Month: February 2015

The setting serves as the backdrop to the story. When you tell a story. What you are doing is building a world for people to inhabit and grow into. The fantasy genre has a lot of great settings. Consider, for example, Middle Earth, the setting for Lord Of The Rings. It has enough fantastic and unknown elements, Orcs, Goblins, Magic, and so forth, to make it interesting and intriguing to the audience, while still been grounded enough in the known and mundane to make it believable so that the audience can invest emotionally in the characters.

Look at Sam from Lord Of The Rings. He’s a character deeply rooted in the mundane aspects of being Frodo’s Gardner, but as time goes on he is able to blossom into the ring bearers extraordinary protector and stick with Frodo until his task is done. Sam wouldn’t be as compelling without the grounding that his setting and occupation provide him. But he’s not boring either.
How does one go about striking Tolkien’s balance between the magical and the mundane?
its a question to ponder isn’t it?

I am coming to believe that a good writer needs to be a good psychologist too. A writer needs to clearly understand what motivates his characters and spurs them to action. If he wants to do that successfully, he must understand what motivates himself. After all good characters are a reflection of the writer.

I often feel conflicted about many aspects of my life. It is best illustrated in the picture above. The disabled person is caught between the conflicted forces of yin and yang, good and bad. They’re good and bad things to a disability which cause me to feel conflicted about having one. I vacillate toward acceptance or ambivalence. My characters help me straighten out my feelings.