The Puzzle Pieces, Laid Out

Most of my Fragments have yet to find a home—but a few of them have. Here, I've decided to compile all of the bullet points from my first five Fragments posts and mark off the ones that have gone somewhere. The rest? Well, they might have an easier time finding their partners with everything in one place.

• An army mime (after seeing the words juxtaposed in a Scrabble solver)
• Some sort of traditional epic fantasy
• A family that possesses full-grown beards from birth that protect their owners (thanks to Caleb being weird after reading the surname "Beardsley")
• A world with no bodies, only voices
• A musical based on Journey songs
• An overly-independent disabled person learning to rely on others sometimes
• A modern day teen sucked into a fantasy world who insists on calling sprites "pixels"
• A family where all of the children are named after different types of tea
• A dark novel titled Thus Quoth the Raven
• Something with two cats sitting atop a car in a neighbourhood and chatting whilst sipping tea (because my eyes took too long to figure out that was just a ladder wrapped in plastic blowing in the wind...)
• Main characters called Lizzie and Ferd who are always at each other's throats
• A fight scene on the outside of this building
• Someone whose dream is to be a graphic T-shirt designer
• A character named Jovial Munk (at my father's request)
• Twin female telepaths, one who controls sugar and the other salt
• Terrorist retirement (after my mother mishearing "terrace")
• A manga about a foosball player
• An excuse to use "mediastinum" (dedicated to Dr. Li)
• Someone with the phone number 324-5873 (spells "failure")
• Some modern fantasy version of the Song of Everlasting Sorrow
• A man walks out to get his mail, sees a wasp, slaps it to the ground with the letters he just retrieved, stomps on it, and yells "SKILLS" before returning to the house (my father is cool sometimes)
• A super-steampunk megalethoscope
• Intelligent, demonic honeybees
• A maestro who can command heartbeats by conducting
• A character named Martha Bell who outlives her husband significantly (after seeing a couple's gravestone with the husband dying at about 40 in the 1930s and the wife with no end year inscribed)
• A fighting gnome with an ice pick (how my mother described her earache)
• A crack dictionary with fake definitions of the chemical elements (i.e. Manganese, n., the language spoken by otaku, or Boron, n., an idiot who can't even be interesting about it.)
• Someone with a painfully Greek last name (Not quite, but I do have a painfully Greek first name or two)
• "They can turn off my feelings like they're turning off the light" (line from a Phil Collins song)
• A story based on example sentences in the dictionary on my computer
• Characters who fly planes over tornadoes/hurricanes and drop bombs down the middle of them to disperse the circulation (my father's idea for a real-life thing)
• Action girls that are personifications of thunder and lightning
• Someone who brings optical illusions to life/reality
• Personality traits as currency
• A Hetalia SpaIre fic insisting that the Black Irish origin myth does have at least one grain (or one couple) of truth to it
• A fan fiction for The Kill Order concerning the pair near the beginning with the boat
• Someone with the ability to remember/know things the moment someone else forgets them
• Hetalia-style personification of religions (although maybe with a higher proportion of serious scenes)
• Personifications of languages (although likely discontinued)
• Some novel in a Douglas Adams type of voice (if I should prove to be so capable)
• An addictive pill that utilises stress hormones for weight loss purposes
• A glove with a watch embedded in the palm
• A world where f_s = μ_sF_s
• The secret lives of instruments left in the band room between rehearsals
• Fantasy with a romantic element, where the heroine chooses the ordinary human over the magical/whatever love interest
• A fantasy with an African setting
• A good, old post-nuclear apoc
• A city whose residents do not age as long as they don't leave the borders—but if they leave, they'll immediately progress to their actual age, which at this point would turn many of them to dust
• "Beaned up" as a drug euphemism
• Two cooks (minor characters) who exchange witty banter at a restaurant the MC frequents (inspired by the omelette bar cooks where I have breakfast)
• Someone who plays the oboe d'amore
• Birnan, the very choleric (and fire-controlling) character from my old NaNoWriMo novel and the only one of the lot that I really enjoyed writing
• Garjen, a character of mine who is quite cheerful and a bit psychopathic, and her main mode of attack is through bubbles that explode, have poison, etc. (she never really got to have her fun outside of a few RPs)
• "She was forced to support herself not only by the pen, but as a secret agent." (Mac dictionary entry: pen)
• A plot based on alarming fantasy racism
• Mountain ranges/landscapes based on specific infrared absorption spectra (might have to be something visual)
• A nutty professor and his adorable, long-suffering lab assistant (based on my Organic Chemistry Lab)

Making a Character Kernel in Three Easy Steps

This certainly isn't a complete guide to putting a character together, but it might be an interesting method if you don't know where to start.

