To be honest, I was hoping to never write something about this. I was hoping to never need to write this. The world was moving on, bit by bit, towards a brighter, more understanding, tomorrow. Unfortunately, the world seems to be rolling backwards. Again.
One of my favourite memories of reading when I was younger, was discovering choice-based novels.
One of the tools that author's reach for, so very frequently, is something to make their reader cry.
Patriotism has long been used to demonstrate charactures of evil, because the inherent risk of the patriot isn't hard to see. Blind faith, in anything, makes you dangerous. It makes you vulnerable to suggestion, and makes it easier for you to step passed your usual lines because you believe faultlessly in something greater than yourself.
There are a lot of approaches when constructing a villain, and for some stories the 2-dimensional figure who just wants to wreck the world is more than enough. However, for most tales, you'll want something a little bit more subtle than that.
In a world of fantasy, the horrifying truth is that death is an inevitability. The only reason that a lot of main characters survive that kind of strange and dangerous world is plot armour, and as many readers of my own books have discovered I prefer it when plot armour is only paper thin.
One of the biggest temptations in writing is to go for broke. You slowly build up to a moment, something you hope that the reader has been waiting for with anticipation, and when the moment arrives you try and top all that anticipation with something amazing. Often times this falls on its face - anticipation is strong than the climax. So you then have to go back and rewrite the build up to be more subtle.
When it comes to discussing the philosophy of most works based in a fantasy world, certain ideas are going to breakdown and become either muddled or confused. It isn't necessarily a bad thing - exploring another world means that certain things aren't comparable. That's the point of fantasy, to be different.
One of the things that I find conspicuous in its absence in many of the books I read, or the TV I watch, is failure. I do understand that media is somewhat constrained, and you don't have the time to really let the character fail over and over, but it doesn't have to feel out of place.
© Copyright 2024, James Milne