The Writing Process 4: Flipping the Coin

Ficathon, third draft (Rich-text file)

The notion of making the story more interesting for the reader started with another what-if question - "What if I told the story from the bandits' point of view?"

It felt like an odd idea, since most L5R fiction is centered heavily on the actual samurai class. On the other hand, I believed that telling an L5R story from a non-samurai point of view would stand a good chance of getting people's attention because of this, so I ran with the idea.

The story was written according to the bare bones of the original plot I sketched out, but I produced no preparation for the names and personalities involved. In a sense, it was a play-it-by-ear story where I just got the characters together and watched them act naturally.

The result was a fairly long draft that had some nice story development and even better lines of conversation. There's just this satisfying feeling about writing dialogue between two people from totally different backgrounds.

While it was fun writing the loudmouthed bandit lord Goro and the surly ronin shugenja Wataru, I noticed early on that the story was running a tad longer than I would have liked. Most of the story is focused on character development for Goro and Wataru, with the unopened box in the background - and it was taking me too long to get to the box.

Granted, it sounds okay at first - choosing not to focus on the box beforehand makes it all the more a surprise once the oni comes out in the end. The problem is that such a story places a lot of emphasis on timing. Cutting to the big climax too suddenly makes the ending abrupt, perhaps even deus ex machina-type.

For the uninitiated, a deus ex machina setup is the equivalent of a literary cop-out. The phrase describes a scenario where a story raises multiple plot points and loose ends, and then resolves everything using a single development that is totally unrelated to everything so far. Any story with a lot of exciting events that resolves them by saying "...and it was all a dream", for example, is a deus ex machina setup.

See? Reading this blog is educational.

Aside from the timing issue, my other big problem with the draft was that I didn't know what should have happened once the captive samurai escaped and Goro and Wataru went along with opening the box. Telling the story at that point felt as though it were highly unplausible, especially considering that the samurai had to be both badly wounded and fighting sheer numbers of bandits at the same time.

That, and the fact that, by telling the story from Goro's point of view, I feared that it may have compromised the original story seed. I anticipated the audience reading about a samurai who runs across an unexpected form of danger, and I didn't think they deserved to get a naive, sadistic bandit who gets into something that he shouldn't have gotten into in the first place.

The story had some nice lines, though, and I could salvage a few. Regretfully, I had to set the rest of the draft aside and go back down to earth.