Newsletter for Week of 12/15/23

The days just creep up on you. I managed to completely miss that today was Friday, somehow, despite having a calendar open directly in front of me. Alert. Focused. Primed to catch the tiniest detail. I would crush life in the post-apocalypse. I would be a god of the wasteland.

News- Racing to the end of Vol. 3. Expect to have it done ~mid January, or a little sooner. As you know, I write thirty or so chapters ahead of what’s on Patreon, so no, you aren’t in for an abrupt ending or anything. No new news on other books.

I have heard vaguely positive things about how the series is being received from Podium, which is good, but few real numbers, which is frustrating. This seems to be a combination of factors, mostly coming from how Amazon tracks things and shares the info, stacked on top of the publisher being more interested in how the series performs, rather than an individual book. This may be sheer projection on my part, but it kind of feels like they will be evaluating the success or failure of the series based on the first three books.

It’s been a real learning experience. I can understand why some authors feel so strongly one way or the other about self publishing versus using a publisher. I go back and forth on it myself. Ah well.

Behind The Scenes- How I build a Main Character (Also I’m a moron and should have used this week to discuss series design and world building so you are getting a little of that here, but much more on it soon. If someone has a decent quality second hand brain going cheap, I could use an upgrade. My current provider has really let me down.) 

A story is basically “Here is a problem and here is how it was solved.” The who, what, when, where, why and how are all built around that. Even something like a biography (arguably) has the same structure- “Life is a struggle. Here is how John Doe faced the challenge.” So the first thing I do to create a main character is create the world they live in.

Well. That’s technically the second step. Step Zero is “What kind of story do I want to write?”

If I want to make a living writing, I need to write things people want to read. I read a lot of prog fantasy, and most of my existing readers are on RR, so prog fantasy it is. So what types of prog fantasy do people like? Lit RPG, system stories, and cultivation tend to dominate. The dopamine loop of “Numbah Go Up!” is real and well documented. Go Go Gadget Scrapbooking!

Can I combine cultivation and LitRPG? Yes, easily. It’s been done before, and a lot. So what does a world with those things look like? 

(Just deleted a whole tangent on where “cultivation” as a literary concept comes from. Should have done a worldbuilding essay first!)

ALRIGHT! LASER FOCUS! A world with stats, a world with cultivation! Issues #1 & 2 in a cultivation world is gerontocracy and inequality. Our entire society is built around the notion that eventually, at predictable rates, people die. Well… what if they don’t? Or even if they do, what if that timeline isn’t sixty, seventy, eighty years, but two hundred? What if the average working life stretches from forty years to eighty, or a hundred?

Society gets unequal, very, very fast.

(Deleted two paragraphs on income inequality, real world examples of gerontocracy, and the myth of the self made man. FML. Bad planning, Warby, bad!)

In a world where you can meditate your way to power and wealth, wouldn’t that be a myth that those at the top would promote hard? Everyone can be a self made man in a cultivation world. Combined with the incredibly exploitative, scummy behavior of the sects in cultivation novels, and the fit with late stage capitalism becomes quite easy.

So here is Truth Medici. We drop our MC into this horrible world. Is he at the top of the heap? Well, would he have interesting problems to solve as the son and heir of Starbrite? Maybe if I wanted to write a palace drama. But I’m writing a progression fantasy. He has to start low, and grow. And he has to remain emotionally believable the whole time.

Incidentally, this ties directly to the question of “relatability.” It’s a useful concept, but a dangerous one. The key is for problems to be interesting. Most people find problems they can “relate” to inherently interesting. We have, I suspect, all been short of money and worked jobs we hated just to cover rent and groceries. We can relate to that much better than, say, fighting demons with a sword. But if I wanted miserable realism, I would read/write “literature,” not LitRPG. Relatability is a tool to achieve interesting problems, but not the thing itself.

Lower status and resources means more problems. How low can we start Truth? Well, lower than I did, actually. He was born in Jeon, has a home, access to education, access to the Universal Spell, clean water, etc. If he was born in, say, the Free State, that wouldn’t apply. But I want him to get that system, because I am writing, at least initially, a system Lit RPG. So he’s in Jeon, and he has to follow a series of steps to get to that system. But he is about as low as you can be in Jeon.

How do I give him interesting problems? Because nobody is here to read about this cool idea for a world I came up with, they want a character they can root for as they are dealing with interesting problems.

