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BluezArt
Nov '17

hoooly moly it's been a while ;;;
i'm not sure how to word this but i'm working on my next story and i'm still in the early bits of it all but i'm wondering if there's anyone willing to give some feedback? like, in my story i'm wanting readers to get attached to the 2 main characters but i'm also wanting them both to old-ish characters, cuz i don't usually see an adventure/fantasy setting with an old female lead.
I want the main story to take place when they're older but i'm not sure on whether to have it divided up into 2 parts, where we see the 2 grow up and explore so we can get attached to them and then have a time skip many years later to where stuff finally goes down in "book 2" OR go ahead and drop the reader in there and have flashbacks dotted throughout

thoughts?

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    Nov '17

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    Dec '17
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Kyazi
Nov '17

Ill chat with you if you want to just PM me and i can give you my discord link if you have one if note PMs are find too

ghostly
Nov '17

I think you should just go ahead and start when they are older ! The character being older won't stop us from being attached to them. :slight_smile:

Kyazi
Nov '17

I agree with above post older first and because they are older nostalgia will be high and remembering old memories would fit in. Esp if you run into old friends or people you knew from "younger years"

punkarsenic
Nov '17

awesome!! if youre worried abt your audience not attaching to the characters because of their age, really dont. for many reasons, 1: people can find themselves attached to characters of any age; teenagers consume media about adults, and adults about teenagers, all the time 2: there are more older people on this site than you think, and 3: i think theres a lot of women on this site of any age that would see an older female lead, and think 'awesome!!'

personally, id go for dotting flashbacks around the place, unless you could make the pre-story part (where theyre younger) a chapter or two long at most. you wanna be able to throw the reader right into the thick of it, and if theres some event that happens between these two in their youth that you havent already laid out, it lets you build intrigue that keeps people reading.

ReroOnyx
Nov '17

I believe that, whether your characters are young or old, you'll need to have them written throughout. Meaning that if I want to get connected to these characters, I need to see their positives as well as negatives and a build up a relationship as a reader to your characters.

Personally, here's what I'd probably do. Your older characters are probably the ones who have gone through development and become the characters they are. There's not much to do there unless you want to add more. Your younger versions however are fresh and ripe and ready for the picking. How did those characters become what they will be in the future?

I'd probably say go with flashbacks too. Your main story can be expressed in the adventure your older MC's are going through and as they do so, we'll slowly but surely learn more about them. Maybe certain events of the "Main Adventure" will give to flashbacks of what happened in the past.

It would also allow you to give development to your characters via "Flashbacks" and allow for a build up of characterizations to be used for your characters in the present.

BluezArt
Nov '17

hhmmm i'll have to think about it though i do like the first 2 ch and then transitioning to the later years

at first i was thinking about writing a legend for the prologue, to set the overall world and story (with some foreshadow for the 2nd main character) and then begin the 1st ch with the young MC having to live with this legend before meeting the 2nd MC. and then later on, whether during the first or 2nd parts, they both finally start learning/ getting the full story on the legend.
if ya'll don't mind spoilers i can post bits of it? to give more of an idea on what i'm going for

ReroOnyx
Nov '17

I'd personally post it on the site, give a link here and I'll happily start reading it. You might as well get started to be honest and frankly, you're not going to be able to get through a lot of development with the first few pages. As a suggestion focus on giving your characters "characterization" AKA, what are their personalities and don't feel threatened to make them flawed either.

As you continue to write, you'll ultimately build up on the character development.

shazzbaa
Nov '17

I think the question of "should I start when they're younger, and then time skip, or should I start when they're older, and then have flashbacks or references to what happened before" -- that's the same question you ask for any character: should we know their backstory now, or should it come up later?

The best way to answer that question is to look at how the backstory changes the story, and the audience's impression of the characters. Here's some examples of when to start with backstory and when to save it, and why!

Be super careful about prologues!! Starting out with a "HERE'S THE WORLD THAT THE CHARACTERS LIVE IN" is very tough to pull off well -- it can be done, but a lot of times it's easier for readers to understand/get invested the world and the setting by watching the characters interact in it. A lot of creators feel an impulse to start out by explaining their world, but I think that sometimes it's not actually information that we need to know right off the bat, and sometimes it's better to see the characters in the world first, instead!
I can't say for sure if that's true for your story or not, but it's something to think about when you're planning -- how much of this information is information we NEED to know from the beginning?

But yeah, essentially I feel like, working with an older character isn't going to be necessarily any different from working with a younger character, in terms of how it's best to set up the story. It's the same question as if you had a highschool character and asked, "I have a character who's a senior in highschool.... should I show his freshman year first, or should we flashback to his freshman year later?" It depends entirely on what you want to show from his freshman year and how that information would impact your story! Same goes for an older character.

DiegoPalacios
Nov '17

The cool thing about older characters is that they have a lot of backstory to explore.Also makes it easier to justify their skills because they have more experience. It doesn`t matter the age of the characters, as long as they are well written. Personally i like the idea.

BluezArt
Nov '17

i was thinking about making the prologue just a short snippet of a legend from the MC's village history and foreshadows the intro to MC 2, and then going into chapter one we're shown MC 1 actively going against the rules of the village that were put in place in order to prevent the legend from coming true, due to feeling smothered by them; this lands her into trouble but ultimately leads her to MC 2.
But i'm thinking that maybe later on in the story/when they're both older she's forced to read more into the legend when things start to fall apart to maybe start taking the legend a little more seriously or maybe leads her to find more to the legend that was picked apart over the years

9 days later
BluezArt
Dec '17

ok i've been thinking about what you guys sent in and it's really helped out so i think i've figured out what i want to do
thank you guys for your help!