• Jun 6

Creativity, a quest for input…

I has it not… I think, or maybe I thought…
I draw inspiration from the things around me for my blog, but fiction was never my forte. Now I’m trying my hand at creative writing for a fanfic contest. I’ve written stories before, mostly to test out the type writer I got as a pressent… And when I say stories of course I mean not even half a story, but still, I tried (and failed miserably).

That’s John Scalzi, as an Orc with an axe, and Wil Wheaton in the infamous clown sweater, with a spear, on a unicorn pegasus kitten. With volcanoes.

In this case, I have some inspiration. The contest gives me the image you see to the left… My take on this is to create an anti-hero, just because I can. It does however leave some huge gaps.

Narration for instance, I can’t bring myself to write it in the first person, as I feel that it would be presumptuous towards these two guys that I deeply respect as writers, but I feel the humorous feel that I want to give this adventure would be best served with first person story telling.
I have one of the characters thought out and I have a bio in my head, but where to start the story? On the first day of his ordeals, or at his birth, to give a little more depth to the character and the myths of his people?
Right now I use the former, with some in-between explanations about the latter. I also have 294 words to get to the point where he realizes that today is different from what he expected. The contest is for 400 – 2000 words.
Most of you will know that I’m rarely ever at a loss for words (except right after I saw Avatar) so if engaging the action and describing one character takes me roughly 300 words, how will I ever make it to the end within 7 times that much text?
On the other hand, the contest asks for a story that explains how they got to be in the situation in which they are depicted, so I *could* just break it off there, but somehow that feels like a bit of a waste, build up to the big action scene and leave it at that.

So where do I go from here? First person, or third person? Starting at birth or have explanations interwoven into the story? End at the action scene or have our anti-hero save his ass/his people/life, the universe and everything? (Discuss!)