51: The Wounded
3/20/2013
Well, I think I finally figured out how to set the scene with Badru. This is the second scene of Chapter Seven: The Wounded. I knew more or less what I wanted to do with her, but I had a miserable time the last two days trying to figure out how to get her and Diallo together in a way that satisfies the needs of the chapter’s story and placing them in a location I haven’t used before and was at least a little interesting. I don’t want all my Ephrathah scenes to be: hut, hub, walkway, fire circle, river, Overlook Hill – the same locations over and over become boring. Like a prison. So, I want the village to be more intricate than that. It’s good that locations are revisited so the reader gets a sense of familiarity and continuity, but not so much that it gets dull.
I think I’ll put Badru under a bridge spanning the creek skirting Overlook Hill. I want her to be hiding from the storm and lightning, but I also need her to be out of the village proper. Diallo must go to the Dula river. So, wherever the hiding spot was, it had to be on the way there. Then I had to invent a reason why Diallo is hiding, too, and decided that he is avoiding his well-meaning friends who are looking for him. This also provides the reason why Diallo sticks around a minute while Badru talks to him. He’s waiting for his friends to go away.
The underside of a bridge isn’t terribly exotic or exciting, but at least it’s somewhere we haven’t been already. It’s got curtains of moss hanging from it, the creek is flooding a bit due to the rains, tree roots – or such things – will be weaving around in interesting shapes. Badru will be sheltered there with a little fire going when Diallo and Tuk enter. They’ll be able to hear Diallo’s friends talk as they cross the bridge above them.
Anyway, it took me two days to come up with that. A lot of pacing and a long walk this morning for two hours in the pouring rain that finally resulted in an idea I can use.
In the end it’s all supposed to feel organic, where all the elements work together in such a way that it feels like it couldn’t have happened any other way. It seems like anybody could have written that because it’s all so simple and fits in with what must happen next. Well, maybe after it’s written it feels that way, but it sure as hell doesn’t when you have nothing and you’re staring at a bank page. Knowing conceptually what you want and trying to figure out how to make it work are two totally different things.
I don’t mind this sort of creative work; it’s a fun challenge.
One thing though, on the level of plotting, is the bad guy. I don’t have one. This is something that has concerned me since the beginning, four years ago. Originally it was intentional. I didn’t want a villain. I didn’t conceive this as commercial fiction where every protagonist needs an antagonist. They say the hero is only as great as his adversary, that he needs the bad guy to work against and use to define himself. Well, life doesn’t work that way, so why should fiction? The bad guy in my life is, more times than not, an abstract idea. Obstacles are not always people. Sometimes shit just happens and a hero is one who rises to the challenge and deals with it.
Siona is the closest thing to an antagonist in human form for Diallo-Mogai. At least so far. Eventually The Others from beyond the Gol-Gasha Mountains that invade and destroy the Batu way of life will be the bad guys. But that is a tribal adversary spanning the last three books, which only actually appear in the third book. Not ideal adversaries if they’re intended to drive the plot like Sauron or Darth Vader.
If there is an actual adversary, in the traditional plotting sense, it’s Diallo-Mogai’s Hira. The ultimate adversary we all carry within us. So far in the story I’ve written, the Hira is mostly just the embodiment of fear, but it will eventually develop into much more than that. It is the Jungian shadow of all the things we reject and suppress coming back to bite us in the ass. It’s probably too esoteric for an adversary in typical commercial fiction, but… This is the story I’m writing.
I’ve been aware of the absence of a Darth Vader since the beginning of this project, and though just about every book I’ve read on how to write fiction stresses the importance of a powerful bad guy, I’m not gonna do it. At least, not in a traditional simplistic fashion. I got the Hira, The Others, people like Siona whose agenda is at odds with my main characters, the environment and wildlife that is hostile and threatening, and the tribe and its culture that are at times problematic. In other words, life itself is the adversary. That should be good enough.
Present-Day Reflection
7/15/2026
At the point of writing that entry, 16 years ago, I was still writing really long chapters, where what I was calling scenes within a chapter have now been reworked to be chapters in and of themselves. So, what I was calling Chapter Seven of the first book back then, is now midway through the second book – Part Two: The Wounded. I was also plotting then for sixteen books in the series (four volumes containing four books each, whereas today I’m plotting for only four books.
This sort of extreme structural inconsistency gets confusing, particularly when I’m creating entire sections – hundreds of pages – and inserting them into much older narratives. This nonlinear production timeline and its nebulous structure can be difficult to track at times even for myself, let alone for those who weren’t there.
As for the content of this entry, I remember very well how good it felt to write that “scene” with Badru and Diallo under the bridge. One of them struggling to deal with the storms of life, the other with an actual storm. Badru chapters are always fun for me to reread and are possibly my favorites to write throughout the entire series. Even though they often require the most thought in how I approach them.
The problem of not having a traditional adversary is an issue I don’t really dwell on anymore. In fact, it’s gotten impossible for me to view Siona as a bad guy at all. Indeed, as I’ve gotten to know her better, I now see her as being one of the most sympathetic characters in the series. It will probably take a while for first time readers to reach this conclusion, but I provide ample windows into her point of view by the end of Wings of Providence to convey what I’m referring to.
The same goes for Diallo’s father, Mosai. Everyone who might be viewed as an obstacle or catalyst for Diallo’s angst has their own sympathetic point of view. Nobody is a bad guy, they’re just wounded.
