Original fic plot ramblings
Jul. 2nd, 2005 03:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethYou ever get re-bitten by a plot bunny?
Really really old original fic bunny this time.
I mean I don't think I've worked on this one since before I moved house, and I don't even remember when that was. Many years ago.
Modern setting, heroic fantasy, people running around with swords and shields and magic. Four heroes, each with a different magic item, Sword and Shield, Staff and Chalice. Five books, focusing on each in turn and then all together. First one was about the Chalice, which had been broken earlier this century but now a man finds what is needed to fix it.
I figured out a lot of what wasn't quite right in the earlier versions. They were trying to be political without noticing, so I'd got that part a bit wonky, and also I'd got half the 'cast' wrong on account of trying to put my favourite actors in where they didn't actually fit.
And I'll have to work a bit on the central Chalice guy, because I've decided I don't much like Fate, so there has to be some way he earns his way in. Like, he is the right man for the job because he has worked hard and got the skills. That part has been there since first draft. But there has to be some reason he, out of all the people in the world with the skills, is the one to remake the Chalice. And I don't want that reason to be Fate.
Also I need to retweak it because if Chalice is the center of the book then the bad guy has to be about him, the central choices have to be about him. As it was I got stuck into the idea of the big Sword fight and kind of didn't give Chalice any choices. Not quite right.
But I have ideas to fix that now.
The only thing I don't have is anyone to read it if I write it. I mean I also have a big huge fanfic Epic Of Doom, and that will get at least two readers. Original fic? Not so very likely. Specially since the first book isn't slash. I mean I could make it slash, but then that would tangle up the m/m with the choice between good guys and bad guy, which is really lame. It would end up looking like he was choosing the Het of Virtue. Even though one of the later books is mostly about him and his boyfriend, that would still look dumb in the middle.
Actually, however I set it up, if the bad guy is the one presenting the tempting alternative that is going to look either m/m or f/f, because Sword is a girl and Chalice is a guy and whoever the opposition is they try to tempt them. And I wanted the Bad Sword to be a guy, because there was this whole Ares-Athena thing (maybe not like the old greek version, more Wonder Woman comic version, I just mean aggressive war vs defensive). And then if he is the same guy presenting temptation to both Sword and Chalice, that would introduce the m/m.
If I introduce an entirely seperate bad guy, could make them a girl, and then the temptation is m/f. And not the cliche creepy.
But the basic idea of the Chalice is that it heals by magic. And here is where the flaw in the basic scheme comes in - if the Chalice was shattered in WWI or earlier, then all the medical advances of this century happened post-Chalice. So what does it matter anyway? What does it embody? If the world can get along fine without it.
Actually I thought the precipitating event for the shattering should be the development of deliberate biological warfare. But I'd have to do some research on that. I know bio-war has been around waaaaaay longer than most people reckon. Like, the plague. So what in particular would be the breakdown?
And in order to tempt Chalice, who is a dedicated healer, the alternatives have to both seem medical. I was thinking scalpel vs chalice, cut away the bad vs promote the good, and the Bad Sword has this nasty method of healing where he just cuts a chunk off his opponents and blends it in with himself until he is all healed again. But that would be saying organ transplants = teh evol, which really isn't what I meant.
See Chalice is mixed race and multi lingual and is supposed to represent multicultural modern life. Kind of Canadian. Whereas Bad Sword bleaches out the chunks of enemy he takes and makes them all part of his (white, monolingual) self, so has that whole Empire thing going on. Kind of the bad version of American.
In earlier drafts he was Spanish, to mirror the Sword, because of the whole 'fiery' thing and thinking on Columbus and really old Empire vs Sword who was going to be mixed South American, like Aztec Mexico not just the import kind. Trouble is that won't play quite right in a modern era. If the assimilates-everything guy can be read as an illegal immigrant type - and there is this dimension jumping, stuff sliding in from other dimensions theme going on that reads kind of like that already - then it all ends up looking kind of racist.
