Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp, page 10

Whenever I write, I don't sleep

I just stay awake until petty morning hours, writing. Sometimes I get a lot of good work done like this. But most of the time I jsut sit there and try to meet the day's quota in desperation. People keep telling me that a good night's rest helps, anyway.

I should just go to sleep.

Through the eyes of the blind - descriptions, five senses, and trouble therein

What I'm currently writing involves a blind person in a major role - as a POV character in the first chapter, at that.



This has been troublesome for a couple reasons.

The first immediate issue is a pretty obvious one: I need to describe things based on senses other than sight. How this blind person hears things, how she feels and smells and sometimes tastes. Give the reader a vivid impression of her surroundings with their most important sense locked away entirely.

But this isn't really a problem at all, once you think about it even a little bit more - because you're already supposed to do just that. You need to engage all the reader's senses, not just eyes and vision, in order to write vivid literature. Overdescribing the visuals while neglecting everything else is not only fighting the visual medium (movies, comic books, and such) under their terms with no hope of winning, it can also cripple the reader's imagination and make it more difficult for them to picture it in their head: you'd think that more description is good, but I think it distracts from the really important bits, and that mind yearns to be free. Let them picture it all themselves.



So it's actually not all that bad. Having a blind POV barely limits me at all, and instead makes for valuable practice in describing things and drawing the reader into it.

There's another thing, though, one I have a much more difficult time wrapping my head around: character descriptions are going to have a big hole in them.

Almost everything I've ever written has been heavily character-based. The people and the animals of the story are what the narrative follows, while the worlds and the buildings and such as just the backdrop. They always need a little bit more description than the rest, including visual detail: color of their hair and eyes, what kind of clothing they like to wear, some of the more bizarre fantasy/nonhuman details, and such. I've been chided for not doing this enough as it is - and in this particular work, this may well end up being even more glaring.

If the blind character I've been talking of were the only POV in the story, it would of course sidestep the whole thing - but she isn't. In fact, I don't know whether she'll take up the role again at all after the first chapter. And her being the POV in the first chapter is a big part of the problem: it gives an instant and vivid impression of the setting a lot of the story takes place in, but it shunts the visual characteristics of all the important actors until much later... and I can't seem to find them a place anywhere else.

They're all introduced in this first chapter, after all, and their introduction is what should immediately bring up all of this stuff. So you get to know what they sound like, how light or heavy they are based on their footsteps, bits of their personalities, and such - but very little of what they actually look like. And I don't know where to put all that stuff into, without it feeling out of place or simply being too late, messing up with the mental image the reader has by now already built to them.



Should I have them described more fully later, from the POV of another character that isn't blind? This would probably only work in introduction, the only time when he or she would truly focus on their appearance - but they were already introduced in the narrative, so doing it all over again just to establish what they look like would be a waste of everyone's time. It'd need to tell something else of them, too, that wasn't brought up in the first introduction - like one of the two characters instantly falling head-over-heels in love with the other, coloring their first interaction and making it more interesting and flavorful.

Maybe I could have their appearance change, by wearing different clothing than before, or jewelry, and then have that emphasize their looks in a new way ("The dress she wore that day went well with her red hair, blue eyes, and green skin...")? Hmm. Seems kind of tricky, especially in the context of what I already have written, but it could work.

Or I could just... you know, do what I usually do and not in fact describe the characters much if at all. Let every reader make up their own mind. But that might feel like there's nothing there, really, just a bunch of invisible blur.

Or maybe I'll spend a lot of money to commission official portraits of them all and stick those to the Internet as measuring sticks? But then what about if you never actually saw those pictures? You'd be lost at the sea!



I don't know. I'll figure something out.

Though it's nice how simply writing a blog post can help me clear out my thoughts and give me new ideas. Thanks, Goodreads.

Goats!

A friend asked me to find pictures of goats ("they're a menace!") for a small project of his. It has inspired me, too. I kind of want to put something in the story.

I love goats.

Giants

We stand on the shoulders of giants.



Vast, green, and fertile – good earth to stand on, sit on, and root ourselves into. Many do just that, and never let go: they swing gently in the wind, smile in contentment, never even stop to wonder what lies under them, or how much they truly owe to the giant. Some of them may themselves grow great, one day, and grow new life on their own shoulders. But most of them remain small.

