So which direction should I take my novel now?

I have been working on my overarching novel project for three years now and I don't like what I have written.

What I originally envisioned was no less than a complete, politically oriented, deconstruction of visual novel tropes with great emphasis upon military warfare, factional conspiracies and ethnic values. What I now have is several hundred thousand discarded words, a storyline that is more splintered than the Holy Roman Empire in the late middle age, and running the risk of unintentional plagiarism at every step.

The last point was especially important - having realized that my protagonist faction ran so afoul of Fate Stay Night, I opted to completely retcon it from the plot. And since, you know, this faction is supposed to drive the plot, this radical move has changed the direction the entire story is supposed to go at the very least. Changes that include completely changing one major faction from the quasi-antagonistic to protagonistic, which, naturally, flips the entire plot on its back.

That was long-winded, I suppose. Now onto the question.

In my story, there is one character called Wladyslaw (Anyone who is Polish, help is very much appreciated in making a good surname for this guy), a young noble whose only defining feature in the first draft was his undying and unfaltering devotion to his faction, the Black Vampires' Holy Komnenian Empire. The story began with his arriving in Japan together with the rest of his detachment with the purpose to "colonize" the vampire population there who had not yet recognized the Emperor as their lord and master.

Previously he was going to serve his terms as a fairly minor character who has exactly one scene, after which he was going to die an untimely and admittedly pointless death. Later on, before the retcon aforementioned and when the Empire was still the quasi-antagonist, I decided to expand his story into a sub-novella to try to provide a better picture of the conflict, and he would still die equally meaninglessly. After the retcon, this novella has completely displaced the original novel and Wladislaw is going to play a protagonist role in this novella whether that was my original intention or not.

The problem is, the eradication of the former protagonist faction means that my entire plot as a whole right now is in dire need of one, and Wladislaw fits the bill the most. So now I have two choices:

• Kill him as per originally planned and play on the drama that might ensue. This is the easy way out, and will wheel the main epic back to what it should be - an inter-factional warfare between multiple supernatural armies.
• Promote him into a proper hero and revolve the story around him and his point of view from this point on. This is far harder, for it will involve characterizing his immediate comrades, and, in line with my intention to deconstruct eroges, crafting an Unwanted Harem or two for him to replace the characters loss in the elimination of the former protagonist faction. He will not die, though the path to salvation would still be a long and hard one.

If you were me, what would you opt for?

edited 20th Jan '11 8:45:35 AM by ArgeusthePaladin

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Promote the homie into a hero — you'll avert the (readers') groaning that will ensure on his pointless death  ^*

, and I'm quite sure you can join his plotline into the main warfare epic.

That is the direction I am leaning towards to be honest. I have little trouble crafting Wladislaw's comrades, but I am having serious trouble to make a sound female cast that deconstructs the usual eroge stereotypes well enough without being too stereotypical and/or heavy-handed.

Ideally I am looking for a cast of no more than 4 girls including a Tsundere / Sheep In Bitch's Clothing / Shrinking Violet, a Stepford Smiler / Genki Girl / Pettanko Snarker and an Action Survivor who may have any selection of traits aforementioned.

So... help?

edited 20th Jan '11 9:16:50 AM by ArgeusthePaladin

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Try this approach: you craft these four girls, fleshing them out fully into people. Whatever it takes. Don't worry about them conforming to stereotypes.

Then the trick is to forget how these four girls act in some eroge game. (In a sense, averting the eroge/visual novel/anime tropes commonly associated, for something better.) You write them out according to your own rules. Have you really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

This is how I roll: I pay ridiculous attention to seemingly minor aspect of the backstory, like the history of the Empire, its ethnic composition and policies with the various ethnicity ranging from Proto-Hellenic to Slavic and Parthian, its military ethos and equipment, right down to the equipment of choice of their every military detachments.

... and forget about characters. So now before me I have a blank sheet as to developing a three-four girls cast that satisfies the bill. Any further tips I should be aware of?

edited 20th Jan '11 9:36:08 AM by ArgeusthePaladin

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Try allowing for some improvisation on-the-fly, and surprise yourself. I find it gets boring when you just know where all the beats fall in place. Instead of "Just as planned!" you can get "Oh wow what the—!"

And do give the question in my above post some thought.

It's hard to tell what would be best, and I think you'll know better on this than others because you know your work in much finer detail than we do. I do want say one thing though:

A lot of things are older than you know or as old as dirt. I'm not sure which portion of Fate/Night Stay you're afraid you plagarized, but (for example) the first paragraph on the Fate/Night Stay page has a part about how great warriors are literally immortalized and can continue to roam the Earth. Well, that can be dated really far back (IIRC Journey to the West has that and I know Norse Mythology does with the Einherjar). Anyways, my point is that if you can cite an old example of a work that is in the "public domain" (a legal term meaning that no one owns any copyrights on it) that used something in it that you also used in your work, you can say that your work is derived from that old work and be perfectly fine from a legal standpoint.

I see where you are coming from with that.

However, I have to admit that, and this may or may not be relevant to the issue at hand, that I am very much subject to Selective Squick when it comes to Nasuverse as a whole. For this reason, I would very much not want to have anything remotely resemblance to it in my future endeavor. Hence, there is more than avoiding plagiarism that drives the aforementioned changes.

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I'm also going to vote for option two. Also, it sounds to me like you're putting to much thought in the whole deconstruction thing. It's not always healthy to limit your characters because you don't want to do it like the others. (Eroges, in this case.) I think they're going to be deconstructed just fine if you forget about this altogether, and just write them realistically.

Which begs the question: What is realistic and what is not? What are the criteria? Who is to decide upon that?

The writer has the right to take certain artistic freedom from what is generally considered realistic, last time I checked.

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Deconstruction means examining the realistic consequences of a trope, I think. That's why I said that.

That is one. Deconstruction would also mean taking a trope in a direction unseen before and hopefully turn it on its head. I follow the second way of thinking.

To clarify: My way of deconstruction is to make something conceptually similar to Tsukihime read like Ogniem i Mieczem.

edited 21st Jan '11 6:10:30 AM by ArgeusthePaladin

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We writers have a myth that there are really only seven stories, so technically everyone is a plagiarist. What I mean is that, if you change your work to avoid plagiarizing one work, you will unavoidably end up plagiarizing another work. You can't let that guide your creative process or you're sunk before you ever begin.

Ditto for tropes. If you do your job properly, people won't notice that you're borrowing ideas from hither and yon.

What I see here, and I mean it in a constructive way, is avoidance. There's something blocking your creative flow, and it's not fear of plagiarism. Maybe you're taking on a project bigger than you feel you can handle, so you should scale it down to a manageable size or work on something else for a while. Maybe you sense a missing piece, so you should find another perspective that throws it into relief. Maybe you have lost yourself in the trees, so you should back off and take another look at the forest. Maybe I'm off base, so you should tell me to sod off.

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Semantics quibble. Using something in a way that is similar to the way it was used in another work is not "plagiarism". Plagiarism is directly copying another's work without acknowledgment and claiming that it is your own. The idea that there are only 7 (or fifteen or 21) plots simply means that you are open to accusations of being derivative is some critic wants to make that accusation. Don't sweat it. You cannot avoid it.

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