To be honest, I have no idea how to write dialogue for some heroes. See Armadon, Pebbles, Legionnaire…etc.
A lot of their speech is characterized by accent or tones. It’s not only difficult, but very unlikely that I can have the same effect with text compared to actually hearing it. Am I supposed to add “uhh…yup!” to the end of every sentence Armadon says? What about Pebbles’ not-so-broken English?
This contributes to about 30 – 90 minutes of frustrated hair jerking when writing scenes that involve them communicating with other members of the team. Readers might notice that I avoid having these heroes speak at all, if possible.
However, this makes a very difficult thing when presenting the story as a whole. Heroes that do not get screen time are easily forgotten; probably all of you remember the most: Swiftblade, Gladiator, Hellbringer, Maliken, and Jereziah. Scout/Blacksmith/Pyromancer probably a very good second bet, since they’re hilarious. Keeper of the Forest, Nymphora, Armadon, Legionnaire, and Pebbles have very little screen time considering they are with the party the whole time. This probably contributes to a lot of you being like “oh yea, this guy’s with them too!” An incredible amount of my time is devoted to figuring out how to give them screen time while avoiding dialogue if I can help it.
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I first projected Forests of Caldavar to end around 100 chapters. Upon further drawing out the plot (I have an entire binder plotting stuff out), and then deleting unnecessary scenes, it’s going to be shortened to about 60 chapters. A lot of things I wanted to explore/expand upon (Scout’s storyline, the Ancients, Hellbringer/Blacksmith/Swiftblade, Vindicator storyline) would either work better in the other maps or do not fit well in Forest of Caldavar. The ultimate goal driving the plot is the urgency to destroy the Shrine before the Hellbourne manage to enforce it; dragging out the plot too much with added side stories would only distract the reader from the importance of the true goal.
Sometimes I think it would be a lot easier to fill the HoNWiki with information except there are 2 problems: a large percent of the things I know can’t be publicized, and the story isn’t official yet, haha.
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It’s been brought up that the daemons are “evil”.
From a very shallow standpoint, yes. However, you can’t know for sure if the guy trying to kill you is a madman until you’ve both calmed down and spoken. I’ve avoided writing from the Hellbourne characters’ viewpoints for quite a while, as I finalized what was happening behind the scenes and their motives. Readers would do well to pay close attention to what is going on in the future as I write from the Hellbourne point of view.
On the side, I am also exploring the themes of “True Justice” and “What is truly Right and Wrong?” Just a pet project; it won’t cut heavily into the actual storyline but I hope to get readers thinking.
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