And fantasy has this demons from Outside theme a lot, but if you look at it as naming the location of evil then that is kind of problematic. Horror is usually about the evil from within, the kind of badness built up inside. And it can be societal, the social pressures embodied or whatever. Or, invaders from Beyond. But again then you get the whole immigrant thing, and in the current political climate you get the terrorists vibe, and that seems sort of problematic.
I'm rambling at great length here and I'm sure it doesn't quite make sense, without knowing the story, which I haven't written yet.
Setting up a world, setting up heroes and villains, you have basic questions. And those questions reflect on the regular world even if you are talking elves and orcs. If you are setting it in a world almost like this one, just around the corner somewhere, then it will very strongly reflect real world conflicts. So you have to decide some very basic questions and how your story is going to answer them.
What is good?
Doing like the law says? Breaking the law in the service of a higher power? Breaking the law on your own initiative? Crossing borders? Defending borders? Fighting? Refusing to fight?
What is evil?
Is there even such a thing?
Personally, I always say I don't believe in evil. I believe in Stupid. Everyone is trying to do the same thing - be happy. Just a lot of people go about it in really stupid ways.
But if you set up one set of characters to be the good guys, whoever they fight end up representing the bad guys.
So, do the bad guys look just like us? Do they represent stasis, disorder, invasion, corruption? Do they serve a higher power, a larger organisation, only themselves?
Whatever you decide, the crucial parts are the differences. If both sides are hyper-religious then the simple fact of being religious won't be considered the representation of Evil (or Stupid) in the story. Unless the point of the story is that both sides come to unnecessary and horrible ends.
If one side succeeds, and the story holds that as a good thing, and the other side fails, and again the story reckons they should fail, then the things that made a difference are the significant points.
So, what do I want to set up as of the good?
Diversity, adaptability, change, imagination, teamwork. Respect. Healing, learning, teaching, earning, building, and fighting when it is necessary.
What do I want to set up as not-good?
All the opposites. Sameness, stasis, relying only on what has been said and done before, arrogance, dismissing the efforts of others. Not just not-fighting when fighting is needed, but fighting when fighting isn't needed.
The invader/defender thing is also key, but I don't just want people invading 'us' to be wrong, I want to make it clear that 'us' invading people is not a good idea either. I guess the simplest way to do that is to set the story in more than one place, defend not just 'our' place but many places. Hmmm, except then you have to have people from outside defending a place that isn't theirs. Which, okay, UN peacekeepers. But not-okay American Neo-Imperialism. Can't be defending them 'for their own good'. Could be cleaning up 'our' own mess - like hot pursuit of a criminal.
Location of 'evil'?
Individual corruption, societal corruption, invaders?
Well all of the above I guess.
Now how to embody that in a bunch of demons...
Bad Sword is the invader. He thinks of himself as a Dragonslayer, following evil back to its lair. He can be a temptation to Sword because she spends her whole life - which is likely to be brief - stopping the bad things that get in to our world, or the alliance of worlds I guess. And of course there are some worlds that make more 'dragons' than others, some that seem to only spit out 'demons', and it has to be really tempting to go charging in there and kill them at source. But it wouldn't be the right thing to do. They aren't actually causing trouble there, just hanging around at home. It would be like charging in and killing every guy in the poor part of town, because so many criminals come out of there. The right model for what they do is crime, not war. So Sword represents the sword of Justice, insightful discrimination, whereas Bad Sword represents the sword of War, destruction.
Sword's story is very simple to read as current politics.
But the book is supposed to be about Chalice. What is the fundamental difference in style, the basic choice that has to be made about healing?
Later on there is the zombie immortality vs natural aging choice, the choosing personal immortality above immortality through your children. But I'm not even sure that is right to set up as a choice. And also it isn't that simple - what actually happens in that story is that the older guy makes his son immortal, and then himself, because his son doesn't turn out perfect and he needs to be around to improve him. Which is more making it a choice between living your own life and trying to get other people to live for you.
