In Review: A Fool's Goddess - Chapter Six

Good evening all, or at least it’s evening when I’m writing this. I’m enjoying a bowl of ice cream, cursing the weather for continuing to fluctuate between hot and cold, and my dog just farted. Overall, it’s another lovely night.

How are you? I hope you are well, both in body and mind. As for me, I’m always feeling good when I’m writing, so I’m pretty relaxed right now. Please make sure you engage in your favorite hobbies as well. Happiness is something we all deserve, don’t you think?

Well now, let’s get down to it. As always, I’ll talk about the key points of the chapter, but let’s open up with something equally important to my writing.

Naming my special moves.

…I promise, this isn’t a joke. At least, it’s not meant to be one. It’s still something to laugh at, but it’s also one of the strategies I’ve found that helps me focus with my creativity. Please hear me out before we agree that I’m an immature lunatic.

Now, what I mean is giving names to things I do when I write, just like how an anime or fighting game character will name their attacks. “Shoryuken”, “Kamehameha”, and “Giga Drill Break” are all memorable moves from notable series (being Street Fighter, Dragon Ball, and Gurren Lagann respectively). The characters shout out the name, and you get hyped because you know what’s coming.

Likely because I’ve always enjoyed such media, I found myself naming all the techniques I’d create for writing. Granted, most of these are things other writers have also thought of (such as Yoko Taro’s “backwards script-writing” that I mentioned in the first In Review), but when they didn’t have a name for the technique, I gave it one.

Examples would be the one-month, post-completion, resting period Stephen King advised in On Writing. If I recall correctly, he described it as putting the story away so that you could forget about it. Great advice that I would encourage everyone to at least try.

Of course, describing it like that is obnoxious, so my manchild-ass deemed it the “cooldown”.

Other examples would be “voiceless characters”, which I discussed previously, and “two-thirds turnaround”, a recent discovery of mine where I found it easier to complete a story if I stopped and reread everything when it was about two-thirds complete. I could list off a few more, but honestly, I’m already embarrassed writing out this silly habit of mine as is.

So you might be thinking, ‘why bother doing any of that?’ Good question. The answer is something along the lines of ‘I don’t know.’ But to be less obstinate, I’d elaborate and say that it helps me remain focused and consistent.

By giving names to these strategies, it makes them easier for me to recall. Calling it “five-line reminder” genuinely helps me keep in mind that, when writing long dialogue scenes, it’s polite to designate who’s talking at least once every five lines of dialogue. It’s not necessary, of course, but it prevents the reader from losing track of who’s saying what and jarring them out of the story. Thus, when I get to every fifth line, a little video plays out in my head where some karate gi-wearing bozo shouts out “Five-Line Reminder!”, bowls over his opponent, and everyone knows who’s talking.

…Dear God, it sounds so dumb when I put it like that. I probably just committed social suicide by writing that out. I’m going to have nightmares about people finding this and showing it to me ten years down the line now.

I guess to bring it all together, I’d encourage any fledgling writer to find a method of helping themselves keep their techniques and preferences in mind as they write. Creating a novel is a long-term project, so it’s not uncommon for your strategy to shift as you go along. While you absolutely can and should shift your tone and/or style for artistic effect, bear in mind that readers will pick up on that regardless if those changes are intentional or not. It’s been recommended to me that one’s style should remain consistent for a pleasurable reading experience, and as a reader, I would agree that my favorite authors keep the changes for special occasions.

You don’t need to name your special moves, of course. Do what feels comfortable to you. My little piece of stupidity here is just an example for you to laugh at and hopefully understand. If you can just keep in mind how you like to break your paragraphs without sounding like a goober, do it.

Meanwhile, I’ll have not-Ryu crying “chaff detail” in my head for the rest of my life.

Okay, so that was quite the tangent. But the reason I bring it all up is because this chapter of A Fool’s Goddess is the first chapter after the time skip. “Time skip” could be one of my special moves, but it’s also a very common technique in long-form storytelling. Regardless, it got me thinking of that dumb habit of mine.

Anyways, I decided to do a time skip here mostly to just give Lior a power-boost. I wanted to him to now be a better sculptor and have made some progress in restoring Tornara’s name, so I cheated and just fast-forwarded. I probably shouldn’t honest about such things, but a writer is just a liar with a keyboard, so why not tell the truth every now and again?

And with further honesty, I’ll admit that part of me kind of hated putting the skip in, but when the reality of how long the story was going to be set in, it was pretty obvious I’d bore a reader to death (if I hadn’t already) if I actually wrote out what happened in those five years.

Writing, like most of life, is a compromise.

I opened with that bit about Chen’s wedding to help make the skip obvious before I state it plainly. We then get a little story about Malka’s past and some more bits on the sort of person she is because I secretly wanted to write a hundred pages just about her. Afterwards, Lior gets them some lunch and explains what’s going to happen next.

Now, if there’s anything I feel that points out I’m a fraud, it’s the fact that Malka takes baths on the second floor. I wrote that she did so last chapter, but as the previous In Review was kind of emotional for me, I abstained from mentioning it then. Now I’m free to tear myself apart.

Why oh why did I ever specify that?!

A cursory lesson in history can confirm that plumbing was a thing in the Greco-Roman era. However, it wasn’t nearly on a household basis, and certainly not at the level of second-floor bathrooms. Of course, my novel doesn’t state that it’s a flowing bathtub or anything like that, but I can’t remember why I stuck with saying the bathroom was on the second floor.

Frankly, it just doesn’t make sense. If we assume that Diesor somehow has multistory plumbing, then why does it lack other relative technologies? And even if the reader kindly assumes it was more akin to a basin, it still doesn’t parse. Why bother carrying the water upstairs? Won’t it just make a mildewy mess if you spill it?

I still think about this and can’t for the life of me figure out why I didn’t just say the bathroom was on the first floor. Because of that, despite Lior’s lucky breaks and odd religious tendencies, I find Malka’s bathroom to be the least believable part of the entire story.

…You know, obsessing over a fictional bathroom’s placement is exactly the kind of thing a guy who names his writing techniques would do, isn’t it?

Well, getting back to the chapter, not much else happens beyond reestablishing the setting post-skip. I had Malka like spicy food because I like spicy food, and I enjoyed saying that she described Lior’s best work as “four out of ten”. Pretty much, I just used this chapter to have fun before we get back into more serious stuff.

I would like to go over the bit about Malka’s nightmares I included though. I really liked the idea of a character who had to force their chaotic visions out in order to sleep, but then I had to consider what happened when she did sleep. We get a little mention from Gili, but it’s not stated what Malka sees in those pleasant dreams.

As a little behind-the-scenes peak, I’ll reveal that she would dream about her wife and the rest of her family, always having fun and smiling. A couple years after taking him as her apprentice, she also started seeing Lior in her dreams, though she has no intention of ever telling him that.

I think that’s apt to be called “pleasant”.

And in closing the chapter, Lior sets out to go get shitfaced with Chen. I do love writing bar scenes, but I’ll go into that next time. For now, we’re all done here. As I expected, there wasn’t too much to this chapter, so I hope my tangential anecdotes were just as good.

Welp, my ice cream’s long gone and my stomach is nagging me for how lactose-intolerant I am. I think I’ll take a shower, maybe work some more on my next novel, or just goof off and play video games. No clue, but that’s the beauty of life. Every decision can be overturned, and only I can forge the path I’ll follow.

That’s all for now. Until next time, handsome.

“FIVE LINE REMINDER!!!”