Ness Swan is moving along. After looking over my outline from last week and comparing it to the manuscript (186 pages long), I realized that the story had derailed and gone in a different direction than I'd first intended. Now, if the manuscript was better than what I planned I would have just run with it. Instead, it was worse. It was heinous. It would be at the nadir of all trial suckiness of any amateur writer ever.
So I started from the top and this manuscript will be at fifty pages by the end of today. I'm moving faster than I'd expected. I'm excited about how this is going. I managed to tell in four chapters what took me eight in the last manuscript, and with the ending I have in mind, I can foreshadow much more than what I was before. In short, I'm very pleased in what is happening.
But enough with the update. Over the weekend, I went over the Mistborn annotations at http://www.brandonsanderson.com/. And I'll give a plug for him here, I'm sure he won't mind. If you like fantasy and are looking for something good, buy his books. He's well-known for his amazing character developments, intriguing magic systems, and for me, his endings have always surprised and satisfied me. His novel Warbreaker kepting me guessing all the way to the last page. Do you know how rare it is to find a book where the last few paragraphs can throw you for a loop? Sanderson does this consistently.
Fanboy plug is over. So I was reading the Mistborn adaptations on his website, which was cool because it gave me a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that I hadn't caught onto when I first read the trilogy and made the mythology and conflicts that much richer. But what also happened was that I remembered how it felt the first time I read the books and what touched me deeply was the level of sacrifice the heroes endured.
I've asked myself over and over for years: why is sacrifice so important? Why do we attach meaning to it? Why do we attach ourselves to people or causes at the expense of our own lives? What makes sacrifice worth it?
I won't give any answers here (that might take fifty pages) but I do want to point out that the greatest stories, the ones that last through time inevitably deal with sacrifice. Sacrifice defines the hero, cuts away their imperfections and lets us see their light.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain comes to my mind. This is the best book that my high school teachers made me read. It's a fairly comical and intense adventure and that's all it would have been if not for the chapter where Huck is deciding whether or not to turn in Jim as a runaway slave. Huck has a crisis of conscience at this point. On the one hand, Jim is his friend and he knows what Jim will suffer if he gets caught. But on the other, Huck has been trying in his way to be a good Christian, and part of that is being honest and obeying the law. The law says that runaway slaves must be reported and turned in and if Huck doesn't obey, he knows that his immortal soul is forfeit. (Whether or not that's true is another discussion; it's how Huck sees things so that's reality for him and the dilemma that he faces.)
His conscience is so wracked that he writes a letter to the police to tell them where Jim is at and as soon as he does, he feels light as a feather. His conscience is clear, he's happy that he's doing the right thing, and he gets to keep the type of life he desires. But then he remembers Jim and even though he knows that despite how this leads his mortal life and his eternal reward down a dark road, he burns the letter and says, "I'll go to hell."
This is the moment that turns the book from a fun adventure to great literature. Huck was willing to sacrifice it all and he stuck to his guns from then until the end of the book.
Look through your favorite stories and ask yourself what the heroes of that book gave up. What makes it meaningful to you? If the sacrifice wasn't made, would that story still mean so much to you? These questions may deepen your appreciation for those tales.
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