 Action/Adventure: August 27, 2014 Issue [#6512] |
  Action/Adventure
This week: What's With All the Walking? Edited by: Storm Machine  
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| All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. ~Friedrich Nietzsche |
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Many action and adventure stories follow some kind of Hero's Journey, where the hero begins as a relatively untried youngster and grows throughout the story. The antagonist sits somewhere and there is a journey required for the hero to meet the villain at the last battle.
While there's nothing wrong with this type of story, sometimes I get mired in the walking, especially with crossovers in the fantasy genre. We're walking, or we're riding horses, we never stay two nights in the same place, and we're always overcome by the scenery. Sometimes the scenery is amazing. Sometimes the author waxes poetic and mixes some metaphors to make the reader's teeth grind.
This type of journey can become repetitive or monotonous, which is the hard part about the hero's journey. You have to show enough of the progress of the hero to make it believable when the end comes and the villain is vanquished, without making the reader take every single step with him.
Case in point: I've been learning tai chi for about six months. Of the three sections of the form, I've completed two for instruction and will begin the third next week. If I wrote about learning each move within the form, I could bore you to tears or write a semi-decent tai chi manual. However, for a novel, I would take a little bit here, a little there, and generally speaking in books we seem to learn the tricks that will be used later in the book to great effect.
When you send your hero down the journey, keep it interesting. Traveling along the road offers opportunities to learn about how each character reacts to unexpected obstacles. Other travelers, bandits, or officials become barriers to overcome. The companions, because a hero always has companions, spend a lot of time together, so the reader will know them well and root for all of them. Bring your Hero's Journey alive, and keep the travel from only being about the walking.
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| |  | Raising Worms (E)
After a man gives a woman a mysterious package, odd things start happening to her.
#2004972 by Allie Z.  |
| | | Out of Place (E)
A man wakes up one morning and finds that something is out of place- but what?
#2005306 by Allie Z. |
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| ASIN: B085272J6B |
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BIG BAD WOLF Feeling Thankful 
I just read a couple of books - Vampyres of Hollywood and Love Bites. They are in Double First Person - first one person tells part of the story, and then the other tells part of it, from their separate points of view.
Always an interesting take on POV.
monty31802
Points well made. An enjoyable News Letter.
Thank you.
Shadowstalker-- Covid free
I myself have been writing a lot in 1st person. Heck everything in my Portfolio at the moment is just that. I see nothing wrong with it, and I agree that in some respects, you go into it knowing the main character won't die. But to me, while writing in first person, it is not so much about them living or dying, but how they deal with the situations. If you read one of my stories (are even any 1st person in general), you know if they are hanging off the edge of a cliff by one hand and their fingers are slipping--- "something" will happen to save them or they save themselves "somehow". It is that "something" and "somehow" that then becomes the real action and stars of the story. done right with good description, it can still put you on the edge of your seat and give that sense of danger that makes the small "what if s/he really will die" thought enter your mind.
Always good so long as the reader must turn that next page. |
| ASIN: B07K6Z2ZBF |
Product Type: Kindle Store
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