I realised at work, a few days ago, that while I had built Reveal from the ground up to be non linear, I hadn’t been taking advantage of it.
In point of fact, I can control time.
Ahah.
Ahahahahaha.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
That is all.
I have really gotta put aside a designated writing time or something. So much for every second day updates.
Also: I’m going to revive my old blog for to make general postings about stuff that happened and other vaguely interesting things. Which means this blog is now about Reveal, writing and whingeing about writers block.
Stay tuned for more intermittent updates, maybe.
I spend frikkin hours creating stuff like this. Nothing can just exist with me, it has to have rules and logic and limits and groundings and pseudo-science and actual science, regardless of whether it’s a new system of transport or the ability to walk up walls.
Basically, it might not exist, but it damn well could.
So why then? Many authors just wave their hand and ignore the problem and it works just fine for them. I mean, Harry Potter just waves his wand and screams some pseudo-Latin and casts the dues ex machina spell to save everyone and J.K.Rowling has enough money to buy France.
Maybe I’m just pedantic, or maybe the ability to consider something from most angles is not so common, or I’m just not lazy enough, or I’m plenty lazy and other people are lazier still, or maybe I place too much importance on the immersion of the reader.
I dunno, but I can tell you for certain that it aint the last one, because immersion and it’s flatmate suspension of disbelief are critical to a good story. And the best way to promote them is to build a world that is plausible, but for certain acceptable elements, which is where we differentiate between suspension of disbelief and willing suspension of disbelief. The first is what you do to the reader by staying in character and continuity, and by constructing a believable narrative, and the second is what the reader does to himself, so as to be able to enjoy the story and not worry about small inconsistencies.
The first one is good story telling, the second one is useful but also the crux of a bad writer.
Why? Because if you stretch willing suspension of disbelief too far, it’s going to snap into a million little pieces. Your character will win the day with his ability to materialise sheer awesome out of nowhere and the reader will be jarred out of the narrative by how stupid and cheap it was.
Bad. Very, very bad.
So you focus on the first type, which results in rule sets.
Just because something can’t happen here, doesn’t mean it defies rules entirely. Everything needs limits and problems and drawbacks and some sort of grounding in the local flavour of reality, so that the reader can emphasise and understand the way the characters interact with these technologies or abilities.
I say this, but don’t go too overboard either. I might find a little blurb about some fake science behind a teleporting cyborg elephant interesting, but if I wanted forty pages about it with technical drawings and diagrams, I’d read the manual to my car.
Just something to consider next time you put pen to paper.
You know how I said the first character would be Leo? I lied. Meet Nathan, who is probably more like Leo version 2.0. Let’s see where I go with this, after more sleep.
Also I’m working on a post about functional magic and suspension of disbelief in writing, that’ll be done soon.
So here’s what I’m thinking for the first character, just to get the ball rolling. It would be a person who is just a little below average, slightly unfit, kinda short, not particularly gifted, nicely jaded as to themselves and the world around them but not terribly depressing. The vast majority of the world would consider themselves to be a few or most of those things, so it’s a nice empathetic starting point which I will totally disregard when it comes to designing the character proper.
So what’s the opposite of that? If you’re wishing to be ‘better’, you don’t do it by a half or just a little bit.
Welp, that means someone strong and fast, tall, pretty, given to a high degree of physical ability and possessed of a happy, upbeat personality.
Already I’m sensing a duality here, because you can take a person out of their circumstance, but you can’t take the circumstance out of a person. There’d be a thin veneer of what the person would think to be a ‘happy’ person would be like, and then their old self, who has no idea how to react to the situation. It’s one thing to be told, or to tell yourself that you’re happy, and it’s another thing to actually be happy.
Regardless, what would a genetically blessed person do in the stereotype laid out by a person who is unhappy with them self? One would think that they’d do all the things that the person found impossible before. Boring, normal things like dating or succeeding at someone’s expense or what have you. Of course, by the nature of this whole debacle, the whole thing is taken way too far and in an intensely personal direction.
And this guy wants to be the hero. To save the world. Being a little taller and more handsome can do that, you know.
Yes, one super cool guy leading the resistance against a corrupt and bloated government in the shadows, whilst the oblivious citizenry live in poverty and despair, awaiting a saviour.
Set in the present day, taking place behind closed doors and in the back rooms, one man prepares himself for the ultimate test.
He must end this war of attrition. He must bring the truth to the people, and stop the machine of opression. He must go forth and destroy the head of the snake, the posterboy for big brother, the herald of the age of stupidity.
The president.
I think I will call this character Leo. It’s a code name. Obviously. Because code names are cool.
I went and had an idea for a world that could contain my own scattershot muse. So I went ahead and made a blog about it. And, since I fully expect it to make no sense to anyone, I’m going to have this blog too, partly to hang as the author proper and de-construct my own stuff, and partly to put up whatever’s on my mind at the time.
First thing’s first: A transformation story? Am I crazy? Well, when you phrase it like that, yes. I tend to doublethink myself out of that hole though, by way of the following reasoning. All characters and people change as they grow, be it mentally or emotionally. They get scars, or become more powerful, or get an extra 99 levels or what have you. Seeing how all this change is going on inside, it’s only a small step of logic to have that change on the outside. This has an added bonus in that the characters themselves start to drive the story, rather than some external catalyst, like a bad guy with nothing better to do, or the zombie apocalypse, or a disgruntled door to door salesman.
I’d like to be up front about something. The odds of this blog having anything resembling a consistent update schedule are slim to nil, and now that I’ve shattered your expectations, I can surpass them quite easily. Everything is falling into place…
I’m actually quite excited about this whole Reveal thing. I’ve got a character to shamelessly base on people I know design, so I’ll get cracking, I guess.
Wish me luck.
