Writing Adventure fics · 2:38am Apr 1st, 2015
Hi-ho, Merc here! It's been a while since I've actually talked about writing on a writing-based website—most of them lately have been about vidya games or how awesome tits are.
Sometimes how awesome vidya gaem tits are, in a divine infusion of tastes. It's like a metaphorical PB&J of combos
Well, today, I'm here to give some advice on writing, namely Adventure stories, but you can salt and pepper these to other genres as needed. Though why are you writing other genres in the first place? What are you, so casual you can't do a full story or something? Have to just write 1K one-shots to get your rocks off?
As a Big Dog shirt I had once said: if you can't run with the big dawgs, stay on the porch. So listen up, chiiildren, it's time to git gud or die tryin'.
1: It's OK to Let The Hero Suffer
Suffering builds character. It sounds like bullshit, I know, especially to my younger audience, but it's true. I wouldn't of become half the man I did if I didn't have rough patches in my life. Now, think of how a character in a story is. Unless he's a flat character (and sometimes these are ok! Not everyone needs to evolve!) he's going to suffer losses. Luke Skywalker started off as a whiny teenage ponce until his aunt and uncle got fried and Ben Kanobi got Vadered. That toughened him up. Mother lost a hand and didn't give a shit, on top of killing yetis and sleeping inside ton-ton guts. He became hardcore due to having a case of the Batmans. (Dead parental figures, a disease that effects most of the Disney cast in some form or another. For more information and how you can help cure this debilitating disease, please call 1-800-DEAD)
Let them lose sometimes. Let them be vulnerable, be afraid, be petty. It's all the more special when they do win against the big bad if you give them the human ability to fall and rise.
For those of you keeping track at home, this is one of the pieces of advice that can be applied to every genre you touch. Pinkie needs some milk? Don't let her just get some! Hell naw! Have her survive a sudden hailstorm, avoid a cultist, nearly get crushed in a stampede, finally make it to the store just for her to find out the store was out of mink and so she'll have to go across town to get some at the other store. Bam, that slice of life fic got served an order of cuhrayzee and the reader'll love it way more than if she just talked calmly to some dull half-demon half-angel OC.
2: Study Combat
We're back to giving more adventure advice here, as combat usually doesn't come up in an average SoL fic, so this is for all those guys working on breathless landscapes and memorable beasts: Study how fights flow dynamically. This can range from studying European warfare and single-target combat instruction (look on youtube, nerd we're in a generation that has no excuse on not getting an idea on how fights, even exaggerated ones, would look like) to close range combat like Judo, Boxing, MMA. Think about how your character would actually fight, think of how their body works, their height and weight can play a heavy, heavy role in how you can envision battles.
For example: In The Laughing Shadow, Jack is very thickset and tall, especially for a woman. At 6'4 and 230ish pounds, she's a chick version of bearmode. It'd be illogical for her to be able to move like the Prince of fucking Persia. Wall running, running up an enemies chest, none of that makes sense. Likewise, in that same universe, Dash is 5'3 and 135. She might be strong, but using a two handed weapon proportioned for Jack would be foolish, and she wouldn't have the strength to really push anything super heavy off of her without using leverage or their own inertia against them.
Think logically about how to have your characters enter fights with their proportions and their knowledge/history of combat. It helps way more than you'd think in having a reader buy what you're serving.
3: Listen to Music
Music soothes the savage beast. Unless it's metal, then he rips and tears with reckless abandon. Metal is what causes testicles to drop as it's concentrated masculinity in its purest form.
Music adds another layer to the scene you want to create and can have a major effect on the content you produce and at times can inspire you to create.
Now, some of my more versed readers will be able to assign context with the music examples I linked due to playing the games. Even if they can, it doesn't change the tone of the piece and can even inspire or enhance a work you're producing due to having the option to incorporate some of the themes and messages the music was from.
And you can be like me and hype myself up for Witcher 3 by playing that combat music for hours on end
4: Characters>World
I'd argue that this one is debatable and that your mileage may vary, but screw it—my blog, my rules. And my rule says that good characters make a good world around them. If I wasn't invested in Samwise Gamgee, Frodo and Aragorn, I wouldn't give two shits about the shire, about the elves, about the Mines of Moria—but due to the characters being sympathetic, evolving and earnest, I grew to care about them.
