Rev.ed. 5Jun2022 for WriteOn challenges, QUEST stuff in the first box, our other genres/templates next.
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<big>THE QUEST FOR THE SACRED LOST JEWEL
OF TOGWOGMAGOG </big>
CHARACTERS: Callow Youth [CY] —first appearing April 21, 2011 !!!— a “chosen one” (self-chosen, quite often, or maybe fate or the police or etc take a hand) questing for that elusive jewel that’ll save the kingdom! And coincidentally solve everything else, too … save the farm/ free the prisoners/ win the heart of the one so true/ hit the jackpot/ break the spell/ fix the climate or economy/ solve the mystery/ set right what’s gone all rong. With CY on the QUEST is her/his indispensible (or disreputable) Stout Companion [SC]/ best bud/ business associate/ partner in crime/ battle buddy, team-mate etc., be it dragged along kicking and screaming or eager & high of heart. Their adversary, the Least Grebe … or other antagonist/ problem/ obstacle (laws of the kingdom, tides of war, dark & stormy night..). Almost always offstage is Froop — the wizard/ genius/ billionaire/ mob-boss /puppet-master, strange source of expertise/ knowledge/ skills and arcane stuff our heroes lack, but bent on an agenda all her/his own! And there might be a Nemesis — a complicator always at cross-purposes with our heroes, even if not caring a fig about their quest nor needing to, either. And the may be an occasional transom alligator — and whatever spear-carriers , utility players, red shirts, etc along the way.
SOME SETTINGS — The Swamp or comparably dangerous unfamiliar locale/ terrain/ situation, home of the Least Grebe ... The Startled Duck tavern — a crossroads reputedly “good” for information or resupply from innkeeper or denizens there, at a price! … Maybe there’s also the Stricken Chicken, a more desperate, less known site off in some backwater or backstreet … The Tower of Dooomm (or Doubt) on the tricky-to-navigate Isthmus of Onionset, where secrets or weapons are rumored to repose that our heroes might find very useful … if any of that is even true… and/or sundry desolate or crowded or etc villages, cities, farms, highways/ roads/ trails, bureaucracies, royal courts, castles, factories, police stations, army headquarters, whathaveyou.
SOME PROPS PERHAPS AVAILABLE: ... The Duffle Bag of Least Resistance — Frankly I could use some clarity about this mysterious object myself! (Tara? cfk? Anyone familiar with it?) or maybe it’s whatever the writer wants it to be ?! It often seems to have come along and to contain unexpected handy items, if also puzzling and even mysterious ones … and the Magical [usually Purple] Onion of Othmar, an object of superbly varied usefulness, but itself has to first be won, stolen, found, rescued, captured (is it a map? a chemical formula? a weapon? a Lost Will & Testament? a compass & sextant? the key to the code? the dude with the keys? a fresh set of clothes? a buncha moola? a Tardis? a get-away car with homing device?)
As for what’s The Sacred Lost Jewel of Togwogmagog —it’s whatever is the goal of the quest, the problem/conflict to resolve … the usual!! :D
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….
<big>Our other realms/ genres, etc.</big>
Belinda sees Lord Postlethwaite-Praxleigh (pronounced Puppy) leaving the ballroom with, Adelaide, her rival, who’s only got her eye on his jeweled sash, and can’t possibly appreciate all he went through in the Peninsular Wars
The battle isn’t going so well for intrepid mercenary soldier Wallace Higginbotham.
A stranger has come to the Wiltchester Dragon Farm, wanting to buy a baby dragon, but ace dragon breeder Jocasta Entwhistle doesn’t trust him one bit.
Private investigator Celia Spunk, driving down a rain-spattered street at midnight, discovers a pink 1940 Hudson following her... the very year, make and color of the car driven by the Chainsmoke Killer … who might be her client!
Goodwife Thankful Goodheart feeds her hens and minds her own business until that awful Agnes Addlepate starts causing trouble in the village.
International superspy James Buns has been captured by an eccentric megalomaniac planing to use an elaborate invention to kill the hero and his unfortunately-named girlfriend.
Incorruptible police detective Scotty Blaine delivers a warning to the local mob boss.
or — credit to strawbale, 2017 —
Goodson Lecoeur, a wage-earner with a passion for doing the right thing, and Cyril Bribbage, his fussy middle manager, who can be ally or antag as needed (Corporate/legal/office drama or comedy).
