Before I had written a single letter, I started thinking about locations, devices and of course the characters, such as the way they dress or wear their hair, their manner of speaking, their hobbies, etc., even though in a novel many ‘internal’ things do not appear, and the ‘vision’” is created by the reader’s imagination. I wanted to make the scenes and dialogues as smooth and ‘film-like’ as possible, and I did not want to leave a lot of explanatory descriptions and physical descriptions to the reader. I wanted everyone to see the story on their own internal ‘screen’ as they liked; I was only giving them some clues.
Of course, many things did not turn out as I had first imagined; I often improvised as I wrote, but my plans sometimes helped to shape the plot – I came up with many ideas along the way that I had not planned, but I also ended up with something quite different from the original plan.
I have no design education, so I went with my instincts. I imagined things, took notes, drew sketches, and of course I was helped a lot by various films and comics, which were also a starting point in some cases.
Like the ‘great ones’, I also liked to look for shapes I knew or liked when designing, shapes that I found in nature, like the head of a hammerhead shark, a dagger-tailed crab, etc, or even my own hands.
The foreign-sounding names were helped by a book called IQ Test. One of the exercises listed hundreds of words, from which the reader had to select those he knew. There was also a lot of meaningless gibberish, which was a great choice. I used some of them without change, others with slight modification, others I created myself, but I also ‘borrowed’ some existing astronomical names, e.g. Spica, Pollux, to make a conscious link between the time of the novel and the present, as if the
novel were set in a possible human future.
I collected the names of planets and people into separate lists, but of course there was ‘crossover’ between them, i.e. if something was originally intended as a planet name but didn’t sound right, it was given to one of the characters. As I was watching a lot of the German action film series Cobra 11 at the time, two characters were given the names of a police character and the actor who played him (Semir, Erdogan – which I later changed to Erdan), and another name – Beryl –
was inspired by the nickname of a high school classmate.
Of course, I changed a lot of things while writing; my notes and plans were the starting point, but many names or plans remained unchanged from what I had originally imagined.
It’s one thing to write down a few foreign-sounding names and draw a bunch of sketches when I don’t have characters.