50+ Questions of Literary Enquiry

Final Question

How would you deal with the following themes in your story if they were to ever come up: Love, redemption, grace, retribution, truth, addiction, suicide and laziness?

Love is a common thing in my stories. Usually every story has one romantic relationship. Some of them have a little bit more hidden relationships. The ones that I want to be out in the open, they usually start out with the two characters meeting, they find a common bond, and they sync together eventually, whereas the ones that are more in the background, you know the relationship’s there, you know that they’re going to end up together, but you don’t know when. Those relationships I try to pan out, I try to make it seem they like each other, but there’s tension, and that is one of the main things for Crossover Sagas. Two of the main characters, Manasa and Hewitt, although they hate each other, they do fight frequently, and Manasa is incredibly mad at Hewitt for the one time he saw her naked, total accident. Deep down she does actually love him, so that’s why in the last episode, I’m not going to spoil the plot for you, she is going to have a major showing of this, of how much she loves him.

There are a lot of characters who have friendship loves, love in the sense of a family. They care about each other a lot, but they’re not romantically involved. Certain stories have really big friendships that help the characters develop. For instance, in Crossover Sagas, I plan to have a big friendship between Imaran and Arugulo, and a big friendship between Nadia and Manasa. Those friendships really help both characters to develop, and I would deal with it in a way that I would show how close they are, how their friendship started, how it developed, and try to show why it is they’re so close, why it is they are friends, why it is they care about each other. It’s the same with all the other stories, for instance, the mentor characters and why they care about their students. In Freedom Trilogy, there’re the female lieutenants, and why they even follow the main character in the first place. I would introduce the characters, get them talking, and develop this friendship that would get there eventually.

Redemption isn’t that much in the stories. There’s only really one that I can think of that has a proper redemption factor to him, and that’s only because he’s shunned by his people. But really, redemption is not that big of a deal. I can really not think of a reason why it would be, because it’s not something I bring into my stories too much. With redemption, if I do have it in, I try to have it really, really panned out. It would start off with the reveal of how it is that the characters ended how they are, usually they would start off with they need to go for their redemption. If I didn’t, then you’d see how they got to the point where they need the redemption, and I’d pan it out so you’d see the full story, you’d see them properly redeemed, not like how some stories do it with at the end it’s practically the same as how it began, there’s not really anything different about it; like Red Dead Redemption, for instance. But they would actually be properly redeemed, no doubt about it.

Kael’thas is really the only character that I can think of, that has a proper redemption story, because he’s the only one who has anything to redeem. There aren’t really any other characters with major redemption arcs that would somehow affect the storyline in a huge way. Some of the characters in Spirit Runners do have a sort of redemption story. Some of the people who were fighting the Spirit Runners in the beginning, they have to work with the Spirit Runners. Some of them will have proper redemption, some of the ones that were really pushing the story forward, may have a redemption story, in that they come from completely hating the Spirit Runners, to actually liking them and getting along, while others are doing it for themselves, and they’re not really redeemable. They were actually the ones that were made to never be redeemed, because they’re evil people that no one should like. They can like them, I would like the readers to like all my characters, but they don’t have to. Now there aren’t really any major characters I have with a redemption story, but I will say this for Kael’thas; I have been trying to think up theme songs for all of my main characters, and Kael’thas’ theme song is really hard to pick, but I’ve seen a few World of Warcraft songs that could tie in to his seeking of redemption, because in the end, that’s what he’s after.