Nazgul number 10, I liked your description of your land—that’s almost a poem by itself. Throw in some returns and you’ll see what I mean. You do good verse! I agree with you about shades of gray—and a story with plenty of gray is more interesting. I also like an author with compassion for characters—do you feel for your characters? Do you like them? I liked the lost dragon element—good luck on the name. I really like the mother tree giving birth to all the plants.
Lila Bramble, you wrote
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I try not to use themes. I have genres (but dosen't everyone?) but I don't intend for a theme, I let the story flow, I just try to write something I think would get people interested. Most of my stories are things I made up in my head, little adventures to think about when I'm bored, and I just started writing them out. That's where ALL my stories come from!
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Believe it or not, that’s the best way to develop themes! They shouldn’t be planned, they should flow naturally out of the story. You probably have more themes than you know, but you shouldn't worry about that, they won’t bite!
I liked your water and earth conflict a lot—I was thinking, sounds like archetypes of male (earth) and female (water) and the battle of the sexes as a vast war, cool—then I read about the leaders falling in love, great! Suits my take on it. I like the idea of starting a war by pulling a chunk of country into the ocean. That’s a cool idea.
Thanks, Littlemanpoet for bringing up themes again—I forgot about that. I’m going to say more about them.
My themes in my literary stories are sort of endgame themes—characters pushing against the limits of their existence, fighting aging, grief. Aside from some current sorrows I won’t go into, when I was 13 I found a wonderful friend, after being very lonely for a couple of years—almost no one my age read Tolkien back in my time, and here I’d found someone on my street, beautiful and kind, who knew about Frodo! Wow!! She looked kind of like a young Luthien, she had long dark hair and fair skin and she was pretty.. and, no joke, she had leukemia. She and I and another outcast, a brave and cheerful blonde girl whose parents were down on their luck, we walked to school together every morning forming one of those magic circles where you complete each other and each becomes witty and clever when the others are around. So, around Christmas she had a relapse. She died. This was the first time I got this feeling of praying so hard your mind pulls at the universe, trying to turn it from its path … can’t be done. Every morning I’d want her to knock on my door so badly that it seemed the force of my longing would bring her to my doorstep … can’t be done.
That’s my model for entering another world in my fantasy story. That feeling of pulling at reality with your mind because you can’t bear it the way it is. So my characters transition into my other world while in the grip of unrequited love (anyone remember how delusional unrequited love makes you? Your dreams drag reality out of whack, at least your own perception of it. Remember the denial? It’s mindbending!) or unremitting grief.
So let’s discuss the two types of fantasy. Tolkein’s is Immersion Fantasy: Reading the books, you’re in the other, wilder world and you never enter this world. Advantage: it’s hypnotic. Difficulty: writing it requires lots of research or invention to make it authentically detailed. Advantage: great scope for big adventures, sweeping events, big feelings, larger than large characters. Disadvantage: Subtlety is harder. Many-layered characters and complicated situations are hard—the story rarely leaves time, and the big, interesting effects and events tempt writer and reader into neglecting character and the --mmm–dissastisfying facets of existance, like unhappy endings and disappointing people.
We know Tolkien considered writing the other type, with Aelfwine (sp? Sorry) as his sailor to the elf world—but he didn’t take that route. Let’s call the other form Transition Fantasy: part of it in this world, part in the other world. Harry Potter’s a somewhat cartoonish example, Narnia also. Mark Twain’s A Conneticut Yankee is a brilliant example. And serious fantasy writer Littlemanpoet’s story would be another example both stirring and intriguing!
This type is risky to write, because going to the other world is part of every reader’s fantasy. So, you need a very careful and classy set-up or it’s wince-inducing. Complicated characters and an original angle become very important—the character-bar is higher if you’re using admitted ‘real people.’ On the other hand, the temptation to let events drive the story and neglect character may be a little less—though I think Lewis and Rowling succumbed. And while in a real world setting, the writer can use all sorts of complicated attitudes, settings and situations that the reader will immediately understand. I’m getting great comic relief and some good themes from my second lead’s breakout of a nursing home that I would never be able to tap if it was a nunnery—there’s not as much resonance when there’s not as much commonality.
[ July 03, 2002: Message edited by: Nar ]