Step One: Typification

In one or two words, what is your character's role? Interpret that however you like. Archetypes, occupations, whatever you neeed a character to do or whatever you happen to come up with.

Examples:

• The mentor
• The rogue
• The murder investigator

Step Two: Contradiction

What is the opposite of the role you just put? What is a quality someone is such a role couldn't or shouldn't have? Assign that quality to your character.  (The same one it doesn't fit.)

Examples:

• The inept mentor
• The loyal rogue
• The softhearted murder investigator

Step Three: Reconciliation

We kind of made everything a mess in the last step, so let's put things together a little more. Is what you put really a contradiction? I'll tell you right now: no. It isn't. Now you tell me, why isn't it? How can those two seemingly opposite things coexist in the same person? Is one of the two aspects not quite what you may have thought it was? Does one side override the other most of the time? What conditions bring the other side to the forefront?

Examples:

• The inept mentor is the most leader-like individual thrown into the situation. Everyone in the situation has to figure out certain skills; our mentor is no exception, but he takes it upon himself to teach the others regardless.
• The loyal rogue is only a rogue as far as skill set is concerned; she's sneaky, prefers to work on her own, and knows all of the best pickpocketing techniques, but she still has friends, and she'll put her neck on the line for them.
• The softhearted murder investigator is usually one or the other. Her default is softhearted, but she steels herself for her detective work. Of course, she's not living altogether separate lives—the more grotesque murders still shake her up and haunt her sleep, and she can shut off her sensitive in her daily life when those situations become bleak.

Now you should have a good starting place. I've heard the main difference between round and flat characters is a sort of inner conflict—and most characters made with this method will have that from the get-go.

What do you think? A worthwhile tool for your writing arsenal?

Prompt Writing #7

Perhaps not the most exciting, but a short bit of character exploration nevertheless.

Prompt [2YN generator]:

"Yesterday, your character had a chance to meet an alternate version of themselves. Today, they wake up in a world _almost_ like their own. A world populated with different versions of the people they knew. Can they return home? Or will they be trapped forever among familiar strangers?"

Randomly Selected Story and Character: Suture, Jethro

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

In this world, Jethro was not in fact a student at the university. When a baffling new reason to study thermodynamics hadn't been thrust upon him, it wasn't surprising.

The others were still in the area, though, virus or no virus. Powers or no powers.

And he had no particular reason not to check up on them.

Midas was the easiest to find, since he was the only one actually enrolled at the university. He was easy to walk behind for a while, too, with his earbuds perpetually in his ears. He didn't seem to be in any trouble. Got to class on time, didn't really interact with friends. It was Midas all right, even if his occasional subconscious conducting wasn't controlling any heartbeats in the area. There wasn't terribly much reason to stay after him.

Sven was at his high school three streets over. He was eating lunch with a few friends Jethro didn't recognise. Of course, he'd only seen Sven at the studying sessions, which were not open to the common populace. There was no reason to assume Sven didn't actually have friends. Perhaps his personality wasn't the most conducive to that, but he did have a life outside of his abilities. Jethro could stand to learn a bit more about him personally.

Not here, though. Not in this world. Although little time had passed since the illness had changed any of them, they were still slightly different people. He couldn't leave the other world, the one in danger, to his powerless self.

If he could find his way back, at least.

Abandonment Issues

Sometimes ideas go places. Sometimes they go places I don't want them to. And sometimes they just don't go anywhere.

In any case, a lot of stories just aren't going to see the light of day. That's part of the reason I'm sharing so many of my novel ideas—I have little interest in some of them, and some I may just never get to, but I feel like they all deserve a little bit of limelight time just for being nice enough to tap on my shoulder and amuse me for a while.

That being said, not every idea needs to be written. I've yet to find a story that beckons me to write it every moment of every day, but I still need to feel some sort of pull to do any actual writing. Ideas that are just a world without much of a story (as in the first draft of Wanderers), or characters without much of a story (as in Suture), or some such thing just can't draw me much. Even if I like the basic idea, I can't see anything happening in my head if, well, nothing's happening in it. I'm guilty of doing very little plotting before I actually start a story, but I'm fine with winging it if I've at least identified a few points along the journey.

