thread: 2005-11-10 : Open House: Ask a Frequent Question...
On 2006-02-16, Vincent wrote:
Mark W: What's color good for? More specifically, how is it important/how can it be made important without turning it into situation/system/etc.?
Color! Good.
Color is the concrete details of character, setting, situation and system.
What might be going on is that you're accustomed to thinking of a character's color as the character, etc.
Here's a character (with a hint of situation): a person having an illicit affair.
Here's the character, colored in: a man in his early 30s, well-off, married, educated, owning property, childless, having an illicit affair with another man, with whom he is not in love.
Here's a setting for him: a city with a substantial economic gap between its rich and its poor.
Here's the setting, colored in: London in the early 1700s.
Making sense?
So your concern - how do we make color important without turning it into character, setting, situation, system? - is groundless. Color is important, it's what makes character, setting, situation and system real.
This makes WMW go "Let me tip my hand a little"
I'm asking about this because I'm having trouble figuring out how prescriptive to be about color in order to get the results I'm looking for. There's a "focus knob" there somewhere.