Others still, such as you - if you are here now - grow fully aware of their foundations. You uproot yourself, and you walk on these great shoulders. You look down into the clouds beyond the earth. At this stage you can never again simply root yourself back: you know too much.

Now you may shrug your shoulders and stay right here, accepting your place in the world, and the role of the giant propping you up. And that will be the end of that. You may grow, or not.

Or you may grow curious. You wonder just what is down below, beneath those clouds... just what is this giant himself standing on?

Or instead you may grow angry. You come to hold the opinion that this giant does not deserve one bit of all your reverence and worship: that the giant is in fact a fraud and must be discredited, denounced, and shunned. Perhaps it's because you've come to believe that the giant slouches, has a hunched back, or brittle bones. Or perhaps that the giant is mad, and will one day fall on his own. Or a whole number of other reasons and excuses.



If you're loud enough, some may come to follow you. They see where you're coming from: they've seen the same signs, or are easily convinced to see them by you now. Most likely, however, the vast majority of your peers simply ignore you: they owe enough to the giant to not be too bothered, though you may have gotten them uprooted and into the curious state mentioned above.

You may pick up a stick and go all the way to poke the giant's eye, but that is a lost cause. The giant cannot be felled that way: his roots lay deep, deep below, far beyond your reach. Most likely he won't even notice you.

To hell with this, you say. Already uprooted and still pissed, you decide to walk right to the edge of the shoulder and jump right down. If you were loud enough, perhaps you will get others to jump with you. Or you may have been one of the curious ones, and jump simply to see what you will land on.

Great perils await you here. You will float through the skies and the void, beyond the clouds, and you will get to see bizarre and disconnected visions. You may be lost here, and never again find root in anything. Or you may land on something, but it is dark and covered in mist... and you will wander and end up lost here instead.

But if you overcome these challenges and learn to see beyond the dark and dispel the mist, you will find a terrible truth: you have landed on another giant, far more vast and ancient than any you could ever have imagined. This is what the giant you yourself came from is standing on! You see others like him rooted here, some small, others bigger than even your own giant!



You may now reel with shock. Or perhaps you knew of this already, and can accept it.

So now what?

Was your grudge only with the giant you yourself started from, and jumped off of? If that is the case, then well enough: perhaps you may find fertile land here, and root yourself somewhere to the shoulders of this greater giant. You may one day grow as big as he is, and nod respectfully at him.

Or, now that you're down here, maybe you can go and strike that giant right into the roots, right into where it hurts! You may do more harm from here than from above... but the giant is still vast, and you still tiny. Perhaps if you yourself grew larger, you could meet the giant on his level, and punch him right in his stupid face.

Alternatively, perhaps your problem was with the giants as a whole, and you want to stand on the shoulders of no one at all? Or perhaps you were curious to begin with, and curious still to keep on going and see how far this can go? Then feel free to jump off again.

You should now be ready to the challenges you faced before: the voids, and the mist. You will likely find more ground – another shoulder, another forest of giants big and small. You may end up liking this giant, and root here, or you may keep on going, lower down, and then lower still.

But how low CAN you go?

One day, perhaps, you will come upon earth that simply does not end. Ground that keeps on going forever, without another cliff to jump down by. What does that mean? Does it mean that you have at last found the earth, and your quest is completed? Or does it mean that you stand on a truly primordial titan indeed, one whose girth you cannot begin to comprehend, let alone travel?

Either way, at least you've come pretty damn far down. You can look up in pride, at the feet of the giants you came from. You have likely grown up a fair bit now already, and perhaps if you keep on going, you can stand on the same level as them. And now you owe nothing to no one.

Or maybe you'd rather grab an axe and chop down the whole thing. Your choice.

Pirate Movies

It's not just the music - when I write, I do my best to dive deep into the popular culture of everything even remotely related to that stuff. I'm going to watch a lot of pirate movies in the next couple weeks.









And of course,



I expect to have a good time.

Play it again, Sam - play it the whole time while I write

If I said that I listened to some type of music my every waking hour, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration. Sure, sometimes I'm outside, or seeing my parents... or does it count as "waking hour" if I'm lying in bed and actively trying to sleep? I don't know. Even in those times I usually have music running in my head.

About a decade ago I got into D&D, and I sort of semi-accidentally ended up picking up a "soundtrack" for the first full campaign I was in. I listened to a bunch of music I had discovered at around the same time (mainly Sonata Arctica), always during games and only during games, or at least while thinking and talking about stuff related to it.