Truth needs to survive his environment- he lives in the slums. He needs to survive his family- his parents are abusive/absent/actively interfere with his goals. He needs to get more powerful, both for personal protection and achieving his goals. He has people to protect- his siblings. The world is changing around him, and at the beginning of the series, he can’t see it or understand how it’s affecting him. He is starved for friendship and affection. The only healthy thing in his life is his relationship to his siblings.

The sibling thing is absolutely key- a problem that drives both plot and character development. It’s the “save the cat” factor, but more than that, it gives people a reason to care about Truth. Nobody wants to care about someone who doesn't care about anything, even if they are okay with a morally gray MC.

Now, that’s a kind of loaded phrase, so let’s take a half step back and look at some successful prog fantasy protagonists for comparison.

• In Beware of Chicken, Jin Rou cares about a lot of things. He cares about his farm, his found family, his wife, the villagers, almost everything except defying the heavens as an almighty cultivator. That was the hook of the book. He cares about everything except what a cultivator should care about.
• In Primal Hunter, Jake cares about hunting. Becoming more powerful, yes, but it’s the actual hunt, the struggle, that he’s into. He cares about it more than other people. He cares about it more than ruling a planet. He just wants to fight and kill powerful things. It’s admittedly selfish, but it’s sincere and powerful. Again, it’s the hook of the book. It’s even called “Primal Hunter.”
• Ditto Defiance of the Fall, where the MC is likewise on the “I just want power and growth, screw everything else” grindset with a smidge more base building. He is, in many ways, a classic Xianxia protagonist. Pure power for its own sake. Clear desires, and he takes active, sensible steps towards achieving his goals.
• Ditto Azaranth Healer, which clearly inspired a lot of things in Primal Hunter and DOTF. Almost completely internal motivation, built around a love of conflict.
• Demonic Tree- the tree is amoral, apathetic, immobile, indifferent to the people around it… and it has desires. It wants to survive and get more powerful. It drives its growth through its daily check in game mechanic. It wants things, and the author ties its desires directly to that “Numbers go up” feedback loop.

We can see a few things here. One, the genre is very comfortable with violence. Two, readers expect a high degree of growth for growth’s sake, but are quite happy to see external motives as well. Three, in an ideal world, you would link both the internal motives, external motives and growth mechanic into a seamless package. HWFWM is a monster hit because it managed the Trifecta AND great worldbuilding AND great charicter design. 

Remove the Sibs from the “Truth” equation and what kind of book will be written? No interest in friends and family points. Those credits go straight into cultivation aids and a luxury lifestyle. He becomes obsessed with watching the numbers go up. He quickly forgets that what he is doing is, in fact, fucked up and not okay. It becomes okay, because it makes him feel good when the numbers go up.

Without the Sibs, Truth is a full blown psychopath by the end of Vol. 1. I would have to make sure the “mind control” mechanic didn’t exist, because he would be a drone eighty chapters in, and readers HATE loss of agency in an MC. I certainly do. He needs a reason to not be that. A reason like some younger siblings.

So let's put it all together.

1. Determine the genre and format: serial web novel Cultivation/Lit RPG
2. Create world: (More on this to come, but) A world where cultivators run everything and would give rise to the System.
3. Determine the MC’s starting point and goals. Jeon Slums-> Starbrite Man.
4. Give the MC interesting problems to solve.
5. Connect the dots.
6. Fill in the blanks.

The systems we built above- the type of novel, the type of world, the type of problems the MC has, mesh together again and again to generate both problems and solutions. And what is anyone’s life but how they grow and change when faced with the problems life throws at them?

The final point I want to make, and I will go into this more next week, is emotional plausibility. Does the Wizard of Oz make any goddamn sense on any level? No. Does anyone reading or watching it care? No. Because it is emotionally believable. The setting can be batshit crazy. The problems can be crazy. The people can be crazy. But we have to believe in them. Therefore there must be an underlying logic that people can believe.

The MC can be a psychopath like most Xianxia “heroes,” so long as they follow a logic we can understand. The world may be awful, but it got that way for rational reasons. There is a logical connection between cause and effect. Truth is, as he points out, the logical consequence of billions of bad decisions made by other people, and so is everyone else. They, and he, both grow as a rational consequence of the world they live in. A world that exists because it fits my genre requirements and matches my interests. But more on that next week.

Next week- Where I should have begun- World Building For Fun and Profit.