Let Rip My Story Apart: A Diagnostic

Summary of Dower Travels Edward (Spoilers if you know me in real life and actually have a chance of reading the whole thing): While delivering a package to a rich capital city, a mailman accidentally unleashes an unimaginably awful monster. He then time-travels with the Arch-Mage of the city. Time travel happens every so often. Eventually the entire universe is destroyed because of all of this time travel, but the characters are unharmed.

This is literally the most succinct way for me to summarize this 180-page story.

The problem with this story is that it doesn't seem obvious to me that any part of the story is particularly bad; it's that the story as a whole is disappointing and weak with flaws and cracks that meander all throughout the duration of the adventure. This means that the only way I'll ever be able to get anything done is if I knock the thing down to the ground and start again.

My first objection: The story isn't interesting, and it doesn't need to be told. If you think of fairytales or other famous bits of writing, usually there's a sort of seed to the story, the main grain of interest to the tale that is, by itself, pretty interesting. 

For instance, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. H.G. Wells's Time Machine. Frankenstein's monster. All of these stories have a story-seed so potent that movie studios seem to be perpetually re-making them. Sometimes they're modernized a bit, or they're in the proper period, and sometimes they're in outer space for no reason. Regardless of the additional trappings, the root of the story remains the same.

A scientist creates a monster who struggles with his own humanity.

A scientist finds a way to transform himself into what he thinks is a bolder version of himself, until this new version of himself is more powerful than his actual self.

The difference being that Dalaran floats and my city is on the ground.

You get the picture. My story (colloquially referred to as Travels) lacks an interesting seed. The reason for this was because it began as a writing exercise during a particularly boring part of a Digital Arts class, written originally as Warcraft fan-fiction (but only for the first four pages). I wanted to write about the ridiculous decadence of the city of Dalaran, a city with more magic than it knows what to do with. I emailed this story to myself to continue writing at home. Knowing the primary danger of fan-fiction (at least for me, personally) is that there is a very real danger that I won't always be interested in the game, I preemptively changed the universe to an original creation so it would last longer. After the initial description of world was written, I just kept going even though I probably should have stopped, satisfied with a bit of a job well done.

This kind of problem isn't unique to the written word. Recently there was a movie called Skyline that was directed by the brothers Strause. These guys were famous for making really good special effects in their commercials for Coca-Cola and Gatorade. Some movie executive thought it would be a great idea to hand these guys a hundred million dollars to make their own movie. What resulted was humiliating. You see, these guys were great special effects artists, but not necessarily great writers. I believe their creative process involved creating massive special effects sequences first, and later trying to write a plot that involved all of these things. Sounds like another movie I've seen.

Also during the writing, I had lots of other small hooks that I thought would be interesting in the story. One of them is that the main character has a sort of useless X-Men-like power that lets him “sense” money of any kind nearby. It was an interesting idea, but ultimately not enough to hang a whole story on. Another was that I had a man whose appearance would change based on the expectations of the person viewing him. That is, if they were expecting him to be an old man, that's how he would appear to them. I played it as a handicap, later exploiting it for his benefit. But still, this isn't Storytelling Gold.

Interestingly, I also had a few Inception-like chapters in which the characters had to enter the memory of the main character to recover a suppressed memory. I wrote it two years before the movie.

I think I got too hung up on the small details that I lost sight of the larger story. Here are my goals for this rewrite:

• Start with an interesting story-seed; make it strong enough to hang a story on

• Eliminate pointless plot threads and plot holes; consider shortening it into a short story

• In general, tighten up the graphics

I guess for this rewrite, I have to find a seed that could be a central root of the story. If I had to take a pick, I'd say that time travel was an overarching theme, or perhaps terrorism via sending monsters in the mail. I'm not trying to write a commentary on anything, and I don't have a particularly compelling Twilight Zone hook (which is typically how I come up with my other stories).

Without further ado, here's the first section I'm looking at.

The city of Malara had a certain ring to it. However, the name didn't. When Dower described it later, he would say that the city "seemed like someone had hooked it up to an electrical current," but would add that "the name Malara just wasn't very appealing; it sounds like Malaria." Of course, both were true; the name Malara did sound a little bit like malaria.

