Rant of Ferox

I create my characters.

I know who they are. I know what they do, what they like, what they fear. I understand their hopes, ambitions, dreams, desires and quirks. I designed their fears, backgrounds and understanding. I know my characters.

And then my more artistically inclined friends turn around and say “But what do they look like?”

And I blink dumbly wondering why they can’t see the character the way I see it, and then whether it actually matters. Read more…

Here is an excerpt from the story I’m trying to write. I desperately needed to change the magic system and make in unique, unlike every other fantasy story in the world. The start of this excerpt isn’t so good, but please bear with it for a few sentences and tell me what you think.

There was a tense feeling in the air as the four made their way back to the hut. They would travel for a five to ten minutes at a time and then stop to scatter their tracks and see if they were being followed. During these short breaks Detra would call down spirits to search for people and Veltra would converse with a hawk that had been hovering in the sky above. Jesse felt like a third wheel, watching these things take place that she couldn’t understand.
“Have you been taught how to see?” Trill asked her as she rode Storm up to Jesse.
“What?”
“The patterns,” explained Trill, rolling her eyes. Storm stamped his hoof and tossed his head at the delay. “The magic! Because now would be a good time to see what you can see.” Trill and Storm trotted off to confuse their tracks.
“Well, let’s give this a go,” Jesse told Max as he peered around from her lap. Jesse took a deep breath and tried to remember how the world around her looked when it was all converted into code. I have to view the source,she thought, and wondered to herself what the mental, metaphysical equivalent to a right-click would be. Jesse tried to imagine herself right clicking, hoping that would work, but to no avail. Uncertain, Jesse nudged her horse closer to Detra, who was sitting on Eclipse’s back in a meditation pose, her hair whipping around her face as Eclipse tossed his head around, as though watching something only he could see.
“Um, Detra? Can I ask you something?” Detra didn’t open her eyes, but nodded slowly, still deep in concentration.
“How do I see the patterns again?”
“By doing something that makes sense,” Detra whispered back, “The patterns are all logical.”
“But what?” Jesse insisted. Detra didn’t answer. Jesse guided Dasher a short distance away again to think. It’s something logical, right? Something that makes sense? I’ve got to right click and view the source…right click and view. Jesse closed her eyes, straightened her back and breathed deeply, trying to focus and hoping her idea would work. She held out her right hand, and clicked. I have to right click and then view the source. She opened her eyes.
“Cool, I works!” The world around her was changed. Superimposed over the shadows of what was probably real was a green, cloudy tinge where snippets of code danced around, defining the world. Scripts and styles shifted as the wind blew and the trees swayed. It took Jesse several moments to take it in and stop trying to read everything; there was just too much going on in any one moment for one mind to comprehend.
“It’s almost chaos,” she whispered to nobody in particular, her breath taken away by the sheer complexity of a normal moment.
“Mew?” Max responded. Jesse turned to look at what Detra was doing. There were multiple scripts trying to work around her, but they weren’t correct and shifted their code as Jesse watched, as though they were alive and trying to cheat existence somehow. Jesse turned to watch Veltra, noting that a piece of style code hung over her and the hawk, converting them both to the same format. Then she blinked and the world returned to normal.

Feedback please!

If it’s not the writer’s block that gets you, then Dead End Editing just might.

 It’s a phenomenon you come across when hard at work editing a piece of writing, generally a long piece. Swap a word here, an an adjective there, a spelling error here, and here, and here…

When it hits you. That passage is so awful, so embarrassingly terrible that no amount of editing and polishing will ever make it decent. But nevertheless you feel compelled to try.

You stare at the piece for a few minutes at a time, but find no inspiration. There’s not a single clue as to how this jumble of words may be salvaged. How could you have written something so lifeless?

That’s where you stop. You just can’t work through those words. You become frustrated, distracted, disheartened and wander off to find something more productive to do. You hit the Dead End of Editing.

There’s only one thing you can do in a time like this. Open a new document to write in, and prepare a replacement for the abysmal section that’s blocking your creativity. Then delete the old piece, and replace it. Hopefully your new work will be an improvement.

I’ve found myself coming up against Dead End Editing a couple of times, and by completely replacing the section I can be much happier about my work and continue. If the old piece is salvageable I will still use it, but some paragraphs are better off being humanely destroyed.

Detra stared into the glass bottle in her grasp. An air spirit glared back at her. It wrinkled up its small, furry  face as it glared. It looked rather like a mouse, except that its hind legs were much larger, as though it was designed to leap into the air, in order to give the feathered wings on its back a head start for flight. 

Spirits are one side of the magic system in the stories I write. They are effectively invisible and shapeless, until a special person who has been taught to see them comes along. Then these spirits must take a shape.

Usually they pick a shape coined from a medley of different things they have seen and like, with a bias towards whatever element they associate with.

To help me visualise and write, I would do little sketches. Recently I’ve tried to use computer graphics to help me along too, becuase I’m anything but an artist.

It didn’t turn out how I had it in my mind, but it’s not awful for a first try. I think the head is the wrong size, and perhaps the wings need to be a lot more obvious. The little guy should look able to take to the air at any moment.

This is the original sketch I had done when re-writing the first time. I really wish I was a better artist, my skills haven’t improved over the years.

First impressions count.

It’s true in real life and it’s true for all the characters you may create in any piece of writing. It can be difficult to introduce a new character in a story, especially when you’re trying to follow the ’show, don’t tell’ principle. Without having names for the character, it all gets too confusing. It reads like you’re floating around in a soup, switching points of view and struggling to make any sense.

I tried to follow good writing theory once and not use names that hadn’t been already revealed in conversation. It just ended up a mess.  You can read Before & After excerpts in the rest of this post. I’d love to know your thoughts and whether I’ve made any improvements. Read more…