The same goes with other writings across so many other genres: you have a character that respects, say, Orc culture, or grew up around Drow? Or, take that muzak to the flipside, yo: you have a character that hates black elves and explains why? That gets me invested, that gets me interested about their culture, how they work with other species, all that jazz. You can't do that with dull mooks with no personality. I won't care about how the Order of the Wild Rose are a group of Druid terrorists. It doesn't effect me or anyone I care about. You gotta nail down those characters to nail down a good setting. World building starts from a base and expands, rather than starts with a universe and contracts. You need to know where your character fits into the world, sure, but that can be figured out as you're nailing down exactly what you want your boy to be.
5: INHALE BOOKS
That one is so important I did a Billy Mays impersonation to get your attention. Read. For God's sake, read everything. To paraphrase T.S. Elliot: Good writers borrow, great writers steal. And Elloit is right. Now, he's not saying in that quote to go ahead and steal the entire plot outline of 50 shades of gray and make a ponyfic out of Dash being an S&M freak. What he's saying is that by emulating a style, emulating pacing, emulating character designs, motivations, tropes, plot hooks, you become a better writer.
Reading teaches you pacing. Creating well-designed characters. World-building that doesn't feel like one guy blabbing out exposition. When to lead the reader by the nose and when to let his imagination fill out nuances to the character. By reading and reading and reading some more, you learn all of that and will tend to mirror a writing style that you're comfortable with.
To throw my hat in the ring as an example, I started by trying to mirror and adopt something similar to Stephen King in my creatures and world designs in some of my original fiction. I quickly grew to despise wring paragraph long descriptions of buildings and rooms. Now, my style is more reminiscent of Lee Child, quick, to the point, terse. There's nothing wrong with either style, it's just one tends to be more approachable than the other for writers. So start digging through books: it will help you more than you think.
I didn't include books improving grammar because I've been reading since I was three and still suck huge penises when it comes to editing. Can't win 'em all.
6: Embrace Tropes
Far too often, people don't want to make the noble knight, the chaste princess, the idealist, the slimy villain. Why? Because they're ideas that have been integrated into our mindset for generations and they want their characters to be different.
Big deal. No matter how you write a character, he's going to be done before. Or if he isn't, he's going to be crap nine times out of ten. Let's look here at a nice comparison pic I made in about three seconds:
Even well-designed characters will be familiar at a glance. That's the name of the game with not only writing, but people. You can try your damnedest, but at the very core of the character, you won't be original. It's how you work the clay, mold it and design it, that makes a good character. So show me why your knight is different from his other rank and file, tell me about the princess, let me know if there's a tragic clown under the makeup: how you nuance a player makes all the difference.
7: Be Scary
Strange sounding one at first glance, but think about it: in an Adventure fic, these guys and gals are staring death in the eye about every other page. If there's no real risk, no real sense of actual dread, then you're not going to captivate audiences. I highly recommend reading up not only Adventure stories, as they usually have some pretty horrible stuff in them, like Ring Wraiths or reanimated corpses, but also look at horror books, not necessarily slasher ones, though they can be great for describing monsters, rather, read up on psychological horror. Lovecraft, Poe, get that sense of wrongness down pat, and you'll have readers invested in if, say, Twilight and Luna can get through the den of a species of massive spiders without any of the eggs rupturing and spilling out thousands of jittering, twitching arachnids babies across the webbing they're walking on. You get scary tension down-pat as a writer, and you will be a fucking amazing Adventure writer. They go hand in hand.
8: Idealized Love Is Important
Some people don't like idealized love in a story. It's understandable, it's a trait that doesn't happen often in real life—often being the key word there, as I'm sure there are a few people out there that embrace something like this—so it can be viewed as childish.
No sir, says I. Idealized love in stories are almost a necessity in an Adventure setting. You have to realize that in a genre like this, you're supposed to be taken to extremes. You're supposed to feel dread when the writer pushes it, you're supposed to feel righteous, monstrous, overwhelmed—the Adventure genre is supposed to showcase the highest highs and lowest lows of the human condition. One of these highs would be something like idealized love. And I'm not necessarily talking about a romantic love, though that can be one. I'm talking love in all its forms. Brotherly love between soldiers, love between a parent and a child, love between siblings, love between friends, the list goes on. Why do you think so many Adventure stories start with the protagonist trying to help someone? On top of being a great plot-hook, there's an important characteristic in doing so. They're, in essence, being one of the seven virtues, one of the pillars of humanity, and by representing this trait, there's a sort of universal appeal to the character, even if he has vices.
9: Play D&D!
