Timewaster's Guide Archive

I like the start of this story, it looks like it can go places. You’ve got instant tension for your main character; his father’s death, he’s soon to become king, he has to earn the trust of his subjects, his country is about to be invaded, etc.

There are two things I want to touch upon, one is a matter of style, the other about logistics.

The first thing is that your descriptions are rather on the lean side. When I was reading I got into Alexander’s head pretty well, but his surroundings, what the people were doing and even what they looked like, isn’t really there. I’d like to see more of the environment Alexander’s in.

The second thing is about the army of Carn. In short, I can’t believe it exists. Now, when you write that:

Carn can afford to field millions against our thousands.

You may have the character exaggerate the numbers, but I doubt it since this is a serious strategy meeting, Gevron doesn’t seem like the type, and the number Alexander’s army consists of sounds accurate.

In any fantasy setting an army of millions is rather unlikely. There are an enormous amount of resources needed to support an army. For instance you need food; in this case for millions of people, which has to be grown on fields by farmers (it’s not SF, there are no replicators (I assume)) who also need to eat.

Your army doesn’t go around naked, so you also need blacksmiths for weapons and armour (enough for millions) and mines and quarries for the ore to actually make the weapons, which means you also need miners. You can see the number of people needed to support millions of soldiers will go up very fast and, yes, these people also need food to live.

Continuing, your army of millions isn’t stationary, which means you need a supply chain to get the food to the soldiers. For that you need an army to actually manage such a supply chain. Even if you let the soldiers forage what they need from the land they pass through it will not be enough, the army will ravage through whatever it finds like a horde of locusts – leaving the land as close to useless as you can probably get and it will still lose people because it can’t support itself.

On the whole you may need ten times the number of people for every soldier in your army, which can come to 10 million to start with and this is just the population to support the army and nothing else.

Here are some numbers from our world:
China: Population=1,339,117,000 army personnel=1,600,000
India: Population= 1,186,790,000 army personnel=1,100,000
United States: Population= 310,080,000 army personnel=477,800

About one in a thousand people is in the army in our time. This will translate into a population of 1,000,000,000 people in Carn for an army of one million. But you say millions, so it’s at least 2,000,000,000 – rivaling current day China with two times the US added for good measure. Even if you cut this to one in a hundred or one in ten it’s still a huge population. I haven’t seen a fantasy setting yet capable of supporting that number of people.

The armies of Carn really need to be toned down a lot, because I can’t believe any fantasy empire on any planet can support it.

Well it's been quite a few weeks since I last submitted anything, or critiqued anything for that matter, but I blame my vacation for that (hopping from festival to festival in the blistering sun of Japan for a month doesn't make for a good writing environment).

Now that I'm back I'm going to try to catch up with everything as soon as I can.

I agree with what the others have said, this version is a lot better than the first – which read more like a summary of what the chapter/part should be about. I liked most of it and I don’t have much to add to what’s been said already, but I would like to address the one thing that I found jarring and which, for a moment, took me out of the story.

It happens when Karrus is stuck beneath the obelisk; his leg is trapped and he can’t feel it, he’s lucky it’s not broken. That’s all fine and good, but this means the circulation in his leg is cut off, or at the very least severely limited. Too long of that and the leg can die, but even before that toxins in the blood will collect in the cut off leg. The moment his leg is freed the trapped blood will start rushing through his body, taking all the toxins with it; think heart attack, yet Karrus walks away scot-free.

There’s also little trouble with him baking in the sun for hours after he stopped sweating. What you describe is heat stroke, which is a potentially fatal condition which should be treated immediately. One of the things that can happen is, like in the previous example, a heart attack. With Karrus there is no treatment, yet again, he suffers no real ill effects.

Karrus should be dead several times over, but he’s not, and he’s doing pretty great walking away from the scene looking for water. I find this a little hard to believe since he appears to be human.

All right, it was a bit short, but the emotional turmoil between the two characters was very good. It shows the other side of the queen nicely.

That said, the dialogue did feel a bit off. For me I wouldn’t say it reads contrived per se, but it doesn’t feel completely natural either. You probably went for this on purpose, since neither character are exactly normal, but the formality of speech makes it feel a bit stilted (thank you writing excuses for adding that term to my vocabulary). The latest Writing Excuses podcast (episode 4.26) goes into this more.

