Same Story Different Eyes

Stories are amazing things. Emphasize this and you have a love story. Emphasize that and you're making a political statement. Quests, personal growth, action, adventure. All of these things are part of the same story. We, the storytellers, simply decide which elements will be emphasized and which will be minimized - or even ignored.

I have always known this, but it is with Swords of Fire that it is really brought home to me. Particularly this time. All of my previous story-shattering rewrites involved making major changes to the story, the time line, and a host of other things. Not this time.

This time I am telling the same story as last, but I have changed the angle at which I look at it. And now it seems to be a completely different story. It's the ten blind men and the elephant thing.

By concentrating on aspects I had kept in the background, and pushing to the background things I had focused on, I now have a new story. And yet it's the same. Hopefully, I will be happy with what I wind up with. Writing it, I feel a greater sense of intensity, urgency, and danger than I did in the previous version. In the previous version those things built slowly over time until they reached the climax. Now, beginning the story about a week later than Traitor, it feels like a different animal. And so I have given it a new name: Fire Mountain. It is appropriate, because the new focus is on the mountain and not the treason. The Mountain, and its surrounding lands and waters, contain the prize. It is the prize. The stakes are high and the risks are higher.

The rewrite is also going to bring forward characters who otherwise were not even mentioned. Now they will play a role. Some significantly. Of course, this means other characters are going to have to fade into the background.

Something else to come out of this is an epiphany of how I can create a database table containing an instant list of who is descends from who, instead of having to search and do time consuming calculations. Creating the table will take time, too, but not more than a few hours. But it really is useful. Trying to figure out if Bordan is descended from Bolar is a bit of a pain in the a*s. And then I will have the data henceforth.

I like The Great Sea. I guess if I could go anywhere it would be there. But I suppose that only makes sense. After all, I'm the one who created it. Kind of.