Re: culture/character noodling

On Jul 9, 4:42 pm, David Friedman <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
In article
<08147b1b-d4ee-4c3a-8d46-8725dbc09...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,





 Nicky <nicky.matth...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 8, 3:59 pm, David Friedman <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Having successfully escaped the attack:

---
She felt the ground shudder, release her. Letting go of the branches,
she put her hands against now solid ground, heaved herself out of her
half formed grave, stumbled over to the apple tree, leaned against it
gasping for breath. A few minutes were enough to unweave branches and
grass. The gaping hole in the earth was no work of hers; she would leave
closing it, or not, to whoever had made it.

I don't see anything wrong with this as it stands but it reads very
fast and very undramatically. If this is a significant event I would
be inclined to make it last longer and give it more weight mainly
because even very good readers miss things and because there is a kind
of convention that most of us buy into that important events are given
space on the page.
If this were my story I would not go for summary but for full on
description of the experience. There is a gap of time between gasping
for breath and unweaving branches that I would probably fill. If I
didn't want to explain why she did that for some reason I would
perhaps refer to her checking that everything was as it had been
before except for the hole and that no evidence of her own magic
remained. I don't know how you've set up your magic but I would
probably remind the reader why that was important - does magic have a
finger print? Can it be used against you? Is she complulsively tidy?
Does she want to suggest that she is dead but that her body has been
moved?

Part of the reason is a sense of responsibility--she has used the grass
and the tree to help her escape and doesn't want to injure them more
than necessary; that shows up a little more plainly in her thoughts the
next morning. Part is that she wants to leave as little information as
possible for whoever tried to kill her.

I don't think the magic leaves any fingerprints. But "it didn't work and
I have no idea why" is more of a puzzle for the attempted killer than
"it didn't work, and she escaped by doing ...  ."

More generally, Ellen does her best to conceal her talents, for several
related reasons. It's obvious that she has the talent to be a mage--if
she didn't she wouldn't be at the College--but it's not obvious that she
is both a very strong fire mage and a strong weaving mage, nor that she
knows a great deal more about the practice of magery than one would
expect of a first year student. So part of this may be a more general
habit associated with keeping a low profile. That general pattern has
been made explicit early on,

A good deal of this is "it felt right and the time, and I'm trying to
figure out why."

...

Back in her room she closed and barred the door, set the small oil lamp
aflame, stripped out of her robe. Her right hand hurt; the palm was
reddened, with a few small blisters beginning to form. Something had
burned it. Something had woken her. Woken her before she was fully
buried.

Two puzzles then, perhaps two mages. That was for tomorrow. For tonight

Unless you have explained elsewhere, I wouldn't think it was obvious
that a sore hand was evidence of the involvement of another mage.

When it happens, what we have is:
---
What woke her was a searing pain on her right hand, as if someone had
blown a flame across it.
---
There's been a good deal of mention of fire mages earlier.

She wakes to discover that she has sunk into the earth, with only her
head entirely free. There is a suggestion just before that that, having
been lured into the orchard by a note, she has fallen asleep on the
ground due to some sort of magic, with some connection to the earth.

A good deal later, when she discover the mage responsible for waking
her, it becomes explicit that he burned her hand in order to wake her
up, being some distance away and having no other fast way of getting her
attention.

Well, obviously you deal with it in any way you see fit. I was
suggesting 1) that as some readers hadn't got it you might consider
giving the episode more weight even if you din't want to tell the
reader what you know about the character's motives. Personally, I
would probably give a reason for her actions partly because it
clarifies both the nature of the world and of her part in in it and
because it would automatically be more memorable having taken up more
space and carrying more emotional weight.I am also quite likely to fit
in a mention of the exhausting nature of magic, if her exhaustion
helped her to sleep in spite of her fear.
2) I think there are ways that you can do this that don't compromise
your rather distant style and which fall short of a full blown
explanation as you seem to dislike these.

YMMV and probably will. I tend to give the reader most of what I know
because by and large I want to know what the reader wants to know and
therefore I tend to work these answers out in the narrative - even if
I don't know anything else. You know much more than the reader and
seem to want to tell them as little as possible. I don't really
understand why that is, but if it is your aesthetic who am I to argue
with it.

Nicky
.

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