances behind his back. After three scenes played at his side the floor is the world’s; never two in a row, and fate does not come into it. It moves forward what pends, or it merely lives — a breather.part 9, toward her goal, without waiting for you. That is where the world writes the adventure in your place.

Loudia — strategist, authority, calculation — sent me on a mission then lost sight of me — ally, or manipulator? · push: to take back, to let nothing go.

Convincing someone. Before you draw an action (part 5), look at his push. An actor whose desire runs against you is not played on a card: he refuses, and it is the world that has answered. An actor whose desire runs your way agrees, and there is nothing to ask there either. You only draw in between: when what you are asking both serves him and costs him. There alone he hesitates; there alone, two cards say anything. Convincing is not overcoming a resistance: it is finding the place where his desire works against him.

An actor you never play does not exist: better three living actors than ten forgotten ones. Anchor sparingly, and let their desires compost among themselves. And the one you stop revisiting fades of his own accord: a departure, a death, a silence. Come back to him only if you feel like it.

◆ An actor’s portrait

An actor who counts ends up overflowing one line. Make him a portrait.

The standing page keeps the overview: who exists, in one line. The portrait keeps the life: what he wants, what you do not know about him, what has happened between you. It is not written at one go, and it is not corrected: the day the man has changed, you write another one, further on, without touching the first. The last portrait holds for what it says; what it does not say again stays true from the previous one. Read them one after the other, and you have someone’s trajectory.

Make one for whoever weighs — not one more.

◆ The bond — what you are to each other

In that portrait, beneath the push, a line of its own: the bond. One sentence, each time something has moved it, with its anchor: since what.

And one rule, one only: you never erase. The new bond is written under the old. Cross out the old, and all you have is a state; stack them, and you have a history. Everything else moves: a desire dies out, what fate has broken remakes itself other; a bond stays, and is read back.

When to write a bond. Never by calendar. Do not go around your actors at the end of every chapterChaptera stretch of adventure that rises, peaks and falls away. A convenience of storytelling: no mechanism depends on it, and it is most often recognized afterward.part 3 to see where your relationships stand. That would be an inventory, and an inventory is not play. The bond is written when something has moved it: a fate gone through together, a world scene that turns it around, a truth that breaks out, a silence that lasts too long. Those moments already exist; you are adding no appointment, you are only catching what happened. And if nothing has moved in six chapters, that is information: that bond may have died out.

The bond is drawn, not decided. What an actor is to you, you already know; writing it teaches you nothing. What you are to him, you do not know: that is an open question, so a minorMinor Arcanumone of the fifty-six cards of the four suits, from Ace to King: the matter of the everyday.parts 2, 4, read freely. Between two chapters, you can even question it on several cards, by the author’s hand. Remember the rule that divides them: draw what you would be afraid to decide alone. A bond decided is a flattery you pay yourself; a bond drawn is news you receive.

Always write it from your character’s point of view, so always with a “seems”. She seems to hold it against me. He seems to have forgiven me. This is not a caution of style: it is the truth of his position, he sees only what he is shown. And if you know, yourself, that Parilia does not hate you but fears you, that knowledge has no place in the bond: it is a meta noteMeta notewhat you know and your character does not, set aside on the standing page. It is often that which strings the story tight.part 8 (part 8). The gap between the two — what your character believes, what you know — works on its own until it breaks out.

→ Those people leave behind them things begun and questions unanswered: part 8.