Injecting Magic in a Story

article Synthesising

My mind wanders through a flow of things I've seen and read. One interesting place I go back to is "Memories of Alhambra." My mom is a K-drama aficionada and recommended it to me because of the LitRPG-like mechanics inside the thing.

To better exemplify what I'll be saying, let me introduce you to a common Human tendency: we often look for stability, routine, guarantees that everything will go one way or another. Even though the world is made of chaotic uncertainty, we try to carve bubbles from a cutout subset of actions and information. When I first chose to study medicine, I wanted to gather the tools to examine the human body objectively, to know what's going on and why. Little I knew that Medicine is just another field we know very little of.

In amateurish novels, there's always a degree of self-insertion, of trying to min-max all the choices and outcomes. In a way, web novels are fanfictioning more complex literature. That mostly happens for web novels that are poorly written, obviously. Not all web novels are like this. Just the majority. It's not a surprise, given that most web novels are, for good and bad, still very amateurish. And so, people try to min-max, to escape the natural entropic order of things. It's enticing to try and set all the pieces in the perfect way, to have all the right things happen. But is it interesting?

And what helps even more is when you destabilize the story, when something - anything, really - breaks the status quo.

While writing Pam's Quest - which I write while narrating it in form of a DnD-like experience to my gf while she acts as the main character - around chapter 5, she made a choice I would have never made. She chose to peek out of the trap door to check if the zombie had gone away. Hell, I knew the zombie had gotten out of the house, but I couldn't help but grip my chair for a second and think: "What the hell are you doing?"

That is probably something I'm still lacking myself in my writing. I've learned a bit about Less is more and Readers are most attracted by what they think they will see next, not what they are seeing right now from Dan Brown's masterclass, but never like in that moment I understood the value of chaos, of a character escaping your control. See, I've always considered myself more of a psychiatrist for my characters than a all-powerful God; I was drunk on the notion that I was just getting their tales and writing them down. But I think that has not been the case until now. I think that so far, I've written down what I liked about my characters, not what they were really telling me. I think that, as the most insidious and dark among therapists, I was guiding their choices to reflect my beliefs.

I should have asked myself more questions to avoid that. I should have tried to fit their shoes better. Instead, my ego took over their personality in crucial moments. And that means I probably robbed my characters and my readers of what truly should have gone down in my stories.