This was something I actually started thinking about and only expanded on when me and a good friend (Nut) talked about it on our way to get taco's!!
Story Line Main Point Map
This is to be a write up of the path that the story should take over time in a very vague way, this is meant to be a guide for me to say this section of the story needs to start here and end over there, how do I want to make that happen? After I accomplish this I need to map out the characters to meet along the way as well as do research into every aspect of the time events that I will be having my story wrap around. Then once I have my bearings as well as a character base and the knowledge to make use of I will be able to set my mind free on the task of telling a tale worth telling.
Act 1
-Begins with a journal entry telling of the excitement of the Main character over a camping trip with the father.
-During their camping trip they become seperated and the child is lost in the woods as a storm begins to roll in.
-The boy finds the cave and the handprint inside and accidently casts himself into a portal into the land of magic.
-The boy makes his way into the city and finds himself in the care of an old man.
-The boy learns of his magical abilities and about how magic affects the world around him.
-The boy is cast out from the city and he decides to make his way back to the place he was found in the land of magic.
-He finds the handprint again and tries to go back to our world but in doing so tears the magical spell with holding magic from our world.
Act 2
-Magic begins to have its affect on our world as the boy tries to make sense of where and when he is.
-He finds himself in a strange time with the world going into utter chaos at the apperance of magic.
-The people of the world begin to join together into groups to protect themselves.
-In order to stop magic in the world of men the man begins to track the spell that was cast so that he can reverse the tear in it.
-He finds out where the spell was cast and when and must find his way back to that time.
-Time travel proves to be unstable and sends him to the wrong time.
-He begins to see that magic was the cause of many of the past events but the spell that erased the memory of magic made people believe otherwise.
-He finally makes his way to hiroshima and finds the wizard who cast the spell.
-He duels the wizard who cast the spell to try to stop it and in the end causes the spell that erases magic.
-He wakes up and finds himself in a different time.
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1 comment
1. xeronut, Oct 6, 2008 8:44:47 AM #
Hey man! I read through your posts from the beginning and decided this would be a good place to stick some initial feedback.
-I like the idea of starting your chapters with journal entries. You'd mentioned that he had a mentor, or an owner/guardian type overseeing him; perhaps an entry from his perspective here and there, a scribbling of thoughts on paper (or parchment, depending on the era in which this part of the story takes place) detailing his impressions, musings, fears in rearing you. Given this is a boy you're writing about, does this master play something of a father figure to him parallel to his role as a mentor or teacher? Maybe these entries could include the kinds of 'does not work well with others' or 'has potential but no direction' anecdotes grade school teachers used to love to jot down on our report cards. :)
-From what I've read in your entries thus far, the world you're creating feels Medieval in context. Given this world was discovered as a result of a father-son hiking trip gone awry, Scotland sounds like as decent a place as any to start the story. One suggestion though - it might be a good idea to start formulating a reason as to *why* they were in Scotland in the first place; are they Scottish themselves, or are they foreigners on a pilgrimage? Does the father have a background of some sort, an obsession he's feeding in searching for whatever it is that brought them to those castle ruins? Will this past tie in to the story later on, if indeed there is an ulterior motive to this venture? Keep in mind, also, that by making them Scottish you might want to do some research on languages in the region (slang, figures of speech etc.), basic geography and castle architecture - here are some links I was playing with:
http://images.google.com/images?q=scotland+castles&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title
and
http://www.castles.org/Chatelaine/list.htm
-This world of magic the protagonist(?) ends up in - will it be revisited during the course of this story, or is it a one-shot meant to show the stark differences between fantasy and reality? A duality such as this in fantasy is more often than not used to flex some of the author's literary muscle rather than actually adding to the plot; the ability to write two completely different worlds in the same story and making them both accessible enough to the reader so they hold that very difference in wonder rather than disbelief. The Acts you described in this post - will they be one book or two? Three? I find myself trying to bite off more than I can chew a lot of the time, trying to fit all these (in my mind) good ideas into too small a space, and they end up elbowing each other in the nose vying for a position as the predominant theme of the story. I suppose what I'm getting at is, will this progression have a defined top-middle-bottom, or is the timeline in this journal post subject to a more freeform approach in that 'if it gets done, it gets done'? To be blunt, how strong is your vision of this story?
-To bring this fight from a fictional realm of dragons and sorcery into our contemporary world is going to take some research, particularly the Hiroshima namedrop in this post. I think it's a great idea to use alternate scenarios for well-known historical events; though it has been used before - a la Forrest Gump like we spoke about in the car - injecting your characters into history and making them seem like they belong is ripe for creative storytelling (storyretelling? I so made that word up right now). A word of caution though: if this story is something you want other people to read, it might be wise to hold your subject matter with some level of reverence, and show respect to the more sensitive points in time you choose to reimagine (Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no laughing matter, I'm sure you know). Not that I think that by writing about them in a fictional tense would be blatantly or unconditionally disrespectful, but make sure you handle them with the delicacy and attention they deserve. I normally abhor Wikipedia - it's smug and too heavily biased to be credible the majority of the time - but this particular article seems less.. well, smug or heavily biased:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
I'll post more when more gets written. :) Interesting start, though - keep at it!