I’m hoping that the title of this blog caught your attention. If it did, then great! You’re in luck, for I am indeed going to be discussing insane elves…well, elf to be accurate. One lunatic immortal is bad enough. Just how does an elf lose his mind, you ask? Very carefully. Why is said insane elf so frustrating? Ah, now that’s an excellent question! Allow me to elaborate.
He’s too complicated.
All right, so I didn’t elaborate as much as you’d hoped. To be honest, his being too complicated truly does explain everything, but I will try my best to give an in-depth explanation anyway. Say you have an idea for a really interesting character; your characters’ name is Jack, and he’s immortal. Not just any immortal, but one of the fair race: an elf. Jack is also witty and super-brilliant,—the equivalent of Doctor Who’s “The Doctor”—and he is also a prince who is easily bored. Perhaps Jack is also a telepath able to read people’s minds. You decide that Jack gets abducted by some bad people and is taken to a place where they exploit and tortured him at the expense of the lives of innocents. One day—many years later—he is freed by a dark stranger and returned to the world he once knew.
My question is: How does Jack carry on from this point forward?
Stef and I have been pondering through this question for four years. FOUR YEARS! There are a million different answers to this question, and we’ve yet to feel comfortable with a single solution. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that our elf is insane, but not too insane, because he—like his people—has an uncanny ability to heal most every wound, whether it be mental or physical. Or perhaps it’s because our elf’s scarred mind is not immediately noticeable. And maybe it’s because he hears voices, but his ability helps to muffle them. What I’m trying to say is that we’ve made an immortal—with a serious lack of humanity and emotion—partially insane. How do you work with him?
What I’m not saying is that we are not up to the challenge. Quite the contrary, we embrace a challenge. Unfortunately we embraced the near-impossible. Does our elf go on with his life despite his slight mental handicap? Does he turn his back on his people because he believes he is reborn? Or does he continue to slip further into insanity and lean toward becoming a villain? These are all possibilities, but there remains one giant problem: how do you give personality to a disturbed person with a gross lack of emotion?
Sadly, Our first attempt at writing our immortal loon floundered. His character was uninteresting, a bit unbelievable, and altogether unfinished. He was funny and clever at times, but he ultimately seemed incomplete, and that led him down the dreaded path of boring.
In all fairness, Stef and I hope that our troubled elf doesn’t come across as dull. All of our scheming and discussions about how to make him interesting would have been for naught. Fortunately we are in the process of beginning the rewrite of our newest novel and are excited by the process of starting over and making it better than before. We just hope that we don’t end up losing our minds along the way, for then you may catch of real glimpse of what insanity is like.
-Matt
He’s too complicated.
All right, so I didn’t elaborate as much as you’d hoped. To be honest, his being too complicated truly does explain everything, but I will try my best to give an in-depth explanation anyway. Say you have an idea for a really interesting character; your characters’ name is Jack, and he’s immortal. Not just any immortal, but one of the fair race: an elf. Jack is also witty and super-brilliant,—the equivalent of Doctor Who’s “The Doctor”—and he is also a prince who is easily bored. Perhaps Jack is also a telepath able to read people’s minds. You decide that Jack gets abducted by some bad people and is taken to a place where they exploit and tortured him at the expense of the lives of innocents. One day—many years later—he is freed by a dark stranger and returned to the world he once knew.
My question is: How does Jack carry on from this point forward?
Stef and I have been pondering through this question for four years. FOUR YEARS! There are a million different answers to this question, and we’ve yet to feel comfortable with a single solution. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that our elf is insane, but not too insane, because he—like his people—has an uncanny ability to heal most every wound, whether it be mental or physical. Or perhaps it’s because our elf’s scarred mind is not immediately noticeable. And maybe it’s because he hears voices, but his ability helps to muffle them. What I’m trying to say is that we’ve made an immortal—with a serious lack of humanity and emotion—partially insane. How do you work with him?
What I’m not saying is that we are not up to the challenge. Quite the contrary, we embrace a challenge. Unfortunately we embraced the near-impossible. Does our elf go on with his life despite his slight mental handicap? Does he turn his back on his people because he believes he is reborn? Or does he continue to slip further into insanity and lean toward becoming a villain? These are all possibilities, but there remains one giant problem: how do you give personality to a disturbed person with a gross lack of emotion?
Sadly, Our first attempt at writing our immortal loon floundered. His character was uninteresting, a bit unbelievable, and altogether unfinished. He was funny and clever at times, but he ultimately seemed incomplete, and that led him down the dreaded path of boring.
In all fairness, Stef and I hope that our troubled elf doesn’t come across as dull. All of our scheming and discussions about how to make him interesting would have been for naught. Fortunately we are in the process of beginning the rewrite of our newest novel and are excited by the process of starting over and making it better than before. We just hope that we don’t end up losing our minds along the way, for then you may catch of real glimpse of what insanity is like.
-Matt
