Tag: tropes

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 31

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Waking Up

I find myself writing a lot of chapters in this book that start with Christopher waking up. Popular advice is that this is an overused trope that should be avoided. I feel like I might be given a pass, because earlier in the story there was some question as to whether Christopher would wake up at all, and now the question is whether he’ll still be himself when he awakens. But maybe those are just excuses for using tropes.

After Chapter 30 delved mostly into Christopher’s head, Chapter 31 gets back to the external action. However, I did make a little digression back into Christopher’s thoughts at the start of the chapter because I wanted to drop more information about the voices. Now that Christopher is getting God-Speaker knowledge, there’s no more hiding their origins.

I expect this is a spot where I might lose some readers. It’s been clear since halfway through the book that God-Speaker has some inhuman powers, but it wasn’t clear whether these came from a supernatural source or something else. If the reader thinks the book is trending toward fantasy and it takes a sudden swerve into sci-fi territory, that’s bound to annoy someone.

Hopefully those readers are invested enough at this point to accept it and keep going to the end.

Breakfast

My goal in the breakfast scene was to highlight the juxtaposition of the incredibly mundane (mediocre microwave breakfast burrito) with the incredibly weird (attempted assassination by poisoning). Even for the immortal god-emperor, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Revealing tidbits of information helps to drive the story, but the poisoning incident and the interview with Reed are there to help keep up the tension. The reader knows who killed God-Speaker, but Christopher and Cain do not, and that kind of information disparity can be used as a tension machine. As time runs out, we have to wonder when Reed is going to make his move, and what form the danger will take.

The other topic I wanted to cover in the conversations between Cain and Christopher was the oracles. They are one of the two big mysteries that I haven’t adequately resolved, and they’ll play an important part in the ending of the book. I’m honestly a little worried about how well it will work. I don’t want it to feel like deus ex machina, but I also don’t want to give away the secrets too early.

If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to go back in revisions and figure out how to clean it up. I knew there was a risk of that happening when I decided to post these chapters as I wrote them. This is an open experiment, with all the possible messiness that entails. If nothing else, I hope it’s interesting to other writers to see how one person’s process played out for one particular book.

The Interviews

The interviews that make up the rest of this chapter mostly serve to flesh out the world and the way God-Speaker fits into it. He’s the spider in the middle of the web, and the web started to break down in his absence. Hopefully it also raises the question of what Razor Mountain is for, and whether it’s a good or bad thing that God-Speaker has created.

Moira, the former Secretary of Justice, has been imprisoned for a good portion of her life in an absolutely unjust way. Whether Christopher and Cain feel guilty about this, it’s a result of the systems that God-Speaker built. She points out that no matter how they feel, there’s nothing they can do now. It’s already done, and nothing will get those years back.

Next Time

Chapter 31 was the longest chapter yet, and looking to be the longest of the book. (It’s not that long though. I just like short chapters.) There are only three chapters left.  In Chapter 32, big things will happen. See you next time.

What I Learned From The Unwritten (Part II)

Last time, I took some lessons from the first four volumes of The Unwritten. This time, I’m going to look at volumes 5-8. These volumes encompass some interesting turning points in the series. The heroes seem to have defeated the “bad guys,” even if it does come at a high cost. The mysteries deepen, a few new major characters are introduced, and some old characters come back.

What really makes these volumes great is that they don’t just continue the story that was started in the first four. They take it in new and unexpected directions. Each question that gets answered introduces yet more questions. All in all, it sets up the last three volumes so that you really have no idea what to expect as the story comes to its conclusion.

Moving the Goalposts Can Be Exciting

The first few volumes set up a shadowy cabal as the villains who cause all sorts of trouble for the protagonists, especially their chief henchman, Pullman. All of the bigwigs in the cabal are largely interchangeable and never characterized in much detail. It’s Pullman who is causing trouble on the ground for the heroes while the leaders of the cabal are safely hidden, and he’s the one they have to worry about. But Pullman is also the one villain who is given a back-story, revealed in drips and drops.

When the heroes actually have some success bringing the fight to the shadowy cabal, it might seem obvious that Pullman is just a Man in Front of the Man trope. But his motives turn out to be quite different from a “standard” villain. Almost exactly halfway through the story, the entire direction of the plot turns in a new direction.

Tropes are dangerous. If the reader thinks you’re just retelling a story they’ve heard before, they’ll quickly lose interest. However, tropes can be useful building blocks if you want to subvert expectations.

Tropes are just story elements that show up over and over again. They’re the canyons gouged by the flow of stories over the centuries, the comfortable shapes that stories like to fall into. A savvy reader will see parts of a trope and anticipate that the rest is forthcoming. However, you can make them a little less certain by including some elements that break the trope. Eventually, you can tear the trope apart in some unexpected plot twist, and it can be immensely satisfying. 

Sometimes these twists seem obvious in hindsight, but as a reader it’s very easy to get pulled into those deep currents that tropes provide. It’s a great way to disguise where the story is going.

Exposition Can Be a Reward

The Unwritten is great at introducing characters right in the middle of something. Tom Taylor’s dull life is turned upside down within the first few pages of the first volume. Lizzie sets those events in motion, but not in the way that she hoped. And Ritchie meets Tom in a French prison right before it explodes into chaos. The story forces the reader to hit the ground running. First, it shows you who the characters are and makes you care about them. Only then, and slowly, does it start to reveal their back-stories and the paths they took to get here.

By making you care about the characters first, the story makes exposition exciting. We want to know more about these people. How the heck did they get in these situations?

If these parts of the story were told in sequential order, they would be less interesting. They’re the lead-up to the exciting action that makes up the bulk of the story. But by withholding them for a while, they become a reward for the reader. Even better, they offer an opportunity to understand why the characters are the way they are. Learning about the events that shaped them provides new context to everything they’ve done so far in the story.

Epilogues Can Be Prologues Too

Almost every volume of The Unwritten, each major story arc, ends with a seemingly unrelated episode. After seeing the latest exploits of Tom, Lizzie and Ritchie, we might be transported to the Winnie-the-Pooh-inspired Willowbank Wood, to meet Pauly the lovable rabbit, who sounds a lot like a New Jersey mob thug and seems a bit out of place. We might be taken back a century or three to see the exploits of various famous storytellers and how they became entangled with the cabal. Or we might meet Daniel, a directionless young man with a degree in literature who finds himself taking a job that involves reading books all day with hundreds of other people in a featureless underground bunker.

Each of these little stories is an abrupt jump to a new time and place, with new characters. Each one eventually ties in to the main plot, but when the reader first encounters them, they seem like non-sequiturs. In this quiet lull at the end of an arc, when the story has just answered some questions and provided a small, satisfying conclusion, a brand-new big mystery is introduced. Namely, “who are these people and what the heck is going on?”

The next volume invariably jumps right back into the story of Tom et al., leaving these epilogues hanging unresolved for a while. Later on, when they tie back into the main story, there’s an “aha!” moment. These parts of the story are made more exciting simply by being told out of order. They’re also a great way of keeping up the tension in the parts of an episodic narrative where tension has just been relieved (at the end of an arc).

But Wait, There’s More…

The Unwritten is a big series, and I have one more post in me before we get to the end. Next time I’ll be covering the last few things I learned from the final volumes: 9-11. See you then.