Athena Moonbright, modern witch. Feel free to supply her with a coven, familiars, friends, a love interest… or not. (Urban fantasy or supernatural romance.)
Lan Starhom, captain of the Comet. A ship, a crew, a mission or a disaster... or maybe this is a sailing ship in a post-industrial future? (Sci-fi)
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Hello, writers. This is gonna go long. Feel free to jump to THE CHALLENGE waaay down there somewhere, and then just dip into the diary here’n’there as suits you.
Back to our scheduled program: in WriteOn’s April 14, 2011 edition, our fearless leader SensibleShoes observed:
If you’ve ever looked at the various websites where writers post their queries and synopses for critique, you may have noticed a certain sameness in the novels that many people are working on:
1. A callow youth (male or female) is the Chosen One who must obtain the sacred jewel of Togwogmagog in order to save the kingdom.
2. The protagonist either dies on page one or is dead before then, yet she’s tied to this world until she can make everyone sorry they were so mean to her.
3. The passive female protagonist is the love object of a supernatural being: werewolf, vampire, demon, or, with increasing frequency, angel. She is extremely grateful for this.
The generic Callow Youth (familiarly known as CY, Cal, etc.) was the most used template for that evening’s ‘challenge’ (writing practice), and so s/he has remained. The other two soon vanished w/o a trace: too inflexibly specific — high-concept plots, rather than versatile generics.
Today, they might be replaced by athletically powerful, emotionally fragmented girls saving entire dystopias in partnership with boys, if outclassed by, for example, real-life Olympic swimmer Yusra Mardini, who at age 17, with her sister Sarah and another woman, pushed a sinking boatful of fellow refugees hours through dangerous seas to safety a year before the international games. Which gives no medals for achievement like that, a fair example of real-life we can’t use in fiction because who’d believe it, absent magic to make it so.
Some writer whose name I forget once said, “All fiction is fantasy” because real-life sure has no plot while it’s happening, and real heroes in such hell are hell to measure up to.
“C’mon, let’s get writing!”
“Thanks, I needed that kick in the butt!”
For writing practice purposes, a template or “stock” character seems to need to be repurposable, ditto everything else in the conceit: “jewel” can mean anything crucial to quest for (tangible or in- ); a “kingdom” any realm of life; being “chosen” might or might not confer special powers and even be entirely subjective, but does justify the ill-equipped, unsophisticated kid we all might feel ourselves to be, as the Main Character. A template/stock character is the mannequin the artist can put into any position, dress up, and move around, in order to draw from.
Tonight we’ll draw from SensibleShoes’ posting history (other diarists have also guest-hosted WriteOn, but they’re tough to access). Rather than build dozens of visually distracting links in tonight’s edition, I’ll give you THIS ONE, so you get the fun of paging backward using the NEXT» at the foot of each history page in order to find the cited dates. (Click on the WriteOn tag in the diary tag-list at your peril — that approach is more complete, but date order is messed up, and the fraction as many diaries per page makes it worse pain in the assonance to wend through.)
And so, onward to The Lost (infinitely-any-quest-the-plot-may-require) Jewel of Togwogmagog ⧫ Callow Youth/Chosen ⧫ sidekick Stout Companion (except there are no sidekicks) ⧫ Least Grebe (from The Swamp),⧫ the almost always-off-stage yet indispensable wizard-with-his-own-agenda Froop ⧫ Dread Nemesis ⧫ the Startled Duck inn&tavern ⧫ Tower of Dooomm (on the Isthmus of Onionset),⧫ the Magical [& often Purple] Onion of Othmar ⧫ the Duffle Bag of Least Resistance ⧫ transom alligators ⧫ and, outside Towogmagog: Belinda, Adelaide, and Lord Postlethwaite-Praxleigh (pronounced Puppy) ⧫ doughty mercenary soldier Wallace Higginbotham ⧫ ace dragon breeder Jocasta Entwhistle of Wilchester Dragon Farm ⧫ intrepid private investigator Celia Spunk on the noir-damp trail of the Chainsmoke Killer ⧫ Goodwife Thankful Goodheart vs Agnes Addlepate with a village at stake ⧫ superspy James Buns constantly captured by eccentrically nefarious megalomaniacs and often rescued by his unfortunately-named girlfriend⧫ incorruptible detective Scotty Blaine ⧫
This originates in real life. It may be surprisingly use-able in fiction. [Uploaded by rebel ga]
May 26, 2011:
If you really want to have fun writing, put two characters together who are bound to annoy each other. In fact, let’s try that now.
