How do you write a 1632 story for Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond?
You need a story idea. Characters. Conflict. Continuity. And then don’t make it harder than it has to be.
Let’s take a tour through the planning process.
I’ve handed in the fourth Neustatter book, Security Solutions. Neustatter organized NESS in 1633. He hired additional agents in 1634. Spoiler: He’s hiring more in 1635. What if, in 1636, he hires an up-timer?
That’s the story idea.
Okay, I cheated. It might be one character arc in NESS 6 or so. But it could be a 1632 & Beyond story on its own.
The next thing I need is characters. Again, I’m not trying to make this hard. We can assume that Edgar Neustatter and Astrid Schäubin are going to be two of the central characters. All I need is the up-timer. The grid is going to give me the rest.
I haven’t started searching yet, so I don’t know who the up-timer is. He or she will have family. They’re either going to support this person working for NESS or they’re going to oppose it. I don’t know yet, because I haven’t seen the information. And here’s an important skill: Stay flexible. My first thought is a boy right out of high school, and his parents are naturally concerned. But I’m not locked in. Maybe it’s a boy right out of high school, and he can’t join the Army or the National Guard for some reason. Maybe it’s a girl. There’s no point in speculating further right now.
What we need to do now is go to the up-timer grid. That’s here: https://author.1632magazine.com/getting-started/the-grid/
Ideally, I want to narrow my options down to a handful of characters I can look into further. I start by opening the CSV vile in Excel. If you just downloaded it, save it. Tip: Do not hit save again on this file. This is your master, and we don’t want to mess it up. Now open a blank Excel file.
There’s a lot of information here. All I want to do at the moment is (on the Home tab) highlight column D, Birth date. On the far right of the ribbon, click Sort & Filter A-Z. Now, I want an up-timer graduating high school in 1636. So 17-18 in Spring 1636, which means 11-12 in Spring 1631, so 11-12 in Spring 2000, so probably born in 1988-1989. I’m going to widen that slightly to 1987-1990. Now I’m using the slider bar on the right to scroll down to those birthdates. I’m going to highlight rows 19491-19654. Copy/paste to the blank file. Insert an empty row at the top: Alt-I, then R. Remember to let go of Alt before you hit R if you’ve got the latest version of Excel. I think I’m done with the master grid file, but I leave it open in case I messed up.
Now I’m working with our new file. It’s got 164 characters on it. I need to narrow this down. I’m going to start with Sort & Filter A-G on column G, Death location. Lines 2-21 were left up-time or died down-time (i.e., it’s already happened in a story). So I can delete those. Now I’m doing the same thing on column K, Claimed characters. The up-timers are the 3,551 West Virginians who were transported to Thuringia by the Ring of Fire. Claiming one is like checking that character out of a library for a year so that multiple authors aren’t using the same characters at cross purposes.
The characters in lines 2-36 are claimed, so I’m deleting those. (Look—I already have claims on five of them. Alicia Rice was a main character in “Clique, Clique, Boom,” but why do I have a claim on Sunshine Moritz? Tum te tum te tum . . .)
Now I’m headed to column O, highest education level. I’m eliminating rows 2-7 because those students graduated from schools in Magdeburg and Besancon. Next, I’m eliminating rows 23-26 because they graduated in 1638, and that’s two years too late for what I’m looking for. I’m going to leave the 1637 grads for now. At this point I’m widening column O so that I can read the whole thing without column P blocking the text.
For some of my stories, next I would head to column J, Church affiliation. But in this case, that’s not an eliminating factor. It is something I use for potential conflict later, so I’m not ruling anything out. Instead, I’m going to column R, Occupation.
This is where things start to get dicey. Obviously the last time the grid was updated, nobody threw in Neustatter’s European Security Service” as an employment option. The grid assigned jobs to these characters. I don’t want to wreak havoc by pulling someone out of an important job (because then you need to find someone else to put there, and so on).
So I’m pulling back for a minute and looking at the big picture. There are still 90 rows. One is the headings, so I’m dealing with 89 possibilities. I see that the 1990 high school graduates do not have assigned jobs. That’s good—I wouldn’t be disrupting anything. But it’s bad—they’re 10 in 2000/1631 and probably graduating in 1638 or so. Do I want a sixteen-year-old in 1636? Still in school, but working for NESS? Let’s just say I’ve got a down-timer in mind for that role already, and I don’t see a need to duplicate that dynamic with an up-timer. I might have to change my mind, though, so I’m not deleting these rows yet.
This is where I start assessing each character individually. Are they working outside of the Grantville-Jena area or attending school outside that area? If so, they’re not who I’m looking for. So I’m eliminating Mundell, Shaver, Nemeth, etc. I’m deleting the four heading for the USE Army in Magdeburg. Deirdre Batlow stays, though—the SoTF National Guard trains over by Saalfeld. Next, I’m taking out characters with specific jobs, especially if I recognize they’re joining the family business. So Annette O’Reilly, Mason McCarthy, and some others are gone.
