How a Focus on Character Development Shaped the Story in Elf Mastery
Welcome, fellow fantasy enthusiasts! Today, we are going to look at how characters and character development drove and changed the plot in Elf Mastery. I won't go into specific details, as to avoid story spoilers, but the general process of how I developed the story and how the characters helped develop it as I wrote.
The concept of Elf Mastery began with the setting. I had the idea of our world being run by mystical creatures in the background. We didn't see them, but they were in charge of wind, weather, gravity, etc. This isn't a new concept, at all, as most ancient mythologies have gods and spirits controlling elements of the world as well. Elf Mastery developed this concept into the idea of the World of Order, which brought a more organized bureaucratic element into the story.
I was firm from the beginning, however, that the story should be about a character, not a plot, and I needed to be careful to showcase the protagonist above showing off the world. Of course, Kyla would go on many adventures and see many interesting places, but I did put an effort in to make sure she was the center of the story and to not get carried away in scene descriptions.
Kyla adopted a lot of the characteristics I had as a child in a rural village: naive, hopeful, having heard stories from the world at large, but quite distanced from it and therefore inexperienced in many elements of life common to those raised in cities. My goal was to take her from that starting point of naive innocence, run her through various difficulties and challenges, and see if she could come out the other end more mature but still hopeful.
When I started writing, I couldn't decide if I wanted to carefully outline the story first or write by the seat of my pants. I decided that some organization was in order, but I wanted to leave myself some flexibility to make changes to the story as I wrote. So I developed a middle ground. I wrote what I called 'anchor scenes'. These anchor scenes were what I considered vital elements of the story. It gave me a goal so I knew how to keep the story on track as I wrote toward the next anchor scene, but gave me flexibility as I wrote to make adjustments to the planned story.
The interesting thing was that each time I hit an anchor scene, I realized the characters' actions and lines I had written initially no longer fit the character. Kyla, for example, had developed in ways I hadn't planned, and rather than shoehorn her into what I had thought of originally, I always had to change and redirect the story.
The anchor scenes were still valuable as lighthouses, so to speak, to keep my writing focused, but I had to expect a lot of change and redirection at each milestone. I still prefer this style of writing. I tend to ramble and go off topic if I lose focus, but I also need flexibility as a lot of my best ideas develop as I write and feel the characters mature and change.
The end result, which I won't share so as not to spoil, is that Book Three, Elf Righteous, is an entirely different book than I had planned when I started Elf Mastery. But since my focus was on Kyla's character development, I think it flows naturally from the first two books and feels as though the plot developments had been planned from the start. I was still able to create a lot of through-lines that follow from beginning to end, but the outcome surprised even me.
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