Remember the Callow Youth?
A callow youth (male or female) is the Chosen One who must obtain the sacred jewel of Togwogmagog in order to save the kingdom.
...The jewel is in the hall at the top of the mountain. It’s a stormy night, and there are soldiers or dragons or something patrolling, and nobody can even really climb this mountain by themselves, it’s that tricky. Plus the hall itself is guarded and there are witches or assassins or witch-assassins hunting for C.Y.
Fortunately your protagonist has a Stout Companion… who is the most annoying person C.Y. could possibly imagine.
Now get them up that mountain…
But it’s dull if they both annoy each other the same way. And if they’re gonna stick together, they need believable glue. July 2011, on differentiating characters from one another for these & other purposes, “There are lots of ways to do this.”
One way ... is to play characters against each other—contrast them. [For example,] place characters in a situation and show them reacting very differently to it—by their actual actions, the things they do, the things they avoid, and the things they say...
keeping in mind (as other WriteOnns address) that what people/characters say can be really at odds with what they deep down truly think/feel, even in tight spots and pressured conditions. Because people/characters usually don’t know themselves nearly as well before going through trouble as after.
A callow youth and his/her companion have just come down a long underground tunnel that opens into a small cavern.
.A demon, a vampire, a six-foot tall fanged pink poodle … Uploaded by Ekaterin.
On the opposite side of it is a doorway ringed in flames. In front of the doorway stands a witch. (Or, you know, whatever you want. A demon, a vampire, a six-foot tall fanged pink poodle.)
As soon as they step into the cavern, a door to the tunnel slams shut behind them, cutting off their escape.
“So,” says the witch/demon/etc. “You seek the Jewel of Togwogmagog, do you? If you can pass through the flaming portal, you may find it. But see, here’s the thing. I don’t intend to let you.”
Show the C.Y. and companion reacting differently [each according to his/her personality/nature]. You can do this with dialogue or actions, and you can show one character’s thoughts. (Showing more than one character’s thoughts in a scene is headhopping. Like public smoking, it was once considered socially acceptable but is now rarely permitted.)
June 2, 2011, mixing glue from diverse character traits that complement the main characters’ respective strengths and flaws:
My first editor at Random House used to always say, “Let’s dig deeper.”
Twist THIS!
Put a little twist into the overdone trope. Find something new in the character. Instead of giving your wizard a long white beard, give her a flourescent green ‘fro and an irrational dislike of elves. Make your valiant warrior afraid of mice. Or of sharp objects.
It doesn’t matter if the twist has been done before, either. What matters is that you dig deep and find it, and that it belongs deeply and truly to your character.
So … dig deeper into this Callow Youth. Give him/her a conflict, a difficult past, a phobia, a secret evil dream of becoming one of the Seven Solicitresses © TASW, May 2011 — hilarious stuff every time, this may be their first appearance — hava look! and making pots of money.
Now, put CY with [that] annoying character we wrote about last week—or, if you weren’t here last week, any character you want.
They’re approaching the damn jewel. They’re climbing up the mountain to the hall where it is concealed.
Now, reveal the twist. Something new about CY. Something different.
July 7, 2011, how to bring convincing third-bananas:
Right now [these admittedly peripheral characters] sound pretty flat. Fix that. Give each one a distinctive voice, one we’ll know when we meet it again. [And don’t] just edit a little bit. Change what I’ve put in quotes completely to suit the character’s voice.
The king leaned forward across the table. “What do you see? Is it telling you anything?”
The soothsayer peered into her crystal ball. “Yes. I see a callow youth. He is approaching the castle.”
“When will this happen?”
The soothsayer frowned. “I don’t know. But it will be soon.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants to overthrow you.”
“He will not succeed,” said the king, although his eyes asked “Will he?”
“He might succeed,” said the soothsayer. “He has the Jewel of Togwogmagog.”
“He can’t. It’s lost.” The king became angry. “You are lying to me.”
“No, I’m not,” said the woman.
“Guards, take this old woman away and kill her.”
“Yes, sir,” said the head guard. The men grabbed the woman and hauled her from the room.
“This doesn’t change the truth of what I say,” cried the old woman, as she was dragged struggling from the room.
Multifaceted and multiple adversaries give protags more ways to triumph, and also to fail, which we need in order for triumph to really matter: on Bastille Day, CY had to balance on the rail of a ship, fighting an evil pirate over possession of The Jewel! CY didn’t win, but at least the pirate didn’t either.
Other non-allies less overtly adversarial may be fully justified themselves: August 2011, “A narrator’s bias can do a lot for a story—for example, if the reader is encouraged to doubt the narrator… ”, letting us dig into the protag’s afore-suggested difficult past (we all carry the past with us):
Oogle fantasizes cursing CY in Yiddish: “May s/he grow like an onion, head down in the dirt.”
…C.Y. grew up, let us say, in the Castle of Stroop. As a card-carrying Chosen One, s/he was treated with a certain deference.
Another child, Oogle, who also grew up there, was not treated quite the same way. Now, C.Y. is about to start out on his/her [quest]. [How might] Oogle narrate the scene, in the first person...
It’s tough to be Oogle instead of chosen. But even if Oogle’s viewpoint is jaundiced, CY still is/has as much feet of clay as heart of gold and diamond in the rough, or why would we care? But it can’t be arbitrary. Whatever happens,
has to have been building up to the point where it happens. “Making sure everything is set up”, Nov 17 2011. If a Callow Youth is going to risk his/her life to save his/her Stout Companion (or vice versa) then there have to have been earlier moments that convinced us that
1. the CY cared enough about the SC and/or
2. the CY is the kind of person that would risk his/her life to save somebody [despite those feet Oogle found to be clay].
If CY and SC suddenly look at each other and realize that they are in love, the reader has to have [been given] at least a suspicion of it beforehand. Otherwise, the moment, when it comes, lacks impact, and may not be believable.
You don’t need whole big galumphing scenes to set up a future act or revelation. A light touch, a mention of something here and there, an occasional gesture or comment, is fine. But you do need more than one place where you set up what’s coming. Once is not enough--your readers can't read your mind and have other things on theirs.
Making sure every scene is necessary
The first half of my novel was full of scenes that I thought were sweet, funny, clever, or just painted something about my fantasy world very clearly. What they didn’t do was advance the plot.
I’m giving myself a choice with these scenes. I can change them so that they do serve the plot—for example, by setting something up that’s going to matter later. Or I can delete them. Harsh, no? But I still had the fun of writing them.
(I know some people will disagree strongly with the need to delete such scenes. I disagree strongly with it myself. That is why we are writers and not editors.)
Both of these concerns—making sure everything is set up and making sure every scene serves the plot—are things you probably shouldn’t be thinking about at all while you’re drafting.
When you’re drafting, it’s full steam ahead. BIC! HOK! TAM!
(Butt in chair, hands on keyboard, typing away madly.)
A Callow Youth and his/her Stout Companion are cornered at the edge of a cliff. By, I don’t know, soldiers, dragons, Solicitresses. The point is someone’s on to them, and there they are, our hero/ine/s, with their backs to the wall, only there’s no wall. And precious little floor.
The CY and the SC are outnumbered, outgunned, outsworded and out-onioned. And they can’t fly.
Deus ex Tolkien rider?
Fortunately! A bunch of giant eagles swoop in, pick them up, and fly them to safety. Whew! Deus ex Tolkien rides again.
[This would require earlier if subtle planting of mentions by which] which you set up [what] makes the later swooping-in-of-eagles possible. In an actual novel, you’d need to do this several times in several different places [but for each] Remember that a brief mention of something is enough—the whole scene doesn’t have to be devoted to the set-up.
Then, August 30, 2012, the advent of The Tower of Dooooommmmm! and the Dread Least Grebe:
A CY and SC find that their search for the Jewel of Togwogmagog had brought them, inexorably, to the lair of the dread Least Grebe. To face the terrible beast, they must knock on the door of the tower that stands in the middle of the Isthmus of Onionset.
... their approach to the tower [must] convey their terror. But don’t actually mention their terror. Just show us what they’re seeing, doing, hearing etc.
Defeated but grimly determined, they return to the Tower on Sept 6, 2012 to face their possible Doooomm (and find out why a writer can’t just spring things on the readers):
Have you ever read a book where, toward the end, the author triumphantly reveals something [like] the murderer is, in fact, Baldwin! Or ... the [man behind the curtain, pulling the switches], to whom they’ve all paid no attention, is, after all that… Baldwin!
Wizard’s Tower by kosak michelewln. Find her graphic arts, photos, jewelry, scarves, sock-monkeys & other items for sale in the 2014 Kos Katalog, the new Katalog soon to be issued, and at links in her Street Prophets Coffee Hour diary today.
And you’re left thinking [“What the...]?”
So you flip back. And it turns out Baldwin appeared eight times in the first 90 pages. But not since then.
Whenever you set up a surprise for readers [whether a character or something else], make sure to insert, a few pages beforehand, a little reminder that helps them be surprised by the surprise. Instead of just confused [and feeling cheated]. I usually put these reminders in during a revision. (I’ve been putting a couple in today, in fact.)
...the protagonist [might] see/hear something that reminds her of him. He can step into the room and say “Ah, there are my reading glasses.” Or someone can say, “It’s like Baldwin is the only guy we can really trust.” (Ha. That’s what they think.)...
Even if [the] Baldwin was a fairly major [element in] the first half of the book, you still need to insert a reminder if [it/he was] gone a chapter or more.
The reason is, time doesn’t run the same in the reader’s world as it does in the book. The reader may have had a restless night and an eight-hour workday, a mad dash to the emergency room, a passionate weekend in Venice, in between reading page 146 and page 147.
A callow youth and his/her stout companion find that their search for the Jewel of Togwogmagog has brought them, inexorably, to the lair of the dread Least Grebe. They are armed only with the Duffle Bag of Least Resistance, and know not what dangers await them. As the two heroes approach the tower, make sure you find a way to remind the reader of Baldwin, so as to prepare the reader for the terrible shock that awaits them within.
Now, what about “a related subject—characters that remain off-stage for the entire book/story/play/movie/memoir.”
...almost all stories have them. They appear in the tale as memories, influences on the protagonist’s beliefs, sources of fear, hope, [motivation,] inspiration [, information,] or unhealed trauma. They might be dead, they might be on vacation in Scotland, they might have written a book that the protagonist constantly thumbs through... But they’re always there (or rather not there).
They’re a device…. part of the backstory. Sometimes the frontstory. ...(“According to the last of Elinor’s letters...” — “Ralph had always told us...”) You can use them to show something [integral to the tale] that you can’t show on-stage—a memory of the distant past, a scene that occurred in a place the protagonist couldn’t possibly visit. Because I write for children, I tend to use absent characters to show events that would be too upsetting if they occurred on-stage. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad technique when writing for adults either.
...Once more unto the dark tower we go ... writing the same scene over and over again is the very life and soul of this business. I’m tellin’ ya.
A callow youth and his/her stout companion find that their search for the Jewel of Togwogmagog had brought them, inexorably, to the lair of the dread Least Grebe. They are armed only with the Duffle Bag of Least Resistance, and they know not what dangers await them. As the two heroes approach the Tower… …your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to evoke in some way the always-off-stage character Froop. Do it in such a way that our heroes really couldn’t get into the tower without Froop’s assistance/inspiration/secret toenail.
Ah ha! There’s Froop, another in our recurring —if, in this challenge, at least, always off-stage— cast of template characters and set of, well, settings. The Least Grebe mentioned above that actually made his/her bow — in The Swamp, one of our template settings, corresponding to any fiction setting that’s dangerous, unpleasant, and rife with unpredictable stuff— on March 8, 2012, in a WriteOn edition about the critical need, sometimes, to “tell, don’t show.” Yes, you read that right.
I know some of y’all don’t like it when I talk about rules, so you might want to avert your eyes, but the best writing rule I’ve ever learned is
Uploaded by rebel ga.
Give the reader a break.
I think that’s the rule that enabled me to step out of my piles of rejection slips. Like a lot of writers, I wanted my clever readers to figure out what I meant through my oh-so-subtle hints. The thing is… they might have other things on their minds... [cf. above: time doesn’t run the same in the reader’s world as it does in the book. ]
During times of extreme stress and/or mental nonavailability I always like to tuck into a little Marion Chesneya.k.a. M.C.Beaton etc etc. She writes Regency romances, which I don’t otherwise read. And she believes in telling, not showing. I doubt there’s a writer alive who believes in telling, not showing to the extent Ms. Chesney does. When your world is going mad, telling, not showing is just what you want in a writer.