To this day I can't listen to any of Days of Grays without getting a really heavy hit of nostalgia. I've never been in a D&D game as fun as that first.



I began to realize just how much power music held, and how much it could influence the going of my (and probably everyone else's) mind. From there on I started to build myself soundtracks like that first: for every game of D&D (and later other systems), for every story I'd write, for some comics and books I like, even a few video games that don't have soundtracks of their own - I would find something to listen. I have a lot of songs and albums and entire bands, some of which I really liked, that I permanently welded together into one specific work or game, and that I only now listen if I want to feel nostalgic.

Sometimes I carefully pick up my music based on the sort of a thing I want to write, resulting in fairly consistent and well-managed stories that keep well in hand and don't go anywhere weird. Other times I just appropriate whatever I really like to listen at the time, which can easily shoot the whole thing into someplace bizarre and unexpected but not necessarily bad. I've done both successfully.

Often, how well this works out - how completely my brain associates the work and the music together, and how much I manage to listen to that same stuff while I work on it - directly correlates to how much I like the end result, be it something I'm writing or something I'm playing in or something I'm reading. If it goes poorly, it can lead to me throwing a story out altogether.

When I worked on The Straggler's Mask, for instance, I listened a lot of Blind Guardian, Twilight Force, a bit of Blackmore's Night and Blue Öyster Cult, and the soundtrack of a game I liked to play at the time, Risk of Rain. A lot of the sort I'd associate with adventure and exploration, but some of it was spontaneous and probably had a hand in the wilder bits of the story.

For The Vagrant's Wings, I picked up a bit heavier stuff like Bal-Sagoth, Celtic Frost, something more soft but foreboding such as Nox Arcana, and then just to spice things up, a bit more Blackmore's Night. It's one of the ones where I succeeded in picking a pretty fitting soundtrack - something for horror and romance alike - rather than just going with whatever, and I think the fairly grounded nature ended up for its benefit in the end.

One of the less successful drafts of mine - codenamed Shadowland - involved a lot of Manowar, Iron Maiden, Blind Guardian again, and the Balance & Ruin remix album for Final Fantasy VI. I don't know exactly why the interest to this one just sort of petered out: how much of it was because I had listened to all these soundtracks before, and elsewhere, and couldn't pair together with this story effectively? How much was because I just got distracted by other things and ended up not feeling like it anymore? I wouldn't know. I'd guess a bit of both.

(Although listening to some of the soundtrack kind of puts me back on the mood of returning to that story... which is inconvenient because I'm kind of already juggling between a lot of things I might want to write.)

Chaos Star is sort of half-and-half: I had no idea what kind of music could fit for this, so in the end I defaulted to Iron Savior, Hyper Light Drifter soundtrack, and a little something nice I found on Youtube called Edge of the World. I'm sure the music can take some credit of it probably being the most out-there story draft I've managed to complete so far. It's been pretty hard to edit, though.

I haven't begun to really work on Ivar Stormling of Skar yet, but I already know it's going to involve a lot of Magic Sword and Gloryhammer. How well this works, remains to be seen.

The cyberpunk story, as I think I've said, is pretty tough to grasp and maintain interest on regardless of music - but it has one of the more duty-picked soundtracks, taking stuff from Blade Runner and Deus Ex, and interestingly, Command & Conquer series, especially Tiberian Sun. Lately, though, I also started to click stuff on Youtube at random, listening to a lot of synthwave and such while I wrote it... and I'm still doing this, even though my interest in the story itself has largely died away again.

So we come to the pirate story, currently tentatively named Pirates of The Demure Sea. I probably should look into Alestorm and such stuff, but because of the cyberpunk fallout I'm currently listening to things like this. Lemme tell you, it's helping me spawn out some pretty weird story notes and ideas.



But on the other hand, I had already decided that the Demure Sea is a weird place. So maybe it'll all work out in the end.

Time travel - constants (the different kind this time)

A proper time travel story needs a Constant: something that exists in every time - lasting and permanent - to remind the reader that they're still in the same place, just at different times. Great many things change in time travel, but not everything: some things need to stay the same too.

Otherwise it might as well be the same time but a different place: the whole notion of time travel starts to crumble.



I don't have a constant right now. This is a problem.