I'm realising why I hadn't got a choice at the heart of Healer's story. Because what choice is it? To heal someone or not heal them? Where is the moral difficulty in that? Would have to be, does he heal the bad people too. Which is in fact one of the stories, but can only be in book 2 because he has to have a chalice before he can use it.
To dedicate ones life to healing, or to... go sit on the couch? This isn't a story about teenagers. This is a story about people in their 30s, people who have studied and got a solid career and are wondering what to do next. They are coming up against the limits of the achieveable and wanting to push them back.
So Healer has already dedicated his life to this. He works in an ER, all day, helping people.
Could it be that he doesn't *give* his life to helping them? I mean, he doesn't risk it the way a soldier would?
But I want it to be clear that the day to day grind of everyday life is just as valuable as the one off heroics. He already is a hero, he doesn't need to choose to be one.
Could realising that be the point?
Hmmm.
Could the difference be between taking and giving? Organ donation by stealing chunks vs life donation by giving bits of yourself? If what the Chalice does is pour out bits of the Healer, so he knows he can bring people back from the dead but he would die to do it... then that would be the thing the one who broke the Chalice did wrong, he wasn't content to give life, he had to stick around and make sure it was lived right. In his opinion.
So what the Healer chooses is to give of himself to save others. Like he always has, only made more effective by this magic item.
So what would the temptation be? An alternative item that would allow him to heal others by taking from other others? Scalpel, cut chunks off and splodge them on somewhere else. Stealing, no cost to the Healer.
See the basic trouble is still, that comes down as anti organ donation. Anti surgeon. Like giving your own time and devotion every day isn't enough. And that isn't what I mean at all. Surgeons have the skill that makes organ donation possible. It doesn't matter that they aren't taking their own bits, they are taking willingly offered bits. It would in fact be rather difficult to donate ones own organs and be the surgeon on that procedure. So I can't set up a choice, an alternative, that actually makes sense compared to the real world.
On the bright side, if I can't solve the basic structural problems in this story, I'll have to write fanfic instead. So not exactly a bad thing, really.
Really really old original fic bunny this time.
I mean I don't think I've worked on this one since before I moved house, and I don't even remember when that was. Many years ago.
Modern setting, heroic fantasy, people running around with swords and shields and magic. Four heroes, each with a different magic item, Sword and Shield, Staff and Chalice. Five books, focusing on each in turn and then all together. First one was about the Chalice, which had been broken earlier this century but now a man finds what is needed to fix it.
I figured out a lot of what wasn't quite right in the earlier versions. They were trying to be political without noticing, so I'd got that part a bit wonky, and also I'd got half the 'cast' wrong on account of trying to put my favourite actors in where they didn't actually fit.
And I'll have to work a bit on the central Chalice guy, because I've decided I don't much like Fate, so there has to be some way he earns his way in. Like, he is the right man for the job because he has worked hard and got the skills. That part has been there since first draft. But there has to be some reason he, out of all the people in the world with the skills, is the one to remake the Chalice. And I don't want that reason to be Fate.
Also I need to retweak it because if Chalice is the center of the book then the bad guy has to be about him, the central choices have to be about him. As it was I got stuck into the idea of the big Sword fight and kind of didn't give Chalice any choices. Not quite right.
But I have ideas to fix that now.
The only thing I don't have is anyone to read it if I write it. I mean I also have a big huge fanfic Epic Of Doom, and that will get at least two readers. Original fic? Not so very likely. Specially since the first book isn't slash. I mean I could make it slash, but then that would tangle up the m/m with the choice between good guys and bad guy, which is really lame. It would end up looking like he was choosing the Het of Virtue. Even though one of the later books is mostly about him and his boyfriend, that would still look dumb in the middle.
Actually, however I set it up, if the bad guy is the one presenting the tempting alternative that is going to look either m/m or f/f, because Sword is a girl and Chalice is a guy and whoever the opposition is they try to tempt them. And I wanted the Bad Sword to be a guy, because there was this whole Ares-Athena thing (maybe not like the old greek version, more Wonder Woman comic version, I just mean aggressive war vs defensive). And then if he is the same guy presenting temptation to both Sword and Chalice, that would introduce the m/m.
If I introduce an entirely seperate bad guy, could make them a girl, and then the temptation is m/f. And not the cliche creepy.
But the basic idea of the Chalice is that it heals by magic. And here is where the flaw in the basic scheme comes in - if the Chalice was shattered in WWI or earlier, then all the medical advances of this century happened post-Chalice. So what does it matter anyway? What does it embody? If the world can get along fine without it.
Actually I thought the precipitating event for the shattering should be the development of deliberate biological warfare. But I'd have to do some research on that. I know bio-war has been around waaaaaay longer than most people reckon. Like, the plague. So what in particular would be the breakdown?
And in order to tempt Chalice, who is a dedicated healer, the alternatives have to both seem medical. I was thinking scalpel vs chalice, cut away the bad vs promote the good, and the Bad Sword has this nasty method of healing where he just cuts a chunk off his opponents and blends it in with himself until he is all healed again. But that would be saying organ transplants = teh evol, which really isn't what I meant.
See Chalice is mixed race and multi lingual and is supposed to represent multicultural modern life. Kind of Canadian. Whereas Bad Sword bleaches out the chunks of enemy he takes and makes them all part of his (white, monolingual) self, so has that whole Empire thing going on. Kind of the bad version of American.
In earlier drafts he was Spanish, to mirror the Sword, because of the whole 'fiery' thing and thinking on Columbus and really old Empire vs Sword who was going to be mixed South American, like Aztec Mexico not just the import kind. Trouble is that won't play quite right in a modern era. If the assimilates-everything guy can be read as an illegal immigrant type - and there is this dimension jumping, stuff sliding in from other dimensions theme going on that reads kind of like that already - then it all ends up looking kind of racist.
And fantasy has this demons from Outside theme a lot, but if you look at it as naming the location of evil then that is kind of problematic. Horror is usually about the evil from within, the kind of badness built up inside. And it can be societal, the social pressures embodied or whatever. Or, invaders from Beyond. But again then you get the whole immigrant thing, and in the current political climate you get the terrorists vibe, and that seems sort of problematic.
I'm rambling at great length here and I'm sure it doesn't quite make sense, without knowing the story, which I haven't written yet.
Setting up a world, setting up heroes and villains, you have basic questions. And those questions reflect on the regular world even if you are talking elves and orcs. If you are setting it in a world almost like this one, just around the corner somewhere, then it will very strongly reflect real world conflicts. So you have to decide some very basic questions and how your story is going to answer them.
What is good?
Doing like the law says? Breaking the law in the service of a higher power? Breaking the law on your own initiative? Crossing borders? Defending borders? Fighting? Refusing to fight?
What is evil?
Is there even such a thing?
Personally, I always say I don't believe in evil. I believe in Stupid. Everyone is trying to do the same thing - be happy. Just a lot of people go about it in really stupid ways.
But if you set up one set of characters to be the good guys, whoever they fight end up representing the bad guys.
So, do the bad guys look just like us? Do they represent stasis, disorder, invasion, corruption? Do they serve a higher power, a larger organisation, only themselves?
Whatever you decide, the crucial parts are the differences. If both sides are hyper-religious then the simple fact of being religious won't be considered the representation of Evil (or Stupid) in the story. Unless the point of the story is that both sides come to unnecessary and horrible ends.
If one side succeeds, and the story holds that as a good thing, and the other side fails, and again the story reckons they should fail, then the things that made a difference are the significant points.
So, what do I want to set up as of the good?
Diversity, adaptability, change, imagination, teamwork. Respect. Healing, learning, teaching, earning, building, and fighting when it is necessary.
What do I want to set up as not-good?
All the opposites. Sameness, stasis, relying only on what has been said and done before, arrogance, dismissing the efforts of others. Not just not-fighting when fighting is needed, but fighting when fighting isn't needed.
