Well I hope you didn't miss the sweet art from the Art Ninja. Quite a few tasty visual bits of sweet world, homegrown and pesticide free. I'm not giving any of the who is who stuff away just yet, so just feast your eyes and don't sweat the anonymity.
Back to the hero. Our hero. Our baby hero who isn't even close to the badass we want him to be. And he will be amazing at the end of his journey, that's the fun of the journey. To watch a hero grow into one who can destroy the villain. Or to grow into a hero we believe can or even will destroy the villain but fails, ending in tragedy.
Enough flummery. Our hero. An idea of good story versus bad story is the amount of showing vs. telling. We need to fill our set up scenes showing the reader several things:
Who the hero is.
Who is in their life.
What makes their life unbearable.
What the hero really wants in life.
We show who the hero is by having him engage with the external world. One could use a narrator and just tell the reader "He was a tense and nervous man." with a still shot of the character. Better though, would be an interaction with the external world that showed the reader how tense and nervous the character is.
He hunched over his desk, scribbling in his book. The muscles in his neck bulged outward in tightness. The sound of a sharp knock at the door startled him so much he jumped out of his book and his chair.
This does create more cells of artwork, but that paragraph could be shown in four pictures:
1) He hunched over his desk, scribbling in his book.
2) The muscles in his neck bulged outward in tightness.
3)The sound of a sharp knock at the door startled him so much
4) he jumped out of his book and his chair.
That said, we put our hero in the context of doing something in the world we've created for him. He is a young beduin male with no parents. He must work for the tribe to earn his place with no father to do so for him.
We show this by finding a place for conflict between what our young hero really wants, to leave the desert for the empire and join the knights of the faith, and his duties to the tribe that has raised him.
Where might we find such a conflict? Well, if the men of his tribe decide to go raiding a neighboring area for supplies, our hero would want to go (fighting experience to be better knight in empire). They do not want him to go.
Now, this is all behind the curtain stuff, on the finished page the reader doesn't know what the hero's motivation is until it is shown on the page. Showing, not just telling, will have our hero's motivations outed by his actions. By pressing to join the raiding party, the conflict will pull out his motivations naturally. At that point, we're just on for the ride.
Posted Saturday, May 4th 2013 @ 11:17