Developing The Story – Fish and the Lilypad

Fish was the first of the characters I thought up for the story. I’d been watching some Matthew McConaughey movies and I enjoyed his “surfer dude” persona from movies like “Sahara” and “Fool’s Gold”. So, he became the starting point for Fish, who became more his own character as the story progressed.

I didn’t know his real name. He was just “Fish”. Cause he spent all his time in the water and said “dude” a lot.

As the story developed, I needed a reason for them to be out on the ocean. My first thought was oil rig, but there logic reasons within the story that prevented that from being viable, and it was less than a year after the B.P. Gulf spill, and I didn’t want to go there. So I explored the other options, and a floating mining platform came to mind. I hadn’t seen a lot (if any) deep sea mining stories, so I had something here that could be relatively mine (no pun intended).

So, we have a character named Fish who works on a mining platform. What should it be called? “The Lilypad” came to mind. Why? I have no idea. It just came to mind. It did leave me with a question of “why” within the story though, and it produced a rather circular line of reasoning that gave me Fish’s real name, the name and nationality of his boss, and a sudden “personality” for the mining platform. Giving something a name, like “The Enterprise”, “The Millenium Falcon” or the “Battlestar Galactica” gives it much more of an identity than just calling it “the mining platform”.

So, okay… check this out… from the beginning of the script, after Fish nails Ramirez with his speargun and sends him packing…

It went more or less like this. Okay… Fish’s boss is French. Probably France-French, but potentially Canadian-French as well. Fish is a bit of a dick, so he nicknamed the mining platform “The Lilypad” in honor of Jacques, who’s French. I don’t think I need to explain the whys and wherefores of that one.

So, I’ve got a French boss, “The Lilypad” and a guy nicknamed “Fish” whose real name I don’t know. What’s “Fish” in French? Poisson. What name sounds like Poisson? Well, there’s actually “Poisson”, but that would be beyond logic for Fish to have a French name. What about “Parsons?”. I had been listening to The Alan Parsons Project at that particular time, so it came to mind without much of a stretch.

So suddenly, Fish’s real last name is “Parsons”, which Jacques, who’s also a bit of a dick, refuses to ever pronounce properly. Suddenly, I’ve got a relationship between Fish and Jacques with some personality to it.

So how do we get from Poisson to Fish? I decided it’s not a nickname that he would self-apply. That’s where Willy came in. Forced to learn some French to understand a boss who wouldn’t meet half-way, even though he could speak english perfectly, Willy knew what Poisson meant. And he also thought it was funny to razz the new guy, first calling him “Fish-Man”… and then shortening it to just “Fish”.

Finally, “Calvin”, of “Calvin ‘Fish’ Parsons”, came from a longtime love of “Calvin and Hobbes”. It’s a playful name, especially given that context.

So. There you have it. “Fish”. “Calvin Parsons”. “The Lilypad”. “Jacques”…