Finally…after several failed tries and tons of disappointments, I finally made it to a Japanese prints exhibition—though a different one—the Hiroshige exhibition at Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit features Utagawa Hiroshige’s works, most of which are landscapes that depict winter scenes, corresponding to the recent snowy and freezing weather.

Entering the museum after a long walk along N. Michigan Avenue made my glasses fogged up. My legs and fingers were numb and I had to sit on the bench for a few minutes to warm my body up before going into the galleries. This scene seemed a bit ironic because this girl who kept complaining about the unloveliness and horribleness of this season was going to see an exhibit called Winter Scenes and appreciate the beauty of the snow as if she had never experienced the rigors of it.

The exhibit was tiny actually, and I almost missed it while walking through different galleries because it only occupied a quiet in-between corridor. Prints of snow scenes were hanging on the walls on both sides of the corridor. Some depict people toiling across the bridge in the heavy snow; two depict geisha walking out of the house however hanging back by the snow; several depict birds in the winter firmly fighting against the severe weather.

An interesting thing I noticed was that although all prints shared the theme of snow, snow itself was not even printed. The dominating white color blocks covering each print were actually just the unpainted paper itself. Presenting the most prominent part of a work by leaving the paper blank—this may be the simplest and the most candid way to depict nature itself.

I am a bum with a soft spot for lost things. Lost things to make other things with. I believe in second lives, third lives even; an object’s character comes from age and use. Like an old fork, faded spots where most people grip, oil fingers stabbing food to mouth, minor teeth marks and chips from being dropped on the ground. Floral decoration at the end, crevices blackened in contrast to clean iron. Not just any fork, this fork.

My bedroom is made for two people, but I fill it out myself. In all the corners are cardboard boxes of unusual proportions, tall thin boxes I can fit in, like cheap coffins or suitcases for carrying many long panels down the street. I keep crates that stack up and become a portable studio, easy to bus with, especially ones with cryptic geometric designs on the bottom that would make nice stencils, pop crates my mother used to stock her vending machines in dad’s warehouse. There are nine blocks of Styrofoam in various sizes stashed behind my Lay-Z-Boy, for packing fragile things or even just to make form studies, a pile of squeaky blank space. Fiberboard scraps lean on the opposite wall, MDF to stack and glue, a block to band saw, sand it down, nice and smooth. Blocks of wood are even better, grain to carve and hack, prime and paint, nail together and pry apart, construct a hut from crap pallets spied by the dumpster and they become a new and living thing. I’ve always got at least a small stack of panels, good for painting heavy textures, long planks in which I always vision landscapes or turned vertical become ancient Eastern compositions where you only get one sliver of a horizon but a little of everything from top to bottom. In the closet so many gallon gesso buckets now random mixing buckets, large amounts of color, also good for keeping old clay slip for an extended amount of time, shake it around every once in a while or it layers up and gets all bottom heavy. I put Sri Racha on everything and always keep the bottles, they make good solvent bottles with perfect flow and clear so you can see the color and consistency, I have about five lying around any given time. Little glass dishes or old cutting boards, even small plates make good painting palettes, especially if they have a small incline at the edges for no spill, white plates best to see true color.

I hoard tools to make stuff, hammer and screw drivers all sizes, putty and steak and palette knives, nails and screws for building and eyehooks to hang from the ceiling. I hoard all the brushes, never too many brushes; hard wire ones for cleaning, some strictly white paint and gesso brushes others acrylic and still others just oils. This summer I worked for housing and was given brushes, buckets, rollers, sponges, drop cloths – enough to run my own painting business, should I ever feel so inclined. I re-appropriate utensils, things like chop sticks, sporks, toothpicks, Q-tips, drum sticks (I don’t have drums [anymore]), folded unplayable Bicycle jokers, big rubber bands, blue and pink and orange, good old string, fishing wire, steel wire, glue and rubber cement, strange plastic disks with grey plastic grain and a peel-off wrapper, chipboard scraps from architecture 3D print-outs, old plaster molds and casts, canvas, plastic, rags (T-shirts), bags of bags of bags, more damn plastic, metal rods, dry crusted paint chips, bits of charcoal, many rulers, stale ink and rusted Exacto blades, rolls of paper, paper towel rolls, toilet paper rolls for smaller jobs, paper clips, wax, graphite powder, old spray bottles and spray paint, all glowing.

