Time, Person, Place

The Process

I used dice and kanji (Chinese/Japanese characters) flash cards to determine the events and order of the story.

First, I used a 4-sided die to determine at what time of day each character would wake up. To determine for any given hour where the character would go, I rolled a 6-sided die, with each number corresponding to each location. I then used a 4-sided die to determine how long the character would stay in each location, from one to four hours. When characters traveled to locations that are not in walking distance, I inserted an hour-long train ride.
See the dice chart

Then, I used a stack of kanji cards to give the layout for each hour and character's plotline. Once I had the basic layout of characters' journeys determined by the dice, I rolled one 6-sided and one 4-sided die for each hour for each character, to determine how many kanji flash cards would be used. I then took that many cards out of the shuffled stack, and wrote down the kanji. I continued this process until I had filled in kanji for every hour and every character.
A few kanji cards
Character and hour chart 1
Character and hour chart 2
Character and hour chart 3
Character and hour chart 4

Then, I wrote each scene for each hour using the selected kanji as a guide.

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