Well, once again revising is kicking my ass. I'm almost done, but I won't finish the chapter I'm on this week. So, more looks into the writing process. This week? Where the idea of a flying castle came from.
So, I love Miyazaki. I love his films, I love his work, and I love
the idea that he toys around with in almost all of his works about the sky
holding an almost boundless potential.
That up there, the world is so small and fragile, so beautiful. But flight is also a great way to travel and
allows people to experience different landscapes and cultures really really
easily. So, I was...kind of determined
to have Aeon's castle, Acacia, able to fly.
At first, it
wasn't necessarily about flying, but just being able to move and be high up,
like you were in flight. To this end,
there was going to be a gigantic apocra underneath the castle which carried it
all over the place. It was going to be a
turtle and the castle would be on its back.
While not an uncommon trope in fantasy, it wasn't exactly as well used
as the "I have amnesia" trope or the "Pre-destined youth"
trope. For a while, it was just a plot
point. How Mina and Aeon would end up
leaving Gesthal. But...doesn't make a
lot of sense plot wise or perspective wise.
A secret castle that's meant to be mobile on the back of the slowest,
largest, most pondering kind of creature available? Yeah, so changes needed to be made. At first, I thought about having it on the
back of a raven or another giant bird, but again, it was just kinda
"why?" I even debated having a
fire spirit powering a steam engine within it, but...Howl's Moving Castle. I watched it, I loved it, I didn't want to
copy it.
Eventually,
I settled on a minor character being chained up inside the castle. Both guest and prisoner, he was an
interesting beast. This was the genesis
of Raschid the wind djinni. While he's
kind of just used for exposition and explaining a floating castle at the moment,
he does have an arc and importance down the line. I rather liked the idea of a castle that just
flies and was designed from the start to fly.
As I wrote, the reason why you'd need a castle that is mobile became
more and more clear. A peace keeper and
someone on the run both make sense to have a home that moves. Couple that with the ability to cloak it with
a glamour and you have the perfect mobile fortress...however, the power is an
issue. I eventually settled on wind
power...that wasn't reliant specifically on Raschid. The castle was built before Raschid, so there
was another power source before that.
And this isn't really spoilers.
It's kind of a minor detail later on.
It also
gave me a reason as to why Acacia was a mix of different eco-systems. The castle keeps being added on to based on
Aeon's jobs and experiences. Now, you
can't rule like a dozen different parcels of land given to you as gifts if you
have to keep moving, so what do you do?
Stitch em together into a floating island. It gave me a lot of reasons for Aeon to have
a whimsical fortress that floats, but which makes sense within the context of
the world. Looking back, it was an idea
that was justified by the narrative, changed slightly to make more sense and
for the purpose of said narrative, but which ultimately still works.
One other
thing I love about this setup is it allows me to have set pieces that are both
familiar, but fantastical. Naturally,
undead, or apocra are going to be away from a dwelling place. This kind of makes sense, seeing as a town
will have boundaries that, if violated by wild animals or monsters, will be met
with resistance. However, since Acacia
freely allows undead or apocra to walk about and is full of strange
environments, it is kind of like a cross cut of the world at large. There is still civilization, but also magic
all over the place.
One final
thing I want to note about Acacia, the floating island of Aeon and co. is that
the set pieces came first, not the reasoning.
Just like I had to rationalize to myself and the readers the whole,
"flying castle" thing, I also had to rationalize why certain places
look the way they do. Why is Nerise's
land barren? Originally it was just
because that's where I thought it would be cool to have undead. Nerise would be very cheerful, but in a
stereotypically undead place. I had to
rationalize that later on. Why is the
Selvan glade Aeon has hidden?
Rationalize. What lies behind the
cliffs and caves where Dakon and Echidna live?
Rationalize. It's one of the
harder things because it's just a step away from pulling things out of your
ass. And that will weaken the plot. You have to think about the context of the
world.
That's the
story of my flying castle. It was always
a hodgepodge of landscapes, but the reason why they look the way they do...has
to be rationalized. Likewise, the reason
why it flies needed rationalization and incorporation into the plot. This could have gone south quickly, as it was
included because I thought it was neat and because I wanted to explore the
themes of travel and living nomadically.
So, I kept it, rather than excising it.
And here we are.
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