Building the City, Part III

Cross-posted from here.

“My question for you: which character in your current book (the one you’re reading or writing) is going through the most dramatic journey? And do you like that character better than the rest?”

I’m not sure if mine will be especially helpful, but you’re certainly welcome to quote it if you like.

I’m working on a fantasy adventure rather than a romance, so I don’t really have a hero and heroine; I only have a single protagonist, the heroine. Her journey/ladder is mainly external, as she’s struggling to survive in a very strange place. Internally, she’ll be progressing from actively antisocial to someone who is at least tolerant of other people; but I’m not sure that’s a matter of character growth so much as the difference between feeling forced to interact with others at first, and having it be entirely her own option later on. She is, of course, my favorite character in the story… but that doesn’t mean I’ll be nice to her!

The antagonist isn’t really a villain; he’s just a very authoritarian (and somewhat self-centered) fellow who’s trying to keep his group alive and fed in a harsh and unforgiving environment. He probably has a steeper ladder than the protagonist; interacting with the heroine is going to force him to realize that authority is not a guarantee of obedience. I wouldn’t say I like him, though.

Building the City, Part II

Writing ideas come from funny places. Take my current project:

The setting is courtesy of a dream I had. This wasn't the setting for the dream itself; it was the setting for a MMORPG that I was play(test)ing in the dream. But it was a hell of a cool setting, and I was having a lot of fun playing a character there - or dreaming that I was playing, anyway. (It's really not as surreal as it sounds...) If I were a programmer, I might try to build that game. If I were an artist, I'd draw pictures of that place. (Unfortunately, stick figures really wouldn't do it justice, and that's about the limit of my artistic ability.) As it happens, I enjoy writing, so I decided to set a story there.

Which was fine, but what would the main character do? Well, he'd be a new arrival; so there would be scavenging, exploring, and other survival-oriented activities. He would discover that people here had powers - they could do things that weren't supposed to be possible. And he'd quickly discover that some powers could be acquired... and not just acquired, but accumulated. It was dangerous, but it could be done.

What sort of power would he acquire? What direction would he go with that knowledge? In a setting like that, what would he want for himself?

I read a lot of comics when I was younger. (I still read some, but it's nowhere near as many. Partly that's because of time and money considerations, and that's partly because the quality seems to have dropped off - couple not-so-good writing with an addiction to endless crossovers, and I'm gone.) At one point, while reading the New Mutants, I started wondering about what sort of character I'd add if I were writing a story in that setting. Well, Marvel Comics has a character called Selene, a sort of psychic vampire who drains people's life energy to fuel her powers and extend her life. And it occurred to me that if she had a son, he might have a similar power, but fueled by blood. This appealed to me, since it added an interesting moral dimension to using his power: he could be as powerful as he wanted, if he was willing to take enough blood. Plus, it would be fun to write: you could introduce him with a couple of minor powers (strength, dexterity, a bit of damage resistance, and a powerful mind shield to hide his secrets from prying telepaths), and then drop hints (dead animals around the estate, using powers he hadn't shows previously). When his parentage and the true nature of his powers was finally revealed, you could have a big, dramatic showdown over whether he'd be able to stay with the team.

Sadly, Marvel never hired me as a writer, and the idea was left to languish on the top shelf in the back of some dark closet in my mind. I didn't forget entirely, though; and it occurred to that it would be an excellent fit for this setting.

The character himself wouldn't work, though. His background was too specific to the Marvel Universe. That could be adapted, but I didn't want him to be born with the power. I didn't want him to be born in the city at all; part of the weirdness of the setting is that people just occasionally wake up there. (New arrivals have no memory of their past, or how they got there; but they retain their skills, and they all have a single power: they can understand each other's languages.)

Which led me to another question: what sort of person would actually want a power like that?

It would be somebody who wanted access to a lot of power, obviously, and wasn't too picky about what he had to do get it. So, probably somebody who didn't have a lot of power, and couldn't afford to build up slowly (by accumulating minor powers). Right about then, my protagonist sudden became female, and Eve was born.

Eve, I thought, would be a new arrival and something of a loner by nature. She'd be a fighter, but also realistic about her limitations. She would feel trapped by the people who had taken her in, and by her inability to survive without them. Then she'd learn about the Temple on the Hill, and see a possible way out - if she could survive it.

Eight weeks and fourteen pages later, I have the heart of the story. It already begs for a sequel.

I wish I had more time to write.

Building the City, Part I

So... I finally finished writing up the short story about the Ruined City. Except, it's not a short story, exactly. It's more a capsule version of a book - like an outline, but with scenes, if that makes any sense.

This idea of using a short story as an outline is new to me, but I like it. I'm usually not much for outlines; in my youth, I'd just sit down and start writing. Of course, in my youth I had time to sit up writing for a couple of hours every night, so it was easy enough to keep my head in the story. These days I don't have that kind of time - at least, not if I want to see my wife and the boys. (This story/outline is about fourteen pages long, and it took me eight and a half weeks to write it. That's an insanely long time, but it's a direct result of trying to cram the project in around the edges of everything else.)

