elizabeth_oswald
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Broken Knife Afterword and Rounding Up
🕑 Added 2025-03-31 16:37:14 +0000 UTCThis is the 'chapter' Royal Road will get tomorrow, so I wanted to make sure you all got it first. It's mostly stuff I've said here before, but not recently, and not specifically relating to TBK.
For me, stories tend to start with characters, not plot. I was talking to my husband one day and kobolds came up. I mentioned that I preferred the dog-like kobolds, mainly because my first exposure to anything called a kobold was in Ragnarok Online, yonks ago. (If you don't know what a yonk is, it's old-people talk for a long time.) My husband is a long-time D&D and tabletop RPG (TTRPG) gamer, so we ended up chasing the 'draconic vs. dog-like kobolds' dichotomy down an internet rabbit hole. This led to Kaz, who was my favorite kind of kobold, but who lived in a world with the other types of kobolds. Yes, in the very beginning, the husede would have been mythological gnome-type kobolds, and the mosui wouldn't have happened. In the end, I just didn't want a humanoid kobold at all, so I switched things up.
I also need a setting, and I had just finished reading several cultivation novels, including a very, very popular one in which the MC creates an internal world as part of his power building. That world even has its own arc and characters, but in the end, it's really just something the MC creates and forgets about for the vast majority of the time. This...irks me. He has effectively become God, and then abandons his world. So, what if a world was created like this, and its creator left behind some guardians, not only to make sure it continued to do good things for his cultivation, but also because he wanted to make sure things didn't go to poop? And what if he had several of these worlds, and the people who lived in them could move between them, the way that cultivators do in these stories? They also tend to forget about the life and world(s) they leave behind, viewing them as a sort of collateral damage to their own cultivation. At best, a lot of cultivation MCs are true neutral, caring only for their own advancement. So, yeah, what happens to those left behind?
Once I have a character, I get scenes. Now, these aren't visual (sadly) because as I've mentioned before, I have aphantasia, so I get no mind-pictures at all. Still, the scene of Kaz finding Li's egg was the beginning of the story. Now, I'm a firm believer in hybrid pantsing AND plotting. I do have a pretty good idea of where the story is going, but I don't worry too much about exactly how it gets there. For the most part, if I or my characters 'screw up', I just roll with it. My favorite example of this is when a character left her horse behind when she went through an expensive portal, then didn't have the funds to go back. Sure, I could have rewritten it. It'd be the matter of a minute to edit in, "Rouge dropped by the stable to get her horse before..." Instead, I sent her on a wild ostrich chase so she ended up with one of the most iconic and beloved characters in the story: Wally, the Battle Ostrich.
So, now I have characters, scenes, setting, and at least a general plot, so what's left? For me, it's a theme. Now, I definitely have themes that end up in all of my stories, intentionally or otherwise. Family, friendship, and kindness are always there. My characters become real in no small part because of the relationships they build, and the way that influences their own growth. In this case, however, I really wanted to talk about both freedom and choice. And, as a woman, I wanted to talk about gender. It would have been easy to make Kaz a female and flip everything in the story to talk about the oppression of women, but then I would have been preaching at you. We're constantly bombarded by messaging about inequality, from many different sides and perspectives. This wasn't about giving you another morality play, it was about telling a great story with a great character, and the world he lives in. But, if at any point you thought, "Man, it would suck to be a male kobold in this world", you should know that this (and worse) are what real human women experience in our world every single day.
First and foremost, I hope you enjoyed the story. I hope you found hope and joy in Kaz learning and growing and, yes, taking his power back. He became an equal and more, but chose to continue doing good for others, while also taking time for his own life and happiness. That makes me pretty happy, and if it made you happy, too, then my job here is done.
Now, I have a rabbit to write about, so I'll leave you to it. Thank you all, it was a wonderful ride!
Comments
Joseph Sikorski
I definitely prefer your world or at least story of more caring people. Too often, stories that are focused on power progression either just turn me off for how cruel or indifferent the characters might be or they just bore me because they lack the interesting characters and interaction.
Elizabeth Oswald
I'm glad it works! I've been writing since before I found out "picture yourself at the beach" wasn't just a figure of speech 🤯 gave me something completely new to worry about when writing 😂
Pavva
Aphantasiacs represent! Maybe that’s one of the reasons the description style worked so well for me in TBK.
