Exercise 6: Write a First Person plural narrative of an event from the POV of a very close-knit couple, or group (I'm adding that last part). Do not use the first person pronoun "I" at all.
Stipulations:
The personal pronoun "I" is not allowed at all, not even twice. It should be impossible to distinguish who is telling the story. Again, I am left to assume that I can use the pronoun "me" or "my." I will try not to do so, but it is left in the air. Supposed to be 600 words.
Hmmm, I've been doing a lot of monster hunter stuff as well as stuff about the undead. I think I'll do something else maybe. I had an idea about an elf creature that could talk to the dead (non-Trithofar), and I'm wondering if this would be a good chance to resurrect that idea (pun sort of intended), but then again I am tired of the undead stuff.
Perhaps this would be a good opportunity to flesh out some ideas I've had about elves. As Will has pointed out to me a number of times: "Why do things have to be balanced in a fantasy world?" Yet, I don't want one race to completely and utterly dominate the others, AND I don't want to get stuck in the trope of every race having a slave thing. For instance, Kunjels have the gremlins, Kinto-shah actually have slaves, and Elves potentially have Elflings. This makes a sort of one trick pony thing appear in my work that I don't like. And yet, I wonder if there must be always a group of people designated the slaves of another. Perhaps this is an undeniable theme of life: that human beings will always, for lack of a more precise term, 'enslave' something to work for them. Could we survive in this world without, say dogs. Would we have come as far in our world if we had not domesticated and trained horses? Must there always be a thinking class and a working class? After all, even the enlightened British Empire had such a divergence among people. The servants or the lower classes were subservient by social decree to the nobility or the bourgeois. Don't know.
What this has to do with Trithofar is the notion of the Elflings, where Elfling children are born as sort of a psychic part of their parents. They are VERY closely connected to the person with whom they are bonded, like pets more than people. They are smaller, but very strong, and again the Kunjels have gremlins that do about the same sorts of things, but are much dumber. The difference of course is that unlike gremlins, the elflings can be engendered, so that they can become full-grown elves. However, if not engendered, they die.
The difficulty with writing this kind of thing is that I've lost a child, and I know how horrible a thing that is. The elves are going to have to have a certain degree of intense callousness about their children to allow them to just die when the time comes. But then again, the parents do not always raise their own young, and instead give them up to the Orderesses and Sortresses to determine their fate.
Anyway, thinking about this makes me want to rethink the story of Raliiren, a character we played when I role-played with my friends. I think I will write about him here and now, because this will not be a story of the undead, but a story about something a bit more happy.
__________________________________________________
We are in the big room again, the room of toys we call it. We all enjoy this room, though mother seems to tire of it quickly. We are allowed to disperse. In fact, mother signals for us to go away from her and to play, and while we like to play, we are not often far from mother. Mother stands and talks open-mouthed for a while with another non-mother. Her words are like the river gurgling among the rocks, or like the sounds birds make. We are signaled not to pay attention to what she says just then, and we don't. Instead, the urge to play rises inside of us.
We meet with others like ourselves. We tussle and jump about. One of us is chased into the limbs of a handmade tree, and we run about through all manner of fun things as though we were running on the roads. A few of us are sitting down and examining some of the toys. Most of us who have just arrived are not interested in the tree toy.
We go over and look at my favorite toys, the ones that make noise. Sometimes we sit with mother and make noises together and she smiles so long as we make the noises she likes to hear. She rewards us with sweetness and pleasant feelings and we try even harder to make those noises she wants. She tells us this is music, these noises we are making, and she lets us play with certain specific toys. Sometimes she works with one or two of us together, and other times she works with all of us together, and she tells us we must only make good music, and not bad music. She sends signals to us about what that means, good music, and other times, she scents for us to pay very close attention to what she does with her fingers. We watch intently, and all the rest of the world leaves us, and her fingers jump along strings. We are reminded of spiders building their webs, and we are reminded of other non-mothers who weave things, weave clothes to wear, and we are reminded of the sounds of birds and the sounds of rivers in rocks, and she scents to us reminders of the winds through the tree tops, and all sorts of sounds that we like to hear. The smells of pay attention surround us, and she tells us that music is sounds people wish to hear.