So I've had to become more organized in order to compensate: make lists of characters, take notes on the setting, outline the story. The problem is, I'm not very good at that sort of organization; it takes time, and makes writing feel more like work and less like fun. This, on the other hand, was actually enjoyable, and didn't rob me of my enthusiasm for the setting.

Minor Powers

I've been reading comic books for most of my life. Some of them are very episodic, but others build complex storylines across multiple issues, treating each issue as a chapter in the story.

Among the various things that interest me about comic book mythology is the way in which relatively minor powers get explored and applied. This is particularly true among the Marvel Universe mutants, but it shows up in plenty of other places. Just to choose an example from a completely different genre, consider Emma Bull's Finder - a novel set in Bordertown, where the Faerie Realms have returned to touch Earth again. The main character has a power which sets him apart from other people, which makes him into both a freak and a hero. His power...

...is the ability to find things. He's a locator. Tell him what you're looking for, and he can lead you to it.

It's not especially potent, and it's certainly not useful in combat. But it's an extremely useful ability in everyday life. And it gets him into trouble as much as it helps him out of it, maybe more.

So tell me: what are your favorite underappreciated powers? What abilities offer the most potential for clever use? What superpower might make someone famous, outside of superhero slug-fests? If you could have one stupid little ability, what would it be?

Story of the Ruined City

I wish I had more time to write.

I few posts back, I wrote down what I remembered of a dream. The dream featured a multiplayer computer game, and while the "real world" elements of the dream (meeting people, setting up computers, logging in) were random and not that interesting, the game itself was. So, while we were in the hospital for the birth of Secondborn, I started writing about it.

If I were writing this chronologically, it would be a "white room" story: the protagonist wakes up with no idea where she is or what's going on, and the story proceeds from there. Of course, if I were writing it that way, it would be a book.

I'd like for it to be a book, eventually; but right now, it's taken me over two weeks to get to six pages. With the arrival of the newborn, the Beautiful Wife's allergic reaction (to the pain pills, we think), and Firstborn's tummy bug, it's amazing that I've captured even this much of the story.

And that's pretty much what I'm doing, here: capturing it. I'm basically writing a short story, alternating between action I remember from the dream and little bits of backstory to flesh out the situation. The idea is that later on (at this rate, possibly a few years later on), I can come back and rediscover not only the basics of the plot, but also the mood and feel of the story and setting. Hopefully this will help me remember not only what I wanted to write, but why I wanted to write it.

Whether I will then want to expand this piece to a full length book, or make it the first chapter of another book, remains to be seen. Both ideas are appealing, and I think I'll have to get some perspective on the piece before I know. (They aren't mutually exclusive, either; I could expand the piece into a book, then use the capsule version as a catch-me-up opening chapter for a sequel.)

Either way, it's nice to have a new world to play in.

Dream of the Ruined City

I have spent the last two nights dreaming about playing a really intriguing MMORPG. It was set in a massive, partly-ruined city; the architectural flavor was a bit old-fashioned and European. The buildings tended to top out around three or four stories, and - the night before last - the whole place had a dark, gritty feel to it. There was a large, open area of rubble, which looked like the result of a bomb or something large crashing into the city; a few streets beyond that was a large stone temple set on a hillside. Inside the temple was a progression of battles; each victory offered you a selection of new powers and abilities, until the last. If you challenged darkness at the heart of the temple, it slapped you down - hard.

Last night, I discovered that the other side of the city was cleaner, brighter, more given to white marble than grey stone. There were also heaps more character possibilities than I'd been aware of, and it was a very mix-and-match system. I don't remember the details (they seemed very clear at the time, but either that was dream-certainty or else I've lost them since then), but I have a sense that while some areas of study were contradictory, you could learn all sorts of different abilities. Over on the darker side of town, you gained power and skill by defeating things; on the light side of town, you gained power and skill by helping people.

My character had (or had adopted?) a very Victorian appearance, with a dark coat and top-hat and a cane; I have the impression that there were a lot of different looks available, not all of them belonging to the same time period.

The overall dynamic seemed to be that the dark things had taken over, or moved in to, one side of the city. Some people were fighting them back, and some were dealing with them in exchange for power, and some were doing both by turns; the balance of power was pretty delicate. I imagine - though this was not part of either dream - that there was a lot of political intrigue going on. I have no idea what the ordinary citizens were doing; the denizens of this city seemed to be mainly squatters or scavengers or survivors, as if the solid citizens had fled or died. All sorts of supplies were available, but seldom in quantity.

I have no idea where this came from, or if I'll dream about it again; if there's a game like this already, I don't know about it. (And I don't play MMORPGs at all, so the game mechanics and whatnot in the dream were all based on one-player computer RPGs.) Still... if I had a skilled development team and a couple of years to work on it, I would totally try to build this.