My Character's Room

The only thing I ended up doing yesterday-in the context of my writing-was drawing the room of my main character. 

The more I thought about it, the more clearer it became. I knew what he was thinking in that space and how he would be spending his time there or why he would not spend it there. I was able to connect from my own experience with the room.  I knew the array of experiences that a character could feel in such a room and towards it.  

This thing of writing about the room came out of the blue. I didn't deliberate about it, weigh the pros and cons before doing the drawing. It was a simple task, because it was simply meant to be a top view or a schematic diagram of his room. In a top view, door or a window would appear as a line, a shelf or a bed would appear as a rectangle. How difficult can that be? I knew his bed was next to the wall opposite to bedroom door. But I wondered if it should touch two sides of the room or one. But that didn't seem to affect anything. So I thought I'll look at it later. The next thing that I wondered was-Where is the door? That unexpectedly required some thinking because of the other furniture in the room. I gave the door a temporary space and then proceeded to the furniture in the room. What did I want in the room? A computer would be normal. So a desk? That's a logical progression of thought. But there were others. 

Questions such as: 

Does he read books?

Is it the same room that he shared with his sister as child?

With these and a few other questions, the room became alive to me. It also gave me the palette for moods and conversations that will emerge from the room. The biggest surprise was that I had found one of the antagonist of my story.  Wow!

I try to read articles on writing but for some reason my brain refuses to function when someone puts across methods in the form of mathematical equations and grids. When I can't find my story fit into it, it affects my confidence. I makes me unsure of the validity of my instincts. But my inherent belief that I have something important to do in filmmaking (I have no idea what it is) brings me back. Had I worked at figuring out my antagonist before developing my story, I might have drawn a blank. 

To my credit, I don't dismiss that there are ways to approach writing. So when I come across some such funda, I let its memory take a little corner in my mental room and hope it is awake and aware. This memory was awake and it showed me who my antagonist was. I was relieved. 

There are various things you can do while writing. It could be about dwelling about the character, his/her immediate surroundings, history, events occurring at those times and so on. I have always known that intellectually. But it can also be boring to write them unless...

To find the antangonist, all that was required was to think about the room. Was that all? Was it logical for me to think about the room to find my antagonist? Or how would that have happened?

Let me give writing a shot for two hours today.