Forråde Forventning

There's a  lot of comfort to be found in predictability. You can pick up a good book, one you're already familiar with, and know that you're going to enjoy it. I can appreciate that. The typical narrative structure of mundanity to call-to-arms to mentor to acceptance-of-heroic-destiny to independence to victory to the-return -- these are successful story elements that you can find anywhere because they work. Becuase people like them. On the other hand, sometimes you just have to mix things up a bit, do something unexpected.

 Yorlain (Bi'iyolñ) is a street magician. He is one of the have-nots who carries a chip on his shoulder, convinced that anything he doesn't have isn't worth having. He is a normal mortal without any magic to speak of, doing stage magic to prove that the workers-in-the-Power aren't any better than normal folks. He is a revolutionary without a mob, a fanatic without a clearly defined cause, and a very stressed, dissatisfied man. He lives an unfulfilled life, scraping by on a meager wage, and sometimes at night he realizes that he makes a fool out of himself every day, in public, on purpose, so he can have enough money to eat. And when he realizes this, he is ashamed. Sometimes he slacks his shame in liquor. Sometimes he just has bad dreams.

Yorlain doesn't know it, but he has a destiny, and it's tangled up with a wizard. Why did I decide this? I can't recall, but it's tied up with one of the principles of writing that I read once. Apparently, all good writers are thieves. They're supposed to take something they like, figure out why they liked it, and do that from then on. Now, this isn't "steal the setting" as much as it is "oh. That character was flawed, and they didn't arbitrarily ignore the flaw every time it was inconvenient." or "that setting had self-consistency" or something. The basic idea is that good writers are supposed to see when other writers do something right, and revise their behavior.

And I had one of those moments reading "Evil for Evil" -- something about inverting expectations. So Yorlain is a street magician who will have to tag along with a real magician. In a normal person, this would evoke shame -- it'd be like me calling myself a gymnast and teaching children how to do cartwheels (I could) and then hanging out with the guy who invented parkour. I would be so out of my league.

But Yorlain doesn't have that problem, and we're going to exploit that for drama. You see, Yorlain is an envious have-not, so good at self-delusion that he believes his own press -- he thinks the Wizards are faking it. He just isn't sure how. And he's going to undergo character growth, probably. Or die. It's always nice to have a character it's okay to kill, right?