A lot of things had influenced Moses in his writing of Jesse King.
Movies. Books. People. Events.
Braveheart (move), Harry Potter (books, movies), Lord of the Rings (books, movies), X-Men (comics, movies), U2 (band), the Bible (book), Beethoven (musician), Brotherhood of the Wolf (movie), Jim Carrey (actor) .. The list goes on.
Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire series. Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time. Deus Ex (computer game). World of Warcraft (computer game).
There was Eric Liddell at the 924 Olympics in Paris, and the movie Chariots of Fire.
The story of Moses Grandfather in the Wars. His death had been fresh in Moses’ memory when writing Jesse King’s first major downfall, the Massacre at Gregar Falls.
So I’m sitting at work, finding problems like User editable base data being forced into harcoded logic, at my day job, when it hits me. I didn’t put the latest chapter of “The Prophet” up last night.
How do you present the information? A single way? Many ways? Through a character’s voice, through events, through other characters?
At what point does the brain switch off because too many new things have sought it’s attention?
Writing this chapter out for posting tonight brought these questions up in my mind. I don’t think these stories are as tight as the Moses Lawd (The Prophet) stories. Not yet at least. They are smaller, and real-world, but I haven’t gone over them as much. Haven’t delved into motivations and histories and secrets. Themes.
Still, it’s a good process. Switching between genres. Learning more each time I sit down to write.
Have just posted Chapter 4 of The Prophet - Part 1. It’s main content was taken from a conversation I heard while sitting in a coffee shop. Actually, in a book shop which had a Gloria Jeans.
Now this may sound a little bit like privacy invasion, but I was taken with the words being said, and wrote them down straight away, knowing they could be used in a story.
And so they were.
In this chapter we see Moses very clearly stating his dislike of love. Of the “prison” that is love. It’s important, because later, when he finds love, this scene should come back.
More and more, I’m of the opinion that this story would be better told as a tv show, or a movie. I read through the chapters (fourteen in Part 1) over the weekend, and got stuck into some of the reasoning behind them. Worked through the themes, the foreshadowing, that kind of thing. The later chapters especially just have too much happening. They either need to be split up and fleshed out, or made into some kind of audio/visual medium of story-telling where more of the written word can be conveyed in fewer .. words.
Breaking apart the chapters and the story in these blog posts is something I want to start doing. Kind of like extras on a dvd set, finding out the why behind the story.
So far we’ve had four chapters of the story of Moses Lawd.
At this time, there are fourteen chapters all up in the first Part. Some of them are quite short, the rest are just short.
Things got wierd in the last chapter with the two strange men insisting that Moses think about “killing Jesse King”.
Moses doesn’t like himself too much, that should hopefully be rather plain.
The world in his books, and particularly Jesse King, is so very important to him.
Perhaps I should have stressed this more. It’s quite an important theme. But then, I guess if you ask authors about their big epic stories, they’d say the same thing.
The coffee shop was a block from the Hendant building. There was an area with comfy lounges where people could sit, talk, read.
A couple in deep conversation didn’t seem to notice Moses as he sat with his crushed ice and coffee drink.
“We’re two sensible adults, and I realise it probably meant nothing to you. I just want you to acknowledge that you stopped calling me because of that other woman you left the party last night with.”
“Were you at the party?”
“No. Tabby told me.”
“Listen, Susan, I stopped calling you for a completely different reason.”
