29/06/2021 - Narrative and Perspective

In my uneducated opinion, Terry Pratchett and George R.R. Martin are probably polar opposites.

One created whimsical tours through a nonsensical world on a disc, playing with tropes and the reality of the Discworld itself to create some utterly compelling journeys, while the other drags you barefoot and screaming through a fictional world that feels far too real for its own good. If Terry was a happy winter elf with a special kind of candy cane hidden in his hat, then GRRM is the machine that calculates the naughty list while the elves are in the other room partying, unaware of their impending doom.

I really can’t overstate the impact reading A Song of Ice and Fire has had on my writing. I was never a Harry Potter kid beyond the movies, and while I was rather obsessed with the Discworld series for a good long time, the painfully mechanical obsessiveness of Westeros’ worldbuilding really threw me for a loop. It wasn’t just how densely packed it was or how long it takes to get anywhere, it was the way the books handled the characters that really caught my attention. Terry Pratchett had a habit of giving the audience insider information on what any given character was thinking or plotting in any given scene, provided that it enhanced the experience. He used kind of a… “semi-omniscient narrator” I guess you could say. Thing is, a lot of newbie writers do that, too, but without the know-how to make it work without upsetting the scene or the whole plot. I followed that way of writing like it was normal, not realising how much harm it was doing to whatever narrative I was trying to tell. There was no direction or focus, and everything I wrote ended up looking random and stream-of-consciousness.

Had I continued writing Window Shopping, for example, you would have seen a similar pattern begin to form, with odd, random mini-journeys nestled in a very weak overarching plot. The same is true, in a way, for Moondust. Some of what takes place was not planned at the start, and probably has no real business being in the story at all, but I think I’ve just about managed to Frankenstein it all together. The lone exception to this is Winter’s Break, who serves zero purpose as a result of my lack of adherence to the overarching plot, and a general lack of understanding of how to make that plot happen in the first place. Whenever I ran out of ideas I simply came up with new ones to fill in the gaps and bridge across to the next important thing, and I think that has harmed the overall quality of the story immensely…

Have I ever mentioned Tite Kubo before? He’s another big inspiration for me, though definitely more in terms of visual style and concept rather than execution. He had that same method when writing and drawing the BLEACH manga, inventing new characters in order to solve problems. Not exactly efficient, and definitely not good for a story’s overall narrative unless pulled off well. You can see his inspirations in the black/white theme of Sleipnir’s Hammers, along with certain characters that will be discussed at a later date…

Anyway, I’m stream-of-consciousnessing again, aren’t I? GRRM. Reading Game of Thrones was like opening my eyes for the first time. All of a sudden it became so blatantly obvious what I’d been doing wrong. A Song of Ice and Fire has each chapter told from a singular perspective, with no exceptions or wiggle room. The audience can only be told what the character actually knows, and no further. With that one simple concept - a fixed perspective - suddenly the story became about someone, and I could write with confidence, and Moondust turned from that awful initial pass to the version that is currently on this site. It’s still a long way from being up to scratch, but it’s a far cry from what it could have stayed as. At the very least it’s now a functional story rather than something you’d stick to the fridge.

I didn’t mean for this blog to be so long. This was all meant to be a lead-in to talking about Black Mountain and how developing this skill at handling a fixed perspective has made writing Vinyl Scratch a fun and challenging experience, but this has gone on long enough. In short, I’m having great fun with her, how differently she sees the world compared to Twilight and Moondancer, and how her relative lack of knowledge colours her perceptions of the same events, or makes them seem utterly irrelevant while Twilight’s in the corner panicking.

Anywho, it looks like I’ll miss my goal of getting Black Mountain started before the end of this month. I need to finish some cover art for it beforehand, but the story itself seems to be going pretty well right now. Moondust is progressing at a slower pace, but it’s coming.

I’m also developing ideas for yet another new story, this time focusing on Sunset Shimmer. More details on that at some point in the near future…