So now rows 2-17 are possibilities, and rows 18-48 less so. If you’ve been following along with your own copy, don’t worry if your count doesn’t match mine exactly. You may not have seen someone express interest in Acton Burchard, for instance.
Here’s where I start to drill down. I’m not going to go through every one of these, but let’s take the first one: James Levi “Jim” Carstairs. I’m going over to Rainer Prem’s Grid Viewer site: https://home.prem.de:1634/ You’ll need to register here; it’s well worth it. This site displays up-timer grid information in more of a family tree format. Click the People tab and type Jim Carstairs into the second box, the one under Name/Aliases. Then click that blue ID number that pops up. We can see his parents. Click on Joel Carstairs. In the left column is a list of related characters. Click on Joel’s brother Howard. I see that Howard is married to Liz Thornton Carstairs. Click on Full Details there and go to the bottom of Liz’s entry. If you didn’t know already, she’s the mayor of Grantville. So, do I want my up-time NESS agent to be the mayor’s nephew? Let’s keep looking.
I also saw that Jim Carstairs’ mother is a Yost. I know that the Yosts run the Grantville Freedom Arches, so when I see Jim Carstairs and Jason Yost both listed as management trainees at the Freedom Arches, I can probably delete them.
Let’s look at Deirdre Barlow next. On the Grid Viewer site, the very first thing I notice is that her dad was Jay Barlow, who was killed by Janos Drugeth in Eric Flint’s story “The Austro-Hungarian Connection” in Ring of Fire II. Do I want to have to deal with that? I’m not excited about it. Let’s keep looking.
I haven’t found the perfect candidate yet. I do see some interesting possibilities. At this point, I’m literally going to sleep on it.
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Okay, I’ve slept on it, and nothing’s jumping out at me except for the fact that column V, Sex, has gotten detached and scrambled in the various Sorts & Filters I’ve done. That means I’ll need to verify the information in the other columns carefully once I think I’ve found a character.
That means looking these characters up in Rainer’s Grid Viewer. I’m eliminating those who have parents who are actively used characters. If I had only character, and his or her parents were claimed, I’d ask that author if claiming the kid would be a problem. But—I don’t have to. I’ve got possibilities.
First, there’s Deirdre Barlow, whose father was killed while defecting. And her sister defected, too. So this would turn into a family honor/redemption story, and a) that’s not something I really want to write and b) it makes sense that the character joins the SoTF National Guard full-time.
Second, there’s Gaston Simmons, who will be a student at the University of Jena. That would be a story with a lot of scheduling difficulties. He’s been in Russia for a year. Why would he join NESS?
There are a few guys I could make work. But then there’s Blaine Dobbs. He’d be 16, and it looks like he’s probably going to graduate high school in 1638. Maybe even 1639. That’s initially a hard sell. But this is where Continuity comes to my aid.
Blaine Dobbs is Nona Dobbs’ little brother.
She’s a character I’ve claimed for quite a while. She has a side plot in “A Cold Day in Grantville” and was fairly central to “Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide.” She’s in the Bibelgesellschaft (Bible Society). Her friend Katharina’s brother Georg is dating Astrid Schäubin. Another friend, Barbara, is dating Otto Brenner. Nona and Blaine’s father is deployed to Augsburg, and their mother found a job down there advising on setting up a library. Nona (and presumably Blaine) are supervised by a fairly restrictive aunt, with other aunts and uncles going along with it at a minimum and perhaps even being fairly restrictive themselves.
So if you were a sixteen-year-old boy looking for your first job, and your dad is in the National Guard and your sister is friends with a group of security contractors who are a cross between the Wild West and hard-boiled detectives, where are you going to apply? Especially if (spoiler) there are a couple pretty girls there and you might not make it into the National Guard. I’m thinking something that’ll fail the PT test Frank Jackson put in place, but isn’t completely debilitating. Maybe asthma. Maybe flat feet. Maybe, more sinisterly, the overprotective relatives simply have a good chance of blocking his enlistment. I could play that conflict a few different ways.
I’m not going to guarantee that I won’t change my mind, but I think this is probably it. I’ve got a character: Blaine Dobbs. I’ve got conflict: getting a job, getting the girls’ attention, being the kid. There’s continuity: reasons Blaine wants to join NESS at age 16, existing ties that make him think this will work (but is it as easy as he thinks?), and a choice of plausible reasons for it.
That took probably 3-4 hours, but I was looking for someone to put in a fairly specific slot. If you have a story idea that’s got more freedom because there’s less continuity to tie into, it might not take you as long. Let’s say you want a two twenty-somethings with some unresolved sexual tension from high school. Now they’re down-time, and Grantville is changing. Are they going to get together? With each other? For something like that, I’d approach it roughly the same way, but use the Grid Viewer to look for conflict points in their families.
Give it a try. Then log into Baen’s Bar, come over to the 1632 Tech conference and request character claims. The grid master will need your name or at least a non-changing pseudonym so that he can keep track of who has which characters. But have fun with it and see what you come up with.
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