Most editors like a bit of telling, not showing. Sometimes [your readers need it] to know what’s going on. I’ve occasionally had an editor ask why something is happening – was this established earlier? And I’ll say why yes, I hinted at it on page 45. [But] while you might want to make your reader work for some things in the story … you don’t want to make the reader work for everything. … Just be conscious of what you’re giving away and what you’re asking the reader to work for, and in most cases, try to keep the latter to a minimum.
A Least Grebe in a Swamp — don’t let appearances fool you..
[Introducing] The Least Grebe (you’ll note he is “the most poorly understood of North American grebes.”) Here’s the setup—
A Callow Youth, having narrowly escaped from an evil wizard with the aid of his Stout Companion and a magic mirror, is still on the run, slogging through a Swamp. The two adventurers encounter a Least Grebe. This Least Grebe is damned important to the narrative—he’s not just scenery. He might turn out to be the key to everything, in fact.
Write a passage (it can be description, dialogue, action, whatever you want) in which the Least Grebe is either
1. there for some obscure purpose that you think the reader should guess, or
2. just being introduced for future use, so in this scene the reader’s attention is drawn to the grebe for the first of several times (this is called “seeding”), or
3. actively doing or saying something that’s important to the narrative now
[Grebe viewpoint, July 2013:]
The Dread Least Grebe had had about enough. Here they came, another Callow Youth and Stout Companion, complete with determined expressions, do-or-die attitude, swords, and a map.
These two would be after the jewel, of course.... the jewel without which the Grebe could not survive …
... The Grebe breathed fire...
With an exercise in genre-jumping, the March 22, 2012 edition demonstrated the versatility of our templates.
...So, basically, yeah, you can write any genre with elements of another genre, but one genre needs to dominate simply so that [editors, librarians, bookstores, readers, parents, teachers etc know how to deal with the book]. And you can break the rules for any genre, but you have to do it well, and recognize you’re taking a risk.
For nearly a year now, we’ve been working on the adventures of the Callow Youth, the Stout Companion, and the Jewel of Togwogmagog. ...For tonight ... write the opening of The Jewel of Togwogmagog as if it were one of the following:
- a romance - a “cozy” mystery - a police procedural mystery - a legal thriller - chick lit - "literary fiction"
Since it’s an opening, be careful not to info-dump.
Mar 29, 2012 introduced a template prop from the genus Allium (these veg keep creeping in from time to time):
...In most cases, in popular fiction, you want to reduce the psychological distance between reader and character as much as possible. This gives your story more emotional impact, and provides a more enjoyable experience for the reader. Many people read at least partly because they want to see through someone else’s eyes.
Creeping with allium genius.
...When you write in limited-omniscient viewpoint (fully omniscient viewpoint is rarely used anymore) you ... increase psychological distance, since the story isn’t seen through just one character’s eyes. That’s one reason why single-viewpoint (or, sometimes, a deliberate shift between two or, more rarely, three or more viewpoints) is more common nowadays.
Much of what we talk about in these diaries has to do with decreasing psychological distance. Some things that decrease psychological distance are:
- using more than one sense in describing a scene (the viewpoint character is experiencing it with all his/her senses; s/he’s there, and so is the reader)
...
- showing the viewpoint character’s feelings (as unobtrusively as possible)
- showing the viewpoint character reacting to events in a less-than-perfect, human way…
...here’s the scene:
A callow youth (male or female) and his/her Stout Companion are deep in a swamp, bearing the Magical [and sometimes Purple] Onion of Othmar, which they must trade to the Least Grebe for information about the whereabouts of the sacred jewel of Togwogmagog.
They don’t know where to find the Least Grebe, though, and as they venture further into the swamp, darkness is closing in, and alligators are creeping over the transom.
Write the scene (or the first 100 words of it) twice.
The first time, do it from a limited omniscient viewpoint… [so we] are seeing each character from the outside. [You] can describe anybody’s appearance, expression, etc—but you can’t describe anybody’s thoughts.
The second time, do it from a single character’s viewpoint [so] we can see the viewpoint character’s thoughts, but not his/her face, and we can see everybody else’s faces, but not their thoughts. Try to reduce psychological distance as close to zero as possible….
BTW, some occasional template characters —some contributed by members of the group— in their habitual milieux ;-)
- Belinda sees Lord Postlethwaite-Praxleigh (pronounced Puppy) leaving the ballroom on the arm of her rival, Adelaide, who isn’t even capable of appreciating all he went through in the Peninsular Wars
- The battle isn’t going so well for intrepid mercenary soldier Wallace Higginbotham.
- A stranger has come to the Wiltchester Dragon Farm, wanting to buy a baby dragon, but ace dragon breeder Jocasta Entwhistle doesn’t trust him one bit.
- Private investigator Celia Spunk is driving down a rain-spattered street at midnight when she realizes there’s a pink 1940 Hudson following her... the very year, make and color of the car driven by the Chainsmoke Killer.
- Goodwife Thankful Goodheart feeds her hens and minds her own business until that awful Agnes Addlepate starts causing trouble in the village.
- International superspy James Buns has been captured by an eccentric megalomaniac, who plans to use an elaborate invention to kill the hero and his unfortunately-named girlfriend.
- Incorruptible detective Scotty Blaine delivers a warning to the local mob boss.
Lest the plethora of characters lose us sight of our template settings, ‘most every genre has some version of the generic first appearing in the January 24, 2013 edition, entitled, “Why Can’t the Protagonist Just Quit?”
Mind you, every template character or setting I first find in a diary may previously have appeared in an earlier diary’s completed challenges, but until they’re made collective property in a diary, I wouldn’t want to risk poaching a writer’s creation or mistaking as longterm a temporary template that didn’t actually turn out to be widely repurposable after all.
Meanwhile, sometimes you wanna go where everyone knows your name … as long as your name is “Mac”, “Bud”, “Pal”, “lady”, “girlie”, “Miss”, “Ma’am”, “fella”, “sir”... And where, with or without honorific, your reply to “What’ll it be?” is a request for which the questioner has the right to expect coin of the realm in exchange. Also where quick reflexes are more than occasionally critical for dodging flung flagons, evading suspiciously intrusive questions, sneaking out the back as the bailiffs arrive, etc., as on January 24, 2014 when the key question of fiction is asked, “Why can’t the character[s] just quit?”
Why is my protagonist going through all this? What are the stakes? Does s/he have the option of just walking out of the story and going home? Tonight’s challenge:
The Startled Duck, a not-very-clean, dimly-lighted place
A callow youth and his/her stout companion have just emerged from the Swamp of the Dread Least Grebe, carrying the Onion of Othmar.
Or at least they thought they were carrying it. Oops.
Now at this point, the sensible thing to do would be to say “Screw the onion. Let’s go off to the Startled Duck and quaff ale.”
Show us why the characters can’t do that.
That’s almost all the templates of characters, settings and props, I think. Having joined WriteOn in 2013, I’ve remained a bit fuzzy on who/what some characters and settings were about. cfk helpfully clarified at my Sept 1,2016 edition, to assist with today’s WriteOn:
[SensibleShoes] set [the cast] up as a callow youth as The Chosen One and a sidekick trying to get back the jewel ... Froop as a wizard and the Least Grebe as a swamp denizen, and then let us loose. I was one who decided that Froop was not a good wizard, but a traitor. Others may not feel that way.
Malford the Dragon is mine. I decided I had to go big the first night, took a deep breath and made my lost jewel a dragon’s eye that had been used in the Togwogmagog light house for many years.
Over the years things have evolved, of course.
Strawbale asked if there’s any consensus on why, or on whose behalf, they are supposed to get the Jewel back. cfk replied,
...I have seen all kinds of jewels and ideas over the years. SS pretty much just let us go down any road though she kept putting us back in the swamp. :)
and I reported my observations...
...consistent with [the longtimers’] I hope ... that The Jewel of Togwogmag is not an ongoing shared-universe story but a set of templates for characters and settings necessary for most kinds of fiction, and slightly shaped for the fantasy genre, but reshape-able by anyone writing here, for purposes of doing the writing exercises (“challenges”).
