Drawing from the Well
I have meant to get this post out for two days, but life gets in the way sometimes, right?
This week, I pivoted. In working on future IP, I realized that I need to know my current characters on a deeper level. So, I dug back into some old research I did and pulled together some info from other writers out there and put together a couple of character profile templates: one for major characters and one for side characters. The difference? Length. The major character profile is about ten times as long as the side character version.
So now I’m working through these, putting together a “book” of profiles to use as reference when I get to drafting. It’s a lot to work on and I need to do it faster because I have 24 major characters and 89 side characters to profile.
How many are done? Oh, right!
Two.
I’ll get to work now.
Filling the Well
This week, I chewed through some books, three namely: Revenant Gun, Hexarchate Stories, and Cruel Crown. The first two round out The Machineries of Empire series which ended in an unexpected way and was rounded out by the short story collection that followed. Cruel Crown is a pair of short stories from the Red Queen series by Victoria Aveyard. They were recently encapsulated within the Broken Throne collection which, so far, is outstanding. I forgot how much I missed this series. So I’ll continue working through it and the other two books I’m reading. We’ll see where we land next week.
79/100 for #ProjectBookworm2021
Well Chat
The Rule of Cool is a justification for the willful suspension of disbelief. Why? Because it’s cool!
The rule itself says that “the limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness.” [TVTropes.com] What does that mean? Said another way, the cooler something is, the less it has to make sense. If something is epic, it only has to have a tenuous thread to internal consistency to keep the reader.
This makes me think of a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you haven’t seen it, this isn’t much of a spoiler, especially for a — WOW! I just looked it up and Raiders is 40 years old this year! Who knew? So, yeah, this is a spoiler, but you’ve had time. There’s a scene pretty early where Indy faces off with a baddie with a whip. You expect Indy to have a whip-off with him…and then he pulls out a gun and shoots the guy and moves on.
It’s cool!
Dragonball Z is also a poster-child for the Rule of Cool. Everything keeps getting bigger, angrier, and more extreme. One of those is when Gohan faces off against Cell. His father is dead. Some of his friends are dead. Cell has come back from near annihilation multiple times already and Gohan is on the ropes, one arm dead at his side. With his father cheering him on from the spirit realm, he summons more power than ever and executes a Kamehameha attack that is literally bigger than his entire body to win.
It’s so cool.
It makes absolutely no sense.
Gohan should be dead. He’s effectively beaten, his body half broken. He can barely stand. His enemy has already killed a handful of people who were all considered stronger than him. He should not even be able to fight this fight, never mind win it.
But it’s so cool that he does.
That is the Rule of Cool and it can be used so well in fantasy. This genre, as speculative fiction, already asks the reader to suspend disbelief, to accept things that do not exist as in-universe, on-page fact. Big moments in books are all important, so to go big in fantasy is asking readers to step further away from fact. So if you’re going to ask that of your readers, you’d better deliver something that’s super cool.
I’ve got a couple of these moments in my first couple of books. As we get closer to the end of the series, there are more to come. It’s going to be fun and cool and a little unbelievable.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG