Tuesday, January 02, 2007

More of Less, First Post on a Hopefully Better New Year

As some of you already familiar - and probably had bored with it, i had a dream of writing a book, and since my favourite books were belong to a fantasy-genre, i plan to write one along that theme. A genre that usually revolves around a tale of good and evil,an evil that long dormant and wait for a time to be risen and once again put the world into his shadows. This evil usually doesn'thave a physical form manifestation such as the great evil (which i forgot his name) from the Fionavar Tapestry series, Melkor from the Silmarillion during the great war of jewels, Morgoth, Melkor's sergeant in the Lord of the Rings series, Ba'alzamon from the Wheel of Time series, or Voldermort on the early editions of Harry Potter series. This genre also observes the use of magic, an army with gleaming steel armors, swords, and bows, and exotic creatures, more prominently the likes of immortal and beautiful human-like creatures, Elf or the lizard like, fire breathing, flying serpent creature, Dragons. Well, you got my point, a fantasy genre was easily identified.

Thus, for years already i had this theme buried inside my mind, developing it consciously, albeit without any physical evidence that such thing has ever happened. Here's the short brief of what i had in mind. I've always hated weakling hero characters such as Frodo Baggins or Harry Potter. And so, what i had in mind was the sort of characters that were similar to those deployed by the George RR Martin in his Song of Ice and Fire series, whose neither good nor bad, but simply played to their instincts and dreams and achieving it with ways they considered to be the right ones. In short, human characters that's more human. The evil entities were ones that i had deliberately took from the Demonology's 108 names of evil. I, myself, had adopted the name Vassago as one of my nickname over the internet. You could easily do more thorough research on these 108 names which included Baal, Diablo, and so forth at Wikipedia.

The real problem came when i started to write about it. I've tried to write it in Indonesian at first, but when i proof-read it, i was so dismayed by the quality of it. Take this for an instance, in a scene i had imagined, there was this High Priestess who look to the East from the height of her ivory tower to had a glimpse of a bleak and dready future as the 108 devils began to rise. Whe ni heard the word High Priestress, my mind was quickly jumped to the Galadriel as portrayed by Cate Blanchett, majestic, beautiful, seems taller than she supposed to be, with eyes so deep with knowledge that belies her true age, and all those nifty tid-bits that often described Queens of old-age. When i had tried to write it in Bahasa, i had an immediate trouble in converting the word 'High Priestess'. The closest word in meaning that i had able to come up with was 'Pendeta Agung'. But of course, if you heard the word 'Pendeta Agung', most likely, instead of Galadriel-like picture that would sprang into your mind, it would be the image of Pope, old man and uninteresting.

Then of course, i tried to keep writing it in English, also to my dismay, that i found myself often fell into a writer's block when i had tried to describe something with words that had more quality than those you used on daily conversation only to find that th edescription was tediously boring. Well, i guess, that's why not everybody could become a writer. There's this little thing called talent that plays into the game, and i had to admit, i had none.

The dream still alive of course, who knows, maybe someday you see my name on the cover of one of those books on the shelf, but i'm not quite seeing it happened in a near-future. Gotta do more readings.

Digg this

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ah. I also have a dream to write a book. Not about fantasy, but more about life. I love to write about conflict in someones's life (and not lovie thingie conflict. I just..can't :3). Too bad, until now, I (also) haven't started to write down again the idea that I have :P

Eh, wanna read your writing once! :D