It’s all in my room with this crippling potential to make stuff, raw matter of the trash heap age. There’s always something to be found, and it’s best when the find is unexpected, when you’re not looking for anything in particular. The best feeling is standing before a half finished painting, maybe a still life of the greenest plants in the world, and needing a specific something and not knowing what it is but what it has to do, and looking through loosely organized drawers boxes stacks in my closet, organized chaos is what I call it, and finding some potato masher or spatula picked up on the sidewalk and extracting it from the depths with force and purpose. The discovery is almost better than needing something and knowing what and where it is all at once, there’s no anticipation there, it’s too easy and I often keep looking for something better and by better I mean more surprising.

Anyone’s who’s ever rolled a twenty-sided die knows that character creation can be one of the most tedious, boring, and lengthy party of any table top role playing game (except for when your halfling bard decides to try and seduce literally anything). However, we’re going to put aside the D6’s (and don’t you even dare bring up the point buy system, which is totally cheating), and focus on the part of roleplaying and story creating that makes it all fun: character.

Now, one might argue that the greatest test of character belongs to the player/writer, since creating a good character background and taking them through an entire campaign, short story, novel, play, or screenplay is nothing less than a testament of will. But honestly, character is the most dynamic and exciting part of any story–and a lot of that is because good stories are run by good characters. When your character walks into a final boss battle with the pit fiend that they’re contractually obligated to obey or die and ends up talking their way out of a fight only to participate in a consensual foursome with that boss later and is now carrying his lovechild before being rendered mute at the command of a Duke of Hell that also holds a contract with your character before your mother attacks and knocks your character out, you’ll be glad that you devoted so much time to an intriguing backstory (potentially based on an actual character of mine in an actual gaming campaign–I admit to nothing).

Compared to the bland motivation of “I want gold,” which requires a story to constantly find some plot device that will provide the character with money (which is super annoying in tabletop roleplaying games since half the quest objectives have nothing to do with cash), I’d rather be playing the pregnant unconscious daughter without a soul (not that I’m biased or anything). For me, I think that that’s what it really comes down to: motivation. The most important question is one of “why”–”why is my character doing this, why is my character doing it in this way?”

How your character chooses to do what they’re doing, why they’re doing it that way, and why they’re doing it at all will tell you and readers/other players more about your character. In this way, you’re able to develop your character in an organic way that doesn’t feel forced. Characters should grow, and if they don’t grow, well that develops them too (so they are growing, kinda, it’s a character creation paradox oh no!). If your character jumps on a horse to chase after some bandits, it might be because your character’s father was a stable manager who was killed by bandits. Or maybe your character does nothing because your character sees no gain or is a coward. Either way, these aspects and traits of your character are wonderful treasure troves that can be explored and investigated throughout a campaign or written work.

One last suggestion: let your character surprise you. Sometimes they might do something that you don’t expect, and if they do (even if it pisses you off), let them do it. Characters, after a certain point, become their own person and they know what they’d do better than you might, so just allow them that freedom. It might make the story harder to write, but that’s only if you’re holding the reins too tight. Let them write their story for you and you’ll find that your own work just became that much easier. You’re now the scribe rather than the creator and that’s okay. In his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King talks about how stories are something you find the way archaeologists discover bones or Michelangelo freed the statues already there but trapped inside blocks of marble. It’s like you’re a transistor radio that’s tuning into this station and your job is to write it down as accurately as you can. Let your characters write their stories (just as you write your own story), so that you can discover them as they continue to discover themselves.