Again, I didn’t mind this so much as I did the names for the two characters. You’ve got characters like Eshra, Trinian, Sareneth, Tristen, Kyrah, etc. around and then, for two of the major powers in the world, there’s Jane and John. Their names are so mundane and modern that it jarred me out of the excerpt for a moment. If you combine the normalness of the names with the speech pattern to make it seem they are far from normal the dichotomy becomes even greater.

I'm trying to re work my magic system a bit, before I begin my rewrites.

Reworking your magic system is fine, but as I said in another comment I think you should finish the first draft first before going into rewrites.

In case people are wondering what happened to chapter six, I've been reworking the previous chapters a bit after all the great advice I've been given.

As such the previous chapter five has become chapters five and six, which makes this chapter seven. At least for now, I still have to do something about chapter four, so the ordering might change yet again, but let's cross that bridge when I get there.

I liked the story – it’s different from what I usually read, far more internally focussed, with a feel of a slower pace (which is interesting because years go by in about 11,000 words). I did have a moment halfway through that I wondered if anything was going to happen.

I don’t usually have that problem with stories that have a more external threat, but in this case an external problem would feel tagged on. While the characters think of their problems you might want to try to make those issues more pressing to them and in that way create some conflicts. Come to think of it that’s what I really missed, some clear, urgent, conflicts for the characters they need to resolve.
 
Another thing I both liked, as well as have some difficulties with, is the writing style of this story. You chose your style deliberately I think, with short sentences to increase the feel of the internal nature of the characters and their problems, but there are instances where the fragments were jarring, as if you’d forgotten to finish what you started. Again I realize that’s what happens when people think, and that this style should work because of it, but it doesn’t, at least not all the time - my internal editor wouldn’t let me.

The switch between past tense for Janna and present tense for Aryl though was brilliant, though mileage my vary, it worked really well for me.

Eshra's viewpoint originally started with the council meeting itself, introducing all the players one by one, but that got treally boring, to write and to read.

Not having read your first draft of the first chapter I can’t really say if it would be boring to read, but if you think it was boring it probably was. That puts to my mind that you were probably giving a lot of world information and explanations on the points the characters were discussing in the meeting. It’s also not necessary to introduce all the key players in the meeting.

My advice there would be to cut the explanations and just leave in the characters discussing some political matter – preferably where they are deciding on a resolution that would favour the magistrate, despite there being better solutions. Since the characters know the situations at hand they can talk without the need for explaining what they’re saying in the context of the world.

Without those explanations you leave in the mystery of what’s going on in your world and by dropping some careful in-world terms you can create the feeling of depth so the reader will read on to find out what it all means. Your focus can then be on what Eshra feels and what she reads in the faces and words of the other politicians.

Since we don’t need to see the whole meeting the chapter can start at the end there so it doesn’t need to drag on. The key there is to not explain things right away. Starting at the decision making moment is soon enough.

I definately could cut out the first bit with the meeting without too much trouble, and just give a brief paragraph explaining that Tristan is going off to recall soldiers, and Gareth to find the girl.  Do you think that would work?

The majority of Felix’s part is the meeting, so if you cut that there’s very little in Felix’s part that we absolutely need to see at this point of the book. His interaction with the queen is interesting and a source for conflict later (since he doesn’t seem to want to be there) but I can easily see that scene happening later in the story.

The thing about Tristan and Gareth also isn’t really necessary. We already know Eshra’s fear of being followed and without evidence to the contrary we’ll naturally assume this is going to happen, so declaring that it’s going to happen isn’t really necessary.

What I think I’m leaning towards is leaving the first chapter solely to Eshra, because I don’t think you need the other viewpoints in the first chapter. But that’s of course your call. We'll see what happens in the later chapters, they may prove me wrong about the importance of certain events right now.

Anyways, thanks so much for your comment.  I completely agree with everything you said, although I don't know what to do about a lot of it yet.

All right, I’ll try to give you some advice. It’s hard because I don’t know where the story is heading and which characters are truly important, but I’ll give it a shot.

Once I thought of just focusing on Trinian, Adam and Eshra's story, and then back tracking and giving the Arbitrators story in a different part, but that would have been very awkward several chapters down the road when several less major characters begin to cross between plotlines.

