A question towards my fellow (aspiring) writers.

1. Think of some of your favorite movies, preferably not ones already based on books you already know-and-love. How do they set the scene? How do they let you know the time period? How do they introduce you to the main characters, and explain their "places"? How do they explain the "world" situation?

There's several ways you can accomplish that. You can actually write a prologue (like the famous "scroll" in Star Wars) where you help set the basic scene. That's fine, but I prefer trying to make the entire story "self-sufficient", where something in the story does the work. You can sort of set the basic scenario as you set up the first scene. Or you can have two characters discuss the basics, in context of their own roles in it. ("I just want to be a wizard! Is that so wrong?" "Well, so long as Megarof has decreed that all magic is forbidden in this realm, you'll never be able to learn enough to get anywhere.")

3. I do have a bit of an issue of making my characters a bit too like me when they talk. But I've found a good way around this - try casting various actors and fictional characters in the role. So when it comes time to write some dialogue for your elven sidekick, try out a few "voices". How would Orland Bloom sound in the role? How about Neil Patrick Harris? Lady Gaga? Bugs Bunny? I wouldn't necessarily go DIRECTLY with any of those "people", or any one specific one you try out. But one of them will no doubt sound somewhat right. So run with that one, altering it enough that it's not really a direct copy. "Orlando Bloom, but more 'chummy'." "Lady Gaga, but more 'regal'."

Don't know if I can help you on the second bit (since I never do that myself).

Lex

 

I've tried writing fantasy. I've completed various short stories and prologues, started numerous books and planned the main details of various series, but I don't quite have the patience to finish an entire novel or trilogy right now. In the most extensively planned series, the prologue of the first book contained foreshadowing, so I can kill two birds with one stone.

The plot of the first book was that a prince from the landlocked kingdom of Proclea, whose father was deathly ill, would hear from a mysterious vendor at Tradesmeet (a popular market town at the southern plains at the outskirts of the kingdom) about a mysterious power in the mountains called the Fairygold Stone (the book's namesake). The prince is driven mad with desire for the stone ever since he hears of it, so he eventually uses his father's illness to his own advantage. He takes the armies of Proclea and marches into the mountains through the pass the vendor describes. They come across Raegirfare, a dwarven stronghold, where a great siege is fought. The prince leads a troop of royal guards to the highest tower of the fortress and obtains the Fairygold Stone. Soon thereafter, Nindor (the elemental Sky) appears. The god realises that he is too late to stop the Procleans, so instead he stands and challenges the Prince to a battle. The Fairygold Stone's property is that it absorbs magic which is pitted against the holder, so when Nindor uses the Wind Bag (a sack containing the power of the world's winds), another god (a banished and imprisoned god, unnamed until later in the series) controls the prince and uses the stone to absorb it all, zapping Nindor of his power and making the prince the God of Winds.

Now, that was important so you could understand the foreshadowing in the prologue. The prologue starts with Osvaelia, the goddess of prophecy, sitting alone and muttering to herself about the wind being its master's bane. Nindor happened to be listening, so he went to his palace and placed all of the wind's power into an old rotten sack. The foreshadowing is, of course, the sack. There is also a lot of irony in the prologue which isn't revealed until the end of the book (which I didn't write :lol. So that's what I did with my prologue, I made it a bit of backstory which seemed completely irrelevant until the end of the book.

As for dialogue, this is the one place where it is a terrible idea to follow the conventions of grammar. Use slang, start sentences with conjunctions, write improper questions and unfinished sentences, even improper pronunciations (relfected through the spelling).

I hope this helped.

 

In my experience, prologues are best for two things - revealing a significant event in the past of the book's main narrative, describing a key event that sparks off the rest of the book, or revealing a murderer at work. I have a prologue in my first novel - the entire book is about the aftermath of World War III, so my prologue describes the nuclear bomb that hits Atlanta, Georgia and starts the war. All of the characters in the prologue die.

I'm particularly fond of using an antagonist's minion as a literary device for foreshadowing. I like dream sequences too, but a lot of people bitch about having a person dream in a book. I don't know, I've always really liked a dream sequence as opposed to a straight-up flashback.

I don't really know how to explain foreshadowing, other than the basic, "if somebody gets shot in act three, there better be a gun on the mantle in act one, and you better draw attention to it". Foreshadowing is really specific to individual stories.

I think my favorite method of foreshadowing are the visions of pyschic characters (think Kate Blanchett from Lord of the Rings). It's hard to fit that kind of foreshadowing into every story, but who doesn't like precognitive characters? It's creepy, it's cool, and we don't understand it.

Lex's suggestion is a really good one, and this is what I usually do - I'll have a fantasy movie cast of my characters in my head, and I already know what those actors and actresses sound like + the personality of my characters = original dialogue.

But another trick (and this is gonna sound crazy) is to read your dialogue out loud. Use different voices, like you were reading a story to a little kid. If you have a gruff dwarf, make him sound growly. Do his dialogue in an accent (or whatever).

Playing around like that, you'll automatically find your characters developing their own voices through you. You'll make up linguistic character traits on the fly.