We are now playing with some of the musical toys. Another non-mother is watching us, scenting at us to be careful with these things, but we already know to be careful. A sibling is near and is playing with a thing called a drum, while another is toying with a stringed lute, like mother plays for us and lets us play, too. Just now in my hands is a harp. We are not playing what we normally play, but it is well. The non-mother is playing something like a lute, and scenting to pay attention. The non-mother's scents are not as strong as mother's, but we heed them. The non-mother plays, and asks us to join, but she scents that we are not to imitate, but to do something different. We are to add, to support, to join. We try to make right noises. We try to play as instructed, but it is difficult. Many times, the non-mother flashes anger in his middle eyes or a corrective scent is spread among us, a scent that we are supposed to change, to shift, a smell that shows which of us is wrong. The eyes are more for direct instruction, while the smell is to reach us all, to tell us to pay attention to what each other is doing and to adjust ourselves. The non-mother does not have to speak. He catches our attention, each in turn, and tells us each what to change with his eyes and his bearing, how to adjust through merely a twitch of himself. It is as though he were playing through our hands, as though he were playing our instruments all at once. With guilt we all think he is better at guiding us than is mother, and we strive to pay closer attention to him.
In time, mother retrieves us. She rewards us with very pleasant following smells and flashes of beauty from her eyes. We are hers again, and we are taken to a new place. She separates us away from one another, and now we, two of us, are facing each other with swords in hands. These are not real swords, but toy ones, like we are used to playing with, but something is different. We are made to feel different than usual. Now, we feel nervous, hostile. We face each other, one of my siblings and me, and we are made to feel angry. We are made to feel very angry, not just angry, but angry with each other. All at once, we hate each other. We must kill each other. We have swords in our hands and now we are enemies.
We fight. We have neither of us ever actually fought with another before. It is a terrible thing to fight. We are filled with hatred and anger and it makes us hurt inside. Like pain, but not like pain. It fills us. It makes us both feel we will not be well again until we have tasted the other's blood, until we have made each other hurt worse than we do. We hit each other with the stick-swords, and we both hurt, and yet we both try to hurt more. We notice our wounds, but we fight on. We will kill. We will kill. We will kill.
And then it is over, and soothing smells are among us and stopping us from fighting. We are calm again. The voices of the non-mothers watching over us are calming and stop us from fighting. We are letting go of each other. We are giving our swords back to the non-mother who guided us. We are looking at each other's bodies and seeing blood and bruises and now we are helping each other to put on bandages on each other. We are touching each other's bodies and noting the pain when we touch each other's wounds. The other sibling is hurt more. The other sibling has more wounds.
The non-mother, who has blue hair and bright blue eyes is pleased with us. He says that we show promise, and he thinks we should train more with swords. We will.
We are brought back to mother. She calls to us, and we listen and we go back to her. We gather around her, and she remarks at our wounds.
"It is merely training," my sibling pronounces, good with words. We are both the best at words among the siblings of mother. Mother has said so. We are the best with words, and we are the best with fighting, she has said, and we are very good with making music. We learn very fast. She promises that we will grow.
______________________________________________
Hmmm, I liked this exercise. It seems that I like the challenge of not using "I" so much. It makes me have to bend my words around and makes me have to think more cleverly. I will attempt, in future, to use that pronoun less in my writing, as often as possible. Obviously, here, it has not yet been put into motion, but hopefully, in time, the word can be eliminated from my style in such a way to make me a better writer. (See, I did it there, and it already makes me sound more sophisticated).
As for the Elfling thing...Well, it is difficult to say just how this might affect a growing being to be so carefully and exclusively guided by someone. Elves would not have what human beings would know as a normal childhood, but perhaps that is good. Definitely, to make this not something awful, elves would have to live a bit longer than other races. No, I"m not talking about forever, but a bit longer than humans. Otherwise, their infancy would take up a greater time of their life.
Then again, they are not stupid, nor completely without the ability to work, just not independent.
An unbonded elfling would have a VERY difficult time, though. They would merely do whatever it was they would do naturally. I am still debating just how helpless an unbonded elfling would be, or how helpless they become when they lose sight and smell of their mother figure. Perhaps they become rather disruly and even dangerous, rather like unguided teenagers of our own world. However, I am thinking that as the elfling grows more and more, and is allowed to grow more and more, they develop a certain degree of personality. Whereas, while they are very young and vulnerable, they are almost ENTIRELY controlled by the mother/father that is put over them. An older one starts to see a new independence and a bit of difficulty to control. Hmmm.
It is okay to have strange things. I am wondering if I should differentiate males and female elves even further. I have debated for a long time whether or not to give elves wings. When I have elves appear in a published thing, then there will be some canon.
I know that elflings among the T'wii are different. The elflings are part animals, having been semi-engendered by eating animal meat. When they are finally completed, they will keep a certain look to them like the animal that they were given to eat. This animal feature continues to guide their thinking and their nature even in adult hood. Anyway, it is a puzzle to me.
Would love to see or read commentary on what people think.
J. Gullage
No comments:
Post a Comment