I wouldn’t recommend this. I’m reading a book right now where the first part switches back and forth between ‘now’ and thirty years ago in order to show how a relatively minor character from the previous book grew into the person he is now. By the end of the first book this character got into a powerful position and now he’s becoming a main character. I’ve been struggling with that first part because I don’t care how he grew up since I already know where he and the people he knows are going to end up. I want to know what’s going to happen next, not what’s already happened.

On one hand I understand wanting to flesh out that character, but it doesn’t really work for me. If you go down that road you risk doing the same.

As for introducing three main characters at once, I did it to try and lend my chapters some structure.  I try to do around three viewpoints a chapter, that way if I have a shorter on, it's usually paired with a longer one.

In the current story I’m editing, The Citadel of Thorns, I also have quite a few chapters with multiple viewpoint characters (also around three). What I’m finding now is that the chapters I wrote with one viewpoint work a lot better than the last two chapters I did, which juggled three viewpoints. So I’m rewriting those chapters, and the following ones, to be more focussed: one viewpoint and perhaps a scene with a different one at the end if I don’t want to focus an entire chapter on what that character is doing. Later on, when I get to some climaxes, I’ll switch viewpoints for tension effects.

It’s interesting that your approach is the complete opposite to what I’m currently trying to do. Should you break the chapters into single viewpoints? Maybe, but if this works for you I say wait to see what’s said about your next chapter (and this one, since so far I’m the only one critiquing, and I can be wrong), before really changing things.

Like I said, the biggest problem isn’t really your viewpoints but what you do with them.

And how would you recommend pairing down the amount of information given

What you’ve done in this chapter is give a lot of information in a ‘tell’ fashion instead of ‘show’.

In the case of Eshra’s section she’s telling Trinian what has just happened to her. What I think you want to accomplish with her section are the following points.
1.   Show the political structure and upheaval.
2.   Show just how powerful and scary the magistrate is.
3.   Get Eshra to run.

The way you currently do this is arrive after the facts, when Eshra’s in a panic at her room. There she explains and explains and explains all that just happened to her. We’ve seen nothing of this and have to take her word for it.

Now if it was me, I think I’d start the first chapter with Eshra’s point of view at the end of the council meeting. She’s frustrated by what she sees and worries about the magistrate’s power. Then, when she’s about to leave the magistrate approaches her and they talk about all the things you currently have her explain to Trinian. You can make her fear more real to us by really putting down an insidious magistrate – it’ll be harder to write than Eshra’s talk after it happened, but it will be a lot more powerful.

This is also your chance to introduce the reader to Felix. He’ll be on the look out for the magistrate’s plots and be interested when he sees Eshra with the magistrate. The magistrate can point Felix out, note his interest in Eshra, remind her (or perhaps she reminds herself) of Felix’s position, to really make her believe the Queen is out for her already.

Then you can end the chapter when she reaches her rooms and tells Trinian they need to run. You'll give the reader the same information, but instead of telling it you're showing it and that will make Eshra's section fun to read.

Because I’m trying (going to try) to focus on a single viewpoint per chapter I say leave the first chapter with Eshra as the sole viewpoint character, but that’s your call and I’m biased right now.

I’m not sure what to do with Felix, other than you don’t want to include the inner chamber talk with the Queen – it gives too much away. It seems he’s investigating what the magistrate is doing, so instead of his report to the queen you could focus on his information gathering, leave off when he’s meeting the Queen, and get back to his viewpoint just after he’s gone to bed with her.

Or you can do the reverse, have his chapter start when he’s in bed with her and she tells him to proceed with his duties. He can then meet up with Sareneth and do what he’s supposed to be doing. If you don’t tell us his assignments and the characters don’t talk about it (because they both already know what that assignment is) you can make the reader think they’re going after Eshra instead of the magistrate.

As for Adam, showing off his magic system in the first chapter is cool, but that’s basically all he’s doing. I might suggest that you wait to introduce him until Eshra and Trinian come for him. If they come in while he’s doing his test you can show off his magic then.

but while I was writing, I felt like I was keeping loads of information back.  It's funny that way.

It is funny; I’ve had the same thing happen to me. I wrote a chapter in which I droned on about how important a city was to the region. I knew that I was going to cut out a lot, since I wrote it mainly to flesh out the city for myself. So in the first rewrite I did cut out a lot. But when I looked at it a few weeks later I was amazed to see the chapter was still an info-dump. Suffice it to say I tossed the whole thing and rewrote it from scratch. Sometimes you just don’t see the surplus of information anymore or it takes a while and a fresher perspective to see it.