Even if an idea comes with enough of a plot for me to get started, that's still no guarantee the book will be finished. If, for any number of reasons, I lose interest along the way, there's no promise I'm getting it back. I may not find the characters interesting enough to play with, and I would have to go back and change too many things (i.e., do too much work) to get another chapter out. I may start the fic without realising the scope of the story and what I'm getting myself into. I may start a story for the sake of fans rather than my own interest only to crash and burn halfway through. I may just stop caring because of life and time constraints. I have indeed finished a few fan fictions, and I completed NaNoWriMo last year, so I'm not always doomed to give up on my stories. I am somewhat scared by the number of those left incomplete, but I know I'm capable of finishing the writing of a story.

Of course, once the last chapter comes to a close, the story still isn't really finished. I hacked out 50,109 words for my NaNo novel and reached the concluding sentence, so it is in one way complete, but I haven't looked back at the thing since I uploaded my final word count. I don't know if I ever will. I have a certain writer friend who says I should look it over and try to publish it, and another who has browsed it and found it doable, but I'm still not sure. To be honest, I don't even know how I was able to stick with my one awkward idea for an entire fifty thousand words, let alone how I can summon the verve to revise the monster. It is certainly in no condition to be published at present, and I feel it's probably less than half the length it should be for its genre. I don't feel the pull to put that much effort into it. I proved I could finish writing a novel, but I want to go elsewhere to prove I can finish revising a novel. I don't know whether I'll get The Long and Winding Road or Mayflies into publishing condition first, but I am certain that both of them will beat out Dreadful Valley (the NaNo novel).

So, out of some 33 novel ideas to date, only five (The Long and Winding Road, Mayflies, Chasers, Piracy Cruise Lines, and Figments) have made it to the writing phase. Only The Long and Winding Road, Mayflies, and Piracy Cruise Lines are being written currently. Will they all be finished? Will they all be revised and sent off to be published one way or another? I can't say for sure until I've reached that point, but at least The Long and Winding Road and Mayflies are looking pretty good right now. I'll just keep working at it and hoping the muse will hang around where she ought to until I'm done.

New Fiction Idea #33

I still don't know what's going on in this story. I just want to play with the characters. Do let me know if you like the plot, though. It's hard to think of anything that hasn't been done a million times in the superhero-type genre.

Working Title: Suture

Genre: Fantasy

Protagonist: Sven, a 17-year-old young man with very yellowish blonde hair kept chin-length. He's tall with hands a bit too large, and he's more enduring than strong physically. He has a dark sense of humour, is a bit irresponsible, and has rather low moral standards towards those who aren't his friends. He has the ability to seal up any wound, tear, fissure, etc.

Other Main Characters: Anna and Anya, 15-year-old identical twins with short, brown hair styled in the same single forward swoop. They're of average height but very slender. Both wear headbands—Anna's pink, and Anya's yellow—but will take them off or switch them to fool people. They're very much tricksters, although on a petty level, and they love cute things, fawning over boys, and swimming. Both are telepaths, with Anna able to control sugar crystals and Anya salt crystals.
Midas, Sven's 19-year-old brother. He has dark blonde hair kept reasonably short and about the same physique as his brother, although a bit more muscular. The quiet type, he prefers to be alone, usually listening to classical music or sketching architectural designs. He's intelligent but can be incensed quite easily and usually lashes out in such situations. He has the ability to control others' circulatory systems by taking a baton and conducting.
Jethro, a 30-year-old man with dull red hair and a fairly heavy build. He's infuriatingly patient and determined. He tries to be an agreeable father figure. He has the ability to touch an object and temporarily give it an extreme temperature, either hot or cold depending on the object.

Antagonist: Harrison, Jethro's brother-in-law and a very physically strong man with dark hair. He is influential in a prosthetics manufacturing company, and normals are entirely unaware of his self-termed "osteophagy." While he is able to consume food without ill effects, he must eat human bones for energy—a simple task when he can pluck any bone straight out of its owner and let it melt in his mouth.

Setting: 1980s California.

Plot: One year after a handful of people fall ill with a stomach bug and also happen to gain powers, Jethro starts putting out advertisements for those affected and rounding them up. As Sven and the others try to get along, Harrison starts his own forceful recruitment, and the protagonists soon discover that Harrison is preparing to start a wide-scale dispersion of a lethal pathogen. Having been accidentally exposed to its predecessor, Sven and the others are the only ones who can enter the pathogen creation/storage complex to shut it down.

Point of View: Third-person, omniscient.