Sometimes the “why” may be part of the exercise, usually not. Some writers tell their version as if the jewel is being heisted from it’s rightful but undeserving or evil owner in the first place, others make it a retrieval rectifying a loss or disappearance or theft, some that it’s simply a quest a Chosen One has to do, some are in it for the money value of the jewel or the money they’ll be paid when they turn it over to someone who hired them to get it or someone who’s put a bounty on it, etc etc.
To paraphrase Edmund Kean’s dying words (unless it was David Garrick, John Barrymore, or whoever), growing an avocado is easy; writing successful fiction, not so much. Uploaded by rebel ga.
[Getting the jewel involves] every possible reason why. The challenge put to us any given week can change the “why” any one of us might have assumed as a given for meeting the writing challenge of the week before.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker said,
...consistency is not required — in fact, the point of the first Jewel of Togwogmagog exercise was to take a well-worn template (callow youth & stout companion quest for the Jewel) and make it individual. So, cfk’s jewel is a dragon’s eye, and mine has a curse that turned 7 innocent maidens into lawyers… There was one going for a while in which the Jewel was a person.
Cfk added “We were writing scenes to learn how to do things rather than to write a story.” My own Jewel is sometimes a once-beautiful seaport town laid waste by climate disaster. Other times it’s a log of frozen chocolate-chip cookie dough … no, wait, that’s the quest provender and barter-goods. Well, anyway… all this is great because it means there’s never any “Oops!” necessary when using or abusing templates for our practice challenges.
The detailedly unique characterization of a template by an individual writer, like the personal creation of characters etc, even for challenge purposes is, of course, the intellectual property of the individual writer, something we want to respect, as we want our own creations respected, in the hope of someday publishing. Copyright is literal and legal as well as moral, whether formally registered or not; and back in the years when I had a bit to do with editors and suchlike, they were quite averse to risking lawsuits by publishing material involving characters, settings, and plots previously in use by multiple authors even on an informal basis, unless the usage was a hundred years or so ago. Inadvertant as well as homage-with-intent copyright violation contributed greatly to the end of acceptance of unsolicited submissions, and the increase of literary agencies as a sort of flood barrier. So, if a writer in our group chooses to give permission to someone else to borrow her/his unique creation, that’s his/her decision, since s/he is the one upon whom potential repercussions would fall.
Uploaded by rebel ga.
Finally in setting up our Challenge for tonight, the stock/template characters in the Quest include transom alligators. When first a Jewel newb whose fiction submission years were mostly in the 70s and 80s, I made the assumption that a transom alligator is what devours manuscripts tossed over the publisher's transom into the slush pile, and promptly savages the writer who tossed it, as well. But I’m given to understand that writers don't actually print papercopy manuscripts anymore, most publishers stopped accepting unsolicited submissions long ago for liability reasons, and doors at publishing houses no longer have transoms anyway (nobody's doors have’em -- it’d screw with the air conditioning) and therefore —I reasoned— the alligators popping up in WriteOn challenges are extremely hungry, thus in a very bad mood. I haven't seen anyone give a transom alligator an actual, specific personality or name, though sometimes they're a requirement of the challenge! Eventually I found Sensho’s Sept 30, 2010 WriteOn (transom alligators actually predate CY, SC, Froop, Least Grebe, et alia) with explication of this species in the key 7th paragraph:
In Jack M. Bickham's book The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Making Them), Chapter 23 is entitled "Don't Drop Alligators Through the Transom". According to Mr. Bickham, a certain author, wanting to raise the stakes at the end of her scene, dropped an alligator through the transom. See, there was this hard-boiled detective meeting with this dame client, and she (the author, not the client) wanted the scene to end with things-just-getting-worse (which is in itself a good idea), and so she (the author) dropped an alligator through the transom.
You can see where this is going, right? ...Make the alligator believable...
Uploaded by kosak Alligator Ed. Transom is just out of camera range.
Sep 30, 2010
THE CHALLENGE FOR TONIGHT:
Write a scene (length of your own choosing) in which the odd-appearing lone denizen of the deserted Startled Duck gives poor Tower of Doom travel directions to a cynical, world-weary news stringer on the trail of the story of the often-purple Magical Onion of Othmar and its connection with a Togwegian Jewel of uncertain powers; said directions causing said traveler to stumble into a tense confrontation in The Swamp, between Our Doughty Questers (CY & SC) and a mob of transom alligators, while a huge, red-eyed, feathered thing lurks unseen to all in the shadows….
Uploaded by JayRaye
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