Posted by Allan.
We were in Whangarei a city a couple of hours north of Auckland. We had been in the Bay of Islands for a few days and were returning home. We decided to stop for lunch. Outside a café down near the waterfront, there was a large outdoor chess set. Brian, Susan’s boyfriend and I decided to have a game while the girls watched.
We set up the pieces and got ready to play. Almost straight away some people gathered to watch. As the game continued, more people arrived until there was a small crowd gathered to watch. I must admit that this was a bit off putting, especially for Brian. It was a good game and as I remember, quite close in the end.
Over lunch, Anne said that an outdoor chess game might make a good story. When I told we had already done that with the Hansini and Katrina stories she said this would be different.
“How many pieces are there on each side?” she asked.
“Sixteen,” I replied.
“And one person to direct the game makes seventeen.”
I began to see where she was going with this.
“How many people are going to the resort in our stories?”
“Seventeen,” Shandra replied.
“You mean all the players are people?” asked Susan.
“Exactly,” Anne said.
So the idea was bounced around a bit and then it was decided that we should use a real game then give names to each of the pieces. This developed to where we decided to play a second game on the chess set outside while the girls recorded the moves. They wanted to develop a story similar to the first playing “Strip” (Letter 13) where the readers could follow how each player ended up naked.
Well, the game didn’t start well for Brian and he was on the back foot most of the way until finally, I pinned his King in checkmate. As this game wasn't so good, there was a plan to try doing another one but we then decided this one was good enough. It had one team winning, that became Hansini’s team, and one team losing, that became Donald’s team.
At home, we replayed the game again using the girl's notes and it seemed to work out OK then we got stickers, wrote character’s names on them and stuck them to the chess pieces. This took a bit of adjusting until we had people placed where we wanted them. This time as we re-played the game with the character names being recorded beside each move. In this way, the bulk of the story was written. All I had to do was fill in the details and add a beginning and an ending.
More recently, during the build-up for publishing, the names of some of the opposition characters were changed and a few more added after some of our online friends. This has now (2015) become common practice to name characters after our online friends. Our editing team Kim and Ayaka had a go and things like that little exchange between Amita and Jeremy got added too. I had to move a few people so Amita would be a side pawn so she would meet Jeremy, but other than that the story was complete.
Brian & Allan,
ReplyDeleteI played out that game. There is nothing wrong with it.
Looked a closely fought game to me. I few silly mistakes but what do you expect in front of an audience.
John.
Now this is a surprise. This was a real game played on a large chess board in public. When I wrote a comment for the story I was of the impression you made up the gáme for the story. I played it out and there are a mixture of good and poor moves.
ReplyDeleteYes there was a real game, played in public in the City of Whangarei.
DeleteThe game could have been better but like I said above there was an Audience and we were distracted by the girls taking notes of a game they didn't really know. Anyway it works, makes something different.
Allan