Going with the Flow - passive protagonists

I enjoy character-based stories and the sort of active and personable characters involved in those. They tend to drive the plot with their desires, aspirations, and dreams - and even when they don't, even when they're bound to the winds of fate, they're sufficiently three-dimensional and developed, with feelings and relationships and woes, for you to feel for them and hope things'll get better for them.

So when I found myself writing a story with a main character that had none of these traits, a blank slate simply content to go along where the plot told her to go, with no friends or personal connections whatsoever... my first instinct was to of course correct all this. I wanted to flesh her out, give her some backstory and people to care for. But this instinct passed quickly, as I got another idea: what if I left her a blank slate? What if I didn't develop her at all?

It felt like a weird thing to do, but the more I thought about it, the more fun I had with it. In a world - by a writer - full of fleshed-out characters, her blandness could actually be a characteristic in itself. It's not like such stories hadn't been written before. More to the point, it would give me practice.

Of course then I would have to make sure the setting - the world around her - was interesting enough to maintain the reader's attention, and I might also need to think about the plot more than I usually do. I can think of two famous examples with relatively underdeveloped main characters - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Alice in Wonderland - and both of them made sure their worlds were weird. I can't match them, for sure, but I can give it an honest try.

Rules for time travel - the mind of the time traveler as the one true constant

Time travel stories tend to make the entire thing pretty complex: either you'll have to be careful about everything you do lest you accidentally change something really important and alter the lives and memories of everyone you ever knew, essentially making them entirely different people...



...or you're plain unable to change anything at all, the fate of the universe having already been sealed and everything you do failing by default. At best, you already changed the past, everything you do having been taken into account all along. At worst, trying to muck things up results in time paradoxes that can wipe out the universe or send creatures outside of time to fix it and kill you.



So all in all it seems like a pretty raw deal, where all you can do is observe - trying anything more than that will always bite you in the arse - but really I see it as far more simple and also somewhat optimistic, and it's the rule I'm following in the time travel story I write right now, as well as in any time travel story by me.

Here's the essential question: how do you ever know you changed anything, or to what extent? How can you tell what of the present-day situation is thanks to you, and what would've come to be anyway? How much can any of us even begin to comprehend of the tangled mess of time and causality, of events leading to others, and of blame and consequences?

And since we can't possibly know, what harm could we do in the end?

It follows the Already Changed The Past the closest, I suppose, except that you're nearly always allowed to freely choose what to do, since the future you know will not change either way. Unless you start to really, deliberately muck up with things you know didn't go this way, everything will be fine... and even if you do, there's good odds the universe will manage to fix its way somehow anyway.

Let's take an example: one of the very first things people tend to think about, when talking about changing the past for the better, is killing Adolf Hitler. This... almost assuredly wouldn't work, because we all know when and how he died. You can't kill him when he was a child, because that's not how it went and you know it.

But it doesn't mean you couldn't help. Nothing would stop you from infiltrating the Nazi-occupied Europe and helping with the resistance, saving lives, doing the little things you can. After all, it's almost certain that you didn't already know every resistance fighter and every little city skirmish and prison break! Once you return to your time (assuming you survive at all), you could finally read on the subject and see if you could find yourself in the annals of history!

Hmm... this could make for a pretty good historical fiction story, actually. A guy goes back in time to kill Hitler, realizes it doesn't work, but still finds ways to put his future technology and knowledge to a good use. Nazis and WWII really are overused, though, so maybe set it to another time and place, one tragically underused in fiction, and one of which far less material exists so that I wouldn't need to do so much research... see, it works for the convenience of the writer too! The less stuff there already is to be known, the more free I am to do whatever I want!

Time travel is all sorts of messy

Imagine if J.R.R. Tolkien had skipped writing The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, or Fellowship of the Ring entirely, and had fast-forwarded right to the Two Towers? And he had no idea what the One Ring even was or what the hobbits were doing with it? And then Eldarion travelled back in time to help them out and tell them of some important bits they could never have known without him at all? Also he already helped kick Gollum into Mt. Doom and he's on the way to give a hand to Bilbo on his way to the Lonely Mountain as well, and then maybe going all the way back to Túrin Turambar and Fëanor as well, except obviously Tolkien is yet to write any of these...

That's kind of like what I'm doing right now. Time travel stuff, involving going farther and farther back in time, except I started writing right from the middle - neither from the chronological beginning, nor from the time traveler's own future home. I think I have a pretty good idea on where the story is going from here, though.