The invader/defender thing is also key, but I don't just want people invading 'us' to be wrong, I want to make it clear that 'us' invading people is not a good idea either. I guess the simplest way to do that is to set the story in more than one place, defend not just 'our' place but many places. Hmmm, except then you have to have people from outside defending a place that isn't theirs. Which, okay, UN peacekeepers. But not-okay American Neo-Imperialism. Can't be defending them 'for their own good'. Could be cleaning up 'our' own mess - like hot pursuit of a criminal.
Location of 'evil'?
Individual corruption, societal corruption, invaders?
Well all of the above I guess.
Now how to embody that in a bunch of demons...
Bad Sword is the invader. He thinks of himself as a Dragonslayer, following evil back to its lair. He can be a temptation to Sword because she spends her whole life - which is likely to be brief - stopping the bad things that get in to our world, or the alliance of worlds I guess. And of course there are some worlds that make more 'dragons' than others, some that seem to only spit out 'demons', and it has to be really tempting to go charging in there and kill them at source. But it wouldn't be the right thing to do. They aren't actually causing trouble there, just hanging around at home. It would be like charging in and killing every guy in the poor part of town, because so many criminals come out of there. The right model for what they do is crime, not war. So Sword represents the sword of Justice, insightful discrimination, whereas Bad Sword represents the sword of War, destruction.
Sword's story is very simple to read as current politics.
But the book is supposed to be about Chalice. What is the fundamental difference in style, the basic choice that has to be made about healing?
Later on there is the zombie immortality vs natural aging choice, the choosing personal immortality above immortality through your children. But I'm not even sure that is right to set up as a choice. And also it isn't that simple - what actually happens in that story is that the older guy makes his son immortal, and then himself, because his son doesn't turn out perfect and he needs to be around to improve him. Which is more making it a choice between living your own life and trying to get other people to live for you.
I'm realising why I hadn't got a choice at the heart of Healer's story. Because what choice is it? To heal someone or not heal them? Where is the moral difficulty in that? Would have to be, does he heal the bad people too. Which is in fact one of the stories, but can only be in book 2 because he has to have a chalice before he can use it.
To dedicate ones life to healing, or to... go sit on the couch? This isn't a story about teenagers. This is a story about people in their 30s, people who have studied and got a solid career and are wondering what to do next. They are coming up against the limits of the achieveable and wanting to push them back.
So Healer has already dedicated his life to this. He works in an ER, all day, helping people.
Could it be that he doesn't *give* his life to helping them? I mean, he doesn't risk it the way a soldier would?
But I want it to be clear that the day to day grind of everyday life is just as valuable as the one off heroics. He already is a hero, he doesn't need to choose to be one.
Could realising that be the point?
Hmmm.
Could the difference be between taking and giving? Organ donation by stealing chunks vs life donation by giving bits of yourself? If what the Chalice does is pour out bits of the Healer, so he knows he can bring people back from the dead but he would die to do it... then that would be the thing the one who broke the Chalice did wrong, he wasn't content to give life, he had to stick around and make sure it was lived right. In his opinion.
So what the Healer chooses is to give of himself to save others. Like he always has, only made more effective by this magic item.
So what would the temptation be? An alternative item that would allow him to heal others by taking from other others? Scalpel, cut chunks off and splodge them on somewhere else. Stealing, no cost to the Healer.
See the basic trouble is still, that comes down as anti organ donation. Anti surgeon. Like giving your own time and devotion every day isn't enough. And that isn't what I mean at all. Surgeons have the skill that makes organ donation possible. It doesn't matter that they aren't taking their own bits, they are taking willingly offered bits. It would in fact be rather difficult to donate ones own organs and be the surgeon on that procedure. So I can't set up a choice, an alternative, that actually makes sense compared to the real world.
On the bright side, if I can't solve the basic structural problems in this story, I'll have to write fanfic instead. So not exactly a bad thing, really.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-02 03:37 pm (UTC)So build your world, because it sounds interesting, and don't worry about what message people might read into it. People will see the message they want to see, no matter whether it's what you're saying, or actually the complete opposite.
Gina