Another idea that ive decied to go through with. I need help with how to get to points...ah im not sure what i need help with, when i write it it dosent seem right... heres the plot idea anyway. Five kingdoms in the world, An increase in rogue's theifing and plunderring and eventurly a threatened king awaits the five world kings to a council. To the point = A link between two words opens and (For reason's im not sure yet) a rogue army comes poruing through, but not as a real army. One leader, the real leader (has the army of rogue's behind he/she) is another character that made a bargain with the one leader too follow him/her on this seige. the rogue's streadily spread throughout the land, destroying all in their paths. They never take any real orders from the leader, more as he's a threat. The five king council eventurly come to see this, before they had merely sent out small forester-hunting groups to take them out, when they do, the rogue army has already stationed a fair amount of folk all around the worldly kingdoms. So when the third or second council comes together, the leader of the rogue army brakes through & offers a peace, only in return for...not sure of what just yet. - (Forgot to mention, the rogue's have supernatural elements/abilities, a trait to their world. The leader is a shape shifter) characters.... Haveing 3rd person pov is best. The characters... -First would be the rogue leader and the bargain maker. -Second would be some of the small time rogue's, (The ones the bargain maker travels with) the first to get caught by the kingdom folk, and they would be the ones to show the races that their race of rogue's have supernatural traits. -Third and final would be a forster-hunter (something like that) that is chosen by the five kings to be a member in the elite forster-huntiing group that is given the task of taking dowm the rogue leader. Comments and suggesting's open freely. Im writting it, but im just not sure about it or how to get to the main points.
I'm finding this quite hard to follow I'm afraid, there were times when it was quite incomprehensible.
There's nothing wrong with liking the fantasy genre, although I'm not a fan of fantasy type stuff myself, simply because it has no physical limitations. This presents a problem in dramatic terms, because it's easy to sidestep the reader's notions of not being able to imagine how the conflict can be resolved. In a world with endless possibilities, how can you have a situation which couldn't easily be resolved by simply dashing off something to solve it? The genre equivalent of the 'and I woke up and it was all a dream' cop out. It's a problem which occurs to some extent in sci-fi too, the best example of which, is Star Trek (notably the more recent ones), which often shortchanges the viewer by creating a dire climax, only to have the engineer say some technobabble along the lines of; 'What if we bypass the bi-polar flux feed on the jeffries tube, and invert the flow?' which lo and behold, solves the problem. It's a cheat, and readers (or viewers) don't like to feel cheated. What I'm driving at here, is that if you like fantasy, then by all means write about orcs and shape shifters and anything else you care to mention, but don't forget that what will really hold a reader's attention and make your story stand out, is if you create a dramatic conflict situation which beguiles the reader in terms of thinking 'how can they ever get out of that one?' In dramatic terms, that probably means some sort of emotional or psychological barrier for the protagonists, because it really can't be a physical one and seem insurmountable owing to the nature of the genre. So before getting too enamoured with the creation of your world and its populace, it might be wiser to think about what your dramatic problem will be, and then build your story around that. It's that element, and the quality of the writing which will make something like that worth reading. Otherwise, it will be just another tale about orcs and the like. To relate it back to Star Trek, you often find that the most compelling episodes which grip you, are not the ones with huge space battles, or strange alien presences which capture the ship, but rather the ones where characters struggle with emotional difficulties, such as a robot who wishes he were more like a human, or a crewmember who freezes with fear all the time. The genre is the backdrop, rather than the story. Al
I disagree with you that physical difficulties cannot seem insurmountable in a fantasy setting. I'm writing a fantasy novel in which the main protagonists have all the physical limitations of ordinary human beings, and they face physical difficulties all the time. And I always liked the episodes with big battles in them.
Or, you can even create physical difficulties in your world and communicate them to the reader before your characters encounter problems related to those difficulties. So then, the reader would be thinking, "Well, they can't do that, so..." Perhaps making sure to specify that "such and such type of magic" can only go so far or something would work. You make a great point about the Star Trek type stuff. We all want to read a solution that is comprehensible and clever, even in sci-fi and fantasy. I agree with this idea as well. I've read plenty of fantasy tales in which the characters are completely human and have the same limitations as a human would in a general fiction story. And Rambling, are you thinking of having all three characters and switching POVs? If you're going to choose one, I'd like to see a member of the rogue army--perhaps someone that's close to the leader, so that we get an idea of someone dealing with consequences of his leader's decisions and fighting in combat directly. It might be cool.
