Ghost Trick

Obviously you want the story to stand completely on it's own, but do you think this blog and other ways of communicating with your audience has made you more willing to include details in the story that are more esoteric or require more context?

Mm, prooobably, but I really love dense work. My favourite media is always overwrought, busy, and layered, sucking you into a world that's been illustrated to a degree you immediately and fully buy into it. My favourite fantasy comic is Nausicaa, and it's often called too hard to read, my favourite novel is Moby-Dick which goes off on incredible tangents about the world of whaling. My favourite game is Vagrant Story which has about a dozen ways to play it and a story so sketchy in a world so rich that people are still trying to interpret what happens in it even today. I like worlds where much of what you're seeing isn't explained. You're dropped into an opaque setting, and exploring that setting and putting its pieces together is just as much a part of the experience as following the plot and the characters.

All this is to say that Unsounded would still be a snaggled jungle even if I'd made it before the internet ever existed. This is just my jam :)

There's a lot of stuff about Kasslyne you ain't gonna get a canon answer for. You'll just have to try and go there and see things for yourself.

Lights and Shadows of Cyber City.

Hello Ashley! Returned to an old story of mine and trying to rebuild large parts of the plot that didn't satisfy me. I figure it's best to detail all the major story beats before I fill in all the icing around them. From chapter 1 to chapter 15 (so we're not considering spoilers!), what major story beats would you say you finalized first? Was it hard deciding which little bits needed to come up and when, even after you had scripted the major steps?

–You’re definitely on the right track, I also used that method. I had a beginning and an end point for the first book, then looked backwards from there, mapping the major beats in each chapter. It’s also personally important for me to know the WHY of everything. I need a Why for everything I write and do, I find it motivating.

So it’s been a while and my memory is foggy, but I believe the broad outline was like:> Duane & Sette have misadventures that help them understand each other. Why do they need to understand each other? Because they are lonely, broken people and the goal is to better them.> They make it to her cousin’s along with the macguffin, which results in a climax, but macguffin escapes. What is the why of the macguffin? The macguffin isn’t just an antagonist; it’s all antagonism. It is the ultimate macguffin, and is motivated by the misery and misdeeds in the story itself.> They chase the macguffin and wind up isolated in a situation that forces out the best of Sette and the worst of Duane, with disastrous consequences. Why is the worst of Duane important to see? Because if there’s hope for the worst of us, despair is only an excuse. Why is the best of Sette important to see? Because it’s not so very Best, and she needs to see all the room she has to get better.> They reunite with the macguffin for another battle.

Easy-peasy. But now let’s flesh out that first step and mark out the milestones:

engage and fight the wand’ring root, introducing their respective characters in very broad strokes

encounter the RBB, enter the crypt, still in-character, but each gradually starts to crack. Duane goes super violent, Sette shows fear

fight each other at the waystation, Duane’s veneer of civility is fully shattered by admitting he’s a closet cannibal with control issues, Sette’s veneer of roguishness is shattered by admitting she’s scared of failing her da

True selves semi-revealed, Sette has an adventure in town, starts trouble, leads to…

Duane battling Quigley, coming face to face with Alderode

Sette sneaks Duane over the border, enters his memories

By seeing who Duane truly was, Sette fully understands who he is now

During their fight the next day in the toyshop, Duane fully understands what Sette needs of him (he doesn’t fully understand who she is, he’s not as insightful as she is)

And bam, that’s how I outline. It’s a pretty simple structure when you lay it out like that, but then you start adding in B and C plots, two dozen secondary characters, and it becomes deceptively complex!

Otherwise yeah, figuring out where to move the plot forward, where to cut away to other storylines (and how much to devote to them), where to pause and meander for character building - that’s all the most difficult stuff. Most of us can sit around and write cute dialog or character studies all day - fanfiction is FULL of amateur writers who can do this marvellously - but the BEST and most successful writers are able to tell an engaging narrative with lots of moving parts and suspenseful story turns. Maybe they get panned because their prose isn’t elegant or maybe their characters are hackneyed - but they still sell mountains of books because they know how to keep readers turning pages by structuring a suspenseful story.

Good luck with that, ‘cause it’s the hardest part! And personally, I have particular considerations I have to make that you probably don’t have to in prose, particularly prose meant to be read all at once. I need to try and make each page at least mildly engaging and end on a hook wherever I can, since there’s no guarantee the reader is going to come back to progress the story in two days :D

My prank for today is I drew this. YOU SHOULD SEE THE LOOK ON YOUR FACE.

Mayhem│Beautiful Destruction │Misdirected Hostility│Disorder by Aaron J Groen

painted peaks; death valley, california

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my personal curse is the knowledge that I function best with rigid structure and strict routine but am almost totally incapable of independently establishing or maintaining that structure and routine

idk if i have posted this on here yet, but i made it back in 2022 when i spent spring equinox up in Scotland and saw the land wake up and bloom. once again been on my travels this equinox but I haven’t had time to draw yet so happy spring fellow northerners the sun is back

Okay but imagine super-zombie-strength Duane with a fully metal pymaric body. He'd be Alderode's terminator!

Full Metal Spellwright!