I said I'd take stock at 20k words. I said I'd do this fortnightly.
Well, that's the great thing about not having a plan isn't it?
I hit 10k words yesterday (after the first info dump) and decided I had a few questions about what I was doing that I wanted to have a little ponder about. The following is a mix of that out-loud brainstorming, and setting down what I brainstormed earlier.
Setting: I never really thought about what the setting of this story would be. I have a lot of settings lying around, each aimed at telling a particular genre of fantasy but none particularly fitted what I was doing (although maybe this is one in a different era; I don't know yet). All I had was something modern-ish, something where magic has created big cities and enabled bureaucracies and where life is, if not exactly modern, not exactly not. But that very statement begs questions. So too does the need for a tyrant for Sooley to rebel against. Are these linked?
As a wise friend pointed out, I am kinda setting up a scenario where the bad guys are seeking to advance humanity through technology, and the good guys are trying to stop that. I don't mind flirting with that, examining that, recalling Tolkien's disgust with industrialisation. But when it comes down to brass tacks, I like modern medicine and air travel and the internet. Sometimes it feels like technology will doom us but I'm still in favour of it. The idea needs playing around with. And I do have a partial solution - not one I'm willing to reveal at this stage, because there does need to be some surprises for people reading the story - and it's resonating with me pretty hard. What I can say though is that while I want to have a story where there is a side you should root for and a side you should oppose - good and bad, in other words - both sides are full of people who are pursuing what they honestly believed to be the best and people who are in it for themselves. Unless you're resurrecting some some mythic scenario, it is the only way to do it. The trick is actually pulling it off while pulling off good and bad. Better authors than me have foundered on it and some point I need to world build on this. It'll be interesting to see if, when working mostly without a plot, I know when to put that world building in.
There is one other thing I know I'm doing. It'll be mostly city based, and not maze like inner city slums either. I love Tolkien, and I love the English countryside; I know the Compton Downs like the back of my hand, miss walking the fields of Kent and the hills of Sutherland, love watching the moors of Yorkshire and the forests of Pennsylvania go by out of the window... but I'm a city boy. I want to put some of that in, and not just what people think of, but what I think of for I am a true son of suburbia. London suburbia that is, not America's spacious green sprawl. It's not what people associate with Epic fantasy, but why not? Of course, if that's a major part of the setting, that implies a story that doesn't travel much and...
Storyline: I'm not planning this one outside of my head. But I am weighing options, setting ideas for destinations. I want this book to reek of Epic Fantasy but that doesn't mean I can't disagree with it. One area on which I might disagree is the Quest. The Quest - the scenery-chewing journey - is part and parcel of Epic Fantasy's DNA, from Lord of the Rings and The Worm Ouroboros to The Red Queen's War and The Killing Moon. Arguably it is one of the defining traits. But I have to admit to have gotten a little bored of it as a reader and not particularly enjoying it as a writer. Give me deep exploration of a place. There's a real good chance it's going out of the window.
What do you put in its place then? The classic accompaniments to the quest are political intrigue and war. Some stories, such as The Poppy War or many Valdemar stories or Harry Potter (yes, its Epic Fantasy, fight me) use magic schools as an accompaniment instead. We've seen investigation and spying sneaking into the genre more and more recently with The Killing Moon and Age of Assassins. Plus, of course, there is always character growth and contrast. I'm not sure which of these - or maybe something else if I'm a lot more imaginative than I think I am - I'll be using but I've got to focus on one of these.
Character: What I pick will have a huge amount to do with what I do with the characters. Normally I have a decent idea about them before I start but this has been completely cold and I feel like there's two problems emerging here. Number one is "Who is Sooley" other than a member of the great Epic Fantasy MC clan; brave and kind enough to admire, clever and impetuous enough to be interesting, and short a pair of parents just because. I want a little more meat to the bone to begin with, as a lot of modern authors seem to do; characters like Girton Club-Foot and Nijiri already have skills and experiences. I want to go there. One of the fun things you can do there is make them a fish out of water, which I think adds some interesting story possibilities.
More importantly to me right now though is "Are my other characters useful?". Right now I have about 4-6 characters that may continue to get used other than Sooley. I've sat down and done some counting with other books and that's not an undue amount. But it will be if they take up minor narrative roles and then I have to introduce new characters. And I'm not sure that I've set them up for that. And, thanks to my uncertainty about Sooley, I've not set them up to highlight parts of his personality and come up with interesting conflicts.
Right now, this is the biggest issue. The world will develop a rough shape that I can twist to my needs. The nature of the world's movers and shakers doesn't need to develop beyond a sketch. The storyline is something I'm forcing myself to take day by day with nothing more than a little awareness of where I'm going. But the characters have to be strong and interesting imo to drive such an approach and right now they don't. As such, I think the next 10k words will see me either stick in some high drama scenes to define characters - or to simply forget they exist and add new ones. I like the ideas I have going on but the characters need to step up their game.
No comments:
Post a Comment