It was very much as if the city had a charge, except it wasn't electrical. Although the city did have a rather robust electricity wiring system; it was used to power everything that wasn't powered by magic, which wasn't much. The hum that Dower described was caused by the throbbing magical pollution that hung over the city like fog. In fact, there were some places in the city that the magic had actually caused fog. It was dense, hot, and it sometimes smelled like strawberries and ozone combined in some kind of revolting, magical fruit salad. The mages couldn't be bothered to deal with the fog for most everyone in the city was too busy being selfish to care. Fortunately, the city was built on the coast, so the fog usually washed out to sea.

Yep. This was once composed entirely inside a gmail message. Hopefully you can tell the kind of whimsical tone I was going for with the narrative; a blatant imitation of Terry's Pratchett's Discworld writing style. That is, the way the story is told is usually more interesting than the story itself. Sorry mister Pratchett, but it's true. This brings me to my next concern with the story, which you'll get to learn about on Independence Day.

Upcoming Series: Lets Rip My Story Apart

A few years ago, I finished writing my second-ever novel, and the first-ever one I was proud of. It's a confusing book about characters doing seemingly-entertaining things in a seemingly-entertaining universe. Upon re-reading it recently, I realized several things, the first of which was that the story itself was quite bad. The second was that it badly needs to be re-tooled, re-written or scrapped completely.

Here's where things get fun for you, gentle reader; I'm going to be taking Steven King's advice from On Writing. I'm going to murder my darlings, (meaning my story), and I'm going to do it in public, neighbors be damned! This Friday I'll be posting the first bit, and hopefully I can stick with it this time. It'll be a learning experience for everyone! 

To avoid accidentally getting the book stolen and published (as if) from this blog, I'm going to be editing select "problematic" segments, completely out of order. That way the thief will actually have to put some effort into their theft.

Breezy Writing (Originally written in April, 2009)

A Black Hole

The ship was being pulled toward the black hole, completely unable to save itself. The crew, naturally, was in quite a panic. Captain Marcus, who was usually quite cool-headed, wasn't himself; of course, if your ship was about to plummet into a black hole and then be compressed into singularity, you'd be worried too. No one had ever gone through and lived, or so the science books claimed. Captain Marcus didn't have much use for that kind of knowledge, as he thought of it as defeatist rubbish.

Flint, the ship's sole remaining mechanic, was the least panicked of those on board. Although he knew all of the science behind black holes, and then some, he felt a sudden lightness. This was, in all likelihood, due to the drugs he had taken moments before, washed down with the strongest liquor aboard the ship, which Flint had brewed himself. It also might have been gasoline.

There was a sound like whales mating, which of course would have been much more frightening, as the ship entered the tear in space. The metal and rivets groaned their complaint, a loud, jarring, scraping roar that became upsetting after only a moment.

"It just figures," Flint thought, his drug-addled mind momentarily pulling him back to the real world, "I just bought that new boat."

The rest of the crew were experiencing similar thoughts, although none of theirs involved boats, and only a few of them were affected by drugs and liquor. The groaning of the ship increased in volume, bringing with it bone-rattling vibration, which served to make what remained of the crew's lives somewhat more uncomfortable, except for Flint, who found it soothing to his head, which had begun to hurt.

It didn't take long for the ship to make it through. In fact, the crew was rather surprised to find that they were not only still alive, but the ship seemed to be in one piece. The view screens didn't seem to work, but there was a single window that Captain Marcus had had installed because he "didn't trust the technology very much."

Through the window, which everyone had promptly crowded around, they could see the space on the other side of space, which turned out to be white. As regular space is black as night, of course inverted space is white. It was much like being in a Microsoft Word document, or a blank sheet of canvas. The stars shone like black rubies in the white expanse of space.

"Of course," said Flint to the gathered crew, "there's probably air our here as well, since our space has none."

Strangely, the crew found that to be a rather logical conclusion, and before anyone could stop him, Ensign Privy had flung open the bay door and stepped out into space. He had failed to realize that, since our space has no gravity, negative space would, and he fell until he hit a planet, some three-hundred million miles away. The fall wouldn't kill him but the starvation would. The people on the planet were very much like the people on ours, except they didn't care about saving their planet, and they respected one another. So actually, it wasn't anything like our planet.