How Primorlen Began: Pt. 2

So, where did I leave off? Ah, yes. Freeborn and Freegiven.

On November 1st, 2010, I began digging into Quartorlen and the characters who lived there. It was the first time I had written more than a few chapters since Grey Warrior. And the effect was undeniable. By the third week, I had grown more in my writing skills than I had in all the years before. It's the coolest thing to look back a your own work and see a progression in skill from the beginning to the end (though it makes for a lot of editing :P).

Perhaps the thing that I fell in love with about NaNoWriMo was the fact that I got to live thirty consecutive days with my story. There was none of the sporadicalness or choppiness in writing time that I had experienced in previous stories, and so there was a much more natural progression of character development and growth. When you meet your characters every night, you can track their progress far easier than when you only meet once a week. And the depth of character I achieved astounded me. Here were real people! Growing up on Henty and Tolkien (not a bad thing, by the way), my first characters tended to be models of perfection, ready for anything far younger than was realistic, and always distinctly good or evil. No one changed, there was no fall or redemption, no chance for the hero to grow.

When I first met the four freeborn, I knew immediately they had problems. Why else were the last of the freeborn hiding out in the woods and mountains? Shouldn't they be working to free their country? Or at least bringing some small measure of hope to their Contained brethren? And thus were my first character arcs created. Farjag was self-doubting. Nitiren was proud and bitter. Flashel was fearful. Ogel was dejected. Each blamed themselves or others for events in their past, and had retreated to the wilds to stay away from everyone and everything. Now, they were being called to a mission that was likely to end in their deaths. They would be risking everything for a country they had given up on. Needless to say, no one wanted to go.

And that was what I latched on to. In many of the stories one reads, the hero quite often wishes for adventure or excitement, and only when actually get what they want do they realize what such things really are. They come back wiser. Or perhaps they reluctantly take up the calling given them. But here were four folk who did not want anything to do with saving the world. Perhaps the premise is original, perhaps not. But the fact remains that each character had an important arc in front of them, and that they would end up much changed.

Form follows function, as a certain famous architect once said, and so the form of the story fell in place around the function. To change these characters, they would have to go through a series of trials that would test each as it tested them all, burning away the selfishness and fear they had been living under. There would be no wizard to help them, or give them cryptic answers to questions, or provide a convenient road map. Only a frail old otter-elder who somehow seemed to know each one well enough to know how to chafe each one into going. Once they started, it would be just them. Except for one small addition to their party. If there are four freeborn, then there must be one freegiven.

But that's going to have to wait till next time.

Until then,
Farjag