#One of my WIPs I pantsed so hard that none of the protagonists had any Backstories bc none of them were in it til they walked onto the page

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Been thinking a lot about characters who don't have tragic/complicated/lore-filled Backstories cause I just finished Neverwhere and Richard is just like some guy. Neil never explains why he's special and he can see door, he just does.

Tolkien never explains why Gandalf chose Bilbo. I don't even think we ever find out what career Bilbo had before going on his journey. He has no Backstory at all.

Rose Tyler was just a totally normal girl. So was Arthur Dent. So was... Another example, sorry I'm tired, I already gave you four.

Look, I'm not saying elaborate/tragic/mythic Backstories are bad, my WIPs are chock full of them, I just think writblr sometimes acts like they're mandatory and they don't have to be.

[talysalankil]

talys’s great nanowrimo 2019 debacle: the post

i felt like being grandiose, just not grandiose enough that I’d properly capitalize things. bear with me.

So I’ve had a bit of a time figuring out what to do for NaNoWriMo this year. So it’s venting time.

I’m also using this to do like, a status report on all my writing endeavors.

Okay so I haven’t had any new novel idea in a while now. I mean, that’s fine. I have a massive pile of WIPs anyway. But (and I think I already made a post about it earlier) the problem for nanowrimo was this:

I didn’t want to do a rewrite of any of the existing drafts:

FEITS v3 was paused at about halfway done in 2017, and while I’ve had a bunch of ideas for it, I haven’t really taken the time to work on them.

Psychopomp’s first draft is complete, but it could use a rewrite

Tangled Stars and Dragged to the Underworld are about 50k each with a missing third act

Eloped in the Night is a 15k word mess that needs major rewriting because it was still Brooding Lust when I wrote those)

Of these five books, four have planned sequels, but: I didn’t want to write a sequel, since none of them anywhere near a final stage. That being

FTEITS (for which I wrote like 30k of a first draft of book 2, most of which is good for the trash what with all the changes I’ve made), 

Psychopomp, whose sequel would have been the best candidate in this category honestly because I don’t think the rewrites would be super structural

Eloped/Dragged are part of the same universe though mostly standalones, but each of the subsequent books in that series would draw from one or both of these, and like I said, neither are even a complete first draft.

While I have a bunch of fic ideas, I didn’t want to do a fic for nanowrimo because it felt like cheating.

Which left me with um…like, nothing. Well, not quite.

So you may or may not know this (I kind of forget where I put information online) but my first draw to storytelling was actually video games. In broad strokes, here’s a quick history of that:

As a very young child (we’re talking 4-8 years old here), I’d play pretend with my plushies

When I got Crash Bandicoot 2 (one of my first video games I was really into), I started to imagine various games where my plushies would be the protagonists. Inspired by Crash, Zelda, other games…I remember once outlining a 15-part series of games around my favorite plushy, each of which was basically subdivided into chunks of different genres. I even invented a “dark age of the franchise”.

When I got Final Fantasy X and then got another gaming magazine with a walkthrough of Final Fantasy X, I started inventing a self-insert game based heavily on it, and wrote most of my ideas in the format of a walkthrough. I even parroted the editing style because I was like nine.

That story was iterated upon several times, and eventually yielded the character of Talys Alankil (well, sort of—the name actually originated in Guild Wars and was then repurposed. Somewhere in the lore, the two of them are like, extremely distant relatives, or were until I decided all copyrighted works were purged from canon). Thanks for creating my brand, 13 and 15-year-old mes.

I actually got into computer engineering because of games, except I then realized the storytelling was what interested me. Oops. I mean I like programming but I’d never want to work as a programmer in a game.

That tangent was completely pointless but whatever, this is the state of the talys post.

Anyway. Point is. I got a new idea for a game earlier this year. Life Is Strange 2 meets Octopath Traveler by way of Vanitas from Kingdom Hearts as the protagonist. This is the first time I have an idea that I can phrase in this kind of pitch so I’ll indulge. Fight me.

Working title is just “The Road” though obviously it needs some work, and over the past few months I’ve actually done some pretty good prep work, so I thought, hey, why not challenge myself this nanowrimo and write a script for a game instead of a novel!

And like, there’s no reason why not. I’m actually feeling pretty attached to the protagonist already, I’ve been wanting to try scrivener’s script writing tool, it could be fun. Of course, the problem is that a script for a game (especially this one) is inerently nonlinear and requires thorough planning, which I have not done. And nanowrimo starts…technically tomorrow night if I can still stay up past midnight.

[Second tangent time: I’ve been going for a teaching degree, which has forced me to reset my sleep schedule extremely hard and I hate it]

So that brings me option 2. Well, technically there are two options here, but only one that’s remotely viable.

I may have mentioned it before but in FTEITS, Adam and Cell bond over (among other things) a shared favorite book/author. Well, mostly a book. There is also a scene of Adam finding that author’s new book and experiencing nostalgia over his lost life, which may or may not survive the rewrites. The author, incidentally, is my self-insert in that world, and will also not be an active character in the plot of the books, but I just felt like mentioning it. And yes, that means my protagonists are fans of my work. Sue me.

The one they’re both a fan of is titled Snow to Ashes (I remember way way back, when I randomly picked a title “The Brain is Out”, before I had any idea what it was about). It is, incidentally, a chance to analyze Adam and Cell’s character arc by proxy and in a microcosm, which is good because I feel that sometimes their arcs are still kind of ill-defined. Basically the story has two protagonist and it is canon that Adam and Cell each relate more to one of them.

The problem with that is that now I’m getting a lot of ideas for Snow to Ashes, and I don’t know if I have the time to work all of these ideas and iron them out before nanowrimo starts.

So that’s where I’m at. Either way I will be pantsing it. I was hoping to get to do some outlining this week before Friday, but it turns out that being tired, having a pretty big spike of executive dysfunction, final fantasy 14, and my parents deciding to watch the TV again after years of not doing it (thus making noise at the time of day that would be perfect for me to write), is not fertile grounds for productivity. I am, incidentally, out of a FF14 subscription in four days, which is very fine by me since that game would also ruin nanowrimo itself, not just the pre-nano prep.

This isn’t really a request for feedback tbh, just, like I said, venting. Hoping to straighten my thoughts and figure out which choice is best.

As a PS i should mention that yes, the Talys Alankil game is also technically a writing option, and I could write a script for that. I mean it’s almost a rewrite because that one has a pretty rigid outline already, but. Yeah. It’s an option too.

Edited: I didn’t mention Malefacta. I didn’t forget about malefacta. I just don’t know what to do with Malefacta. It’s annoying.

Edited2: Remember when I almost wrote a superhero book for nanowrimo 2017? yeah that’s still a project I have somewhere. I’m no feeling it though. Sorry, superhero project. You were never meant to be, I guess.