Know why I say this? Because D&D makes you learn, man. If you have a sorcerer of any type in your Adventure story, then you need to learn how to think outside the box. Why have Twilight cast a fireball when she could just cast a force spell to break a stalactite off the ceiling and crush someone underneath it. Why bother with keys when you can cast a spell to knock on a door and feign your way in? Why rely on normal medicine when you can stitch someone together with magical needles? The possibilities are endless, as long as you have an idea on how powerful you want magic to be, it's up to you on how to make it entertaining for readers.
10: Happy Ever After Isn't a Sin
Look, I get it, you want to write grow-up stories for the hip and mature audience. I understand. Just because you're writing something darker or edgier doesn't mean that it holds more artistic merit than a story where the good guy wins, the war ends, and the king reigns peacefully. Being optimistic, being hopeful, is probably one of the most adult things you can do in life. Not everything needs to end on a nihilistic note, especially if it contradicts the themes and messages you put into the story. If anything, downer endings remind me of the mindset of a preteen going through a Korn phase.
Oh baby, finished that blog up with style. Yep. Nothing else needs to be added. It's perfect.
Beautiful.
I got nothing else.
...
OK, OK, one more rule: One of the women totally needs some nice looking boobs. Because if there isn't some sort of hot cleric or warrior or, if you're desperate, a sorceress, then the adventure is almost guaranteed trashcan. Trust me, I'm an expert on the subject, and it will be why Final Fantasy 15 will bomb harder than Hiroshima.
And yet, you will never touch them.
In my opinion, this hamstrings your very first point about letting characters suffer, and directly contridicts your points about characters being the most important thing. The more realistic your character is, the less idealized anything is going to fit. Which is good, because a character who has issues, including love problems, is more interesting. Sam wouldn't have been as good a character if he was the type of hobbit who could have asked Rosie Cotton out right off the bat, he would have stayed home and got started on all those cute hobbit babies. And if Han wasn't a self-absorbed prick to Leia, we would have been stuck with a plot that was only about Luke for two whole movies. I think giving lovers some issues to overcome isn't going to hurt your adventure.
I've got nothing against optimistic endings, but which was a better movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Crystal Skull? Only one of those had a "happily ever after" ending.
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Jokes on you, we're close to the era of good VR. Oculus Rift for immersion and haptic feedback for sense of touch. Soon my waifu will be real and I'll never have to leave my apartment again except for buying groceries. What a wonderful time to be alive!
Here's the thing about your second point: Idealized love was what made Samwise a good character. It wasn't a romantic love, but a brotherly love that caused him to literally go to the ends of the earth to help Frodo deliver the ring. It wasn't about saving the world or anything about that to him, it was about protecting his friend. He was so inspired and desperate to take care of Frodo, he even wore the ring with no repercussions, something no other character in the entire series was able to really do. If giving your life to save or protect someone isn't the most idealized form of love in the world, I don't know what is.
I'm taking the hidden option here and saying C: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, what with the ending where his dad lives, Indy lives, and they're all immortal thanks to drinking from the Holy Grail and riding off into the sunset, happy ever after.
At least until Crystal Skull decided to exist and Sean Connery wisely turned down the role.
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I will grant you that about Sam, and for a character who is like Sam, simple (and I mean that in the best possible way,) in a relationship with a character who is unquestionably noble (that is, the corruption of Frodo was from the ring and Sam never had to question that about Frodo) a simple love works.
But anything more complex is going to have tension. Even Wesley and Buttercup had to be able to question each other for dramatic tension to work. And, as I mentioned, the more realistic your charactesr get, as you get to Han and Leia, or Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, or Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, the more the romance feels more realistic if the couple isn't flawlessly dedicated to each other but they work it out anyway.
And Last Crusade doesn't count as a happily ever after because Indy didn't end up with Marion Ravenwood who is obviously perfect for him and I will hear no argument to the contrary. Obviously at some point he was going to have to go find her and have another adventure. (And Karen Allen was actually the one watchable part of Crystal Skull.)
I have to disagree about point 4. It's an apples and oranges comparison for me, because I'm interested in both the characters and the world, but for different reasons. I like a setting with details and presences beyond the narrative, a place that feels like an actual place rather than a set piece for the characters to tromp around in. That's not to say I don't care about the characters; I care about both. That's why I like Friendship is Magic so much. Equestria is as engrossing and rich with potential as any member of the Mane Six.
Of course, going full Silmarillion isn't advisable. There has to be a balance, and the optimal ratio is a matter of taste.