TONY SHILLITOE: WRITER
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We need to talk about magic and dragons...

29/5/2023

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May 29, 2023

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One current project is drawing me back through the past projects in developing dragon history across my world and fantasy series and it’s fun looking at how the concepts have developed. There are plenty of optional dragon histories I could draw upon, some seen as lore by advocates of history or writers or games. I’ve chosen to create my own and this blog is really to show an aspect of the thinking involved behind what is now five fantasy series (17 novels).
 
At the centre of my fantasy works is a magical substance the characters refer to as amber because of its colour. It’s not amber as we traditionally know it, but a highly energised crystal structure capable of transferring thought into energy, matter and action. It’s the ‘wild magic’ of my writing and it originates from extraordinary meteorites that crashed into the planet at the time the Elvenaar were dominant.
 
The Elvenaar discovered one meteorite which became known as the Genesis Stone – gecyndboc stan – because it was the source of powerful Elvenaar magic. Over time, the Elvenaar, among many activities, used the amber to morph small lizards into magical flying pets they called the Alfyn – meredragons. The Alfyn surprised the Elvenaar in that the transformation also gave the little creatures high intelligence and empathy and made them amenable companions. In return, the Elvenaar made the Alfyn the protectors of the Genesis Stone.
 
The Elvenaar then experimented on giant forest lizards until they developed protodragons. Over more time and mutations that involved implanting shards of the amber in the protodragons, the Elvenaar created the first flying, fire-breathing dragons and used them in their wars with humans – Eyano – who were growing in number and aggressively encroaching on Elvenaar land, although it was disease, not war, that eventually led to the demise of the Elvenaar populations. The dying Elvenaar Lorekeepers entrusted the ongoing protection of the Genesis Stone to the Alfyn.
 
As a final and desperate response to the human expansion, five Elvenaar brothers embedded amber shards in themselves to become the Dragonlords – dracabrego – and they used the magic and the brutally powerful dragons to dominate their domains, until humans also learned about the Genesis Stone amber and forged fragments of it into magical weapons that they used against the Dragonlords and their dragons. The death of the final Dragonlord led to the release of the dragons into the wild.
 
No longer controlled by the Elvenaar, the dragons survived by a combination of their wits and terror, hunting and killing animals and humans, making them dangerous to humans for a long period of history. At the same time, the dragons grew in intelligence and understanding as they bred and proliferated, and, with self-actuation, they learned their history and recognised why the Genesis Stone was central to their existence, and why they needed it to expand their population and ensure their descendants were as magically powerful.
Charged with protecting the Genesis Stone, the Alfyn prevented dragon efforts to locate it. One dragon clan eventually entered a pact with humans in order to find the Stone because humans were seeking it as well, and came close to finding the Stone, but the Alfyn collaborated with a human who generated a one-way portal trap through which the dragons were lured, believing they were teleporting to the Stone’s location.
 
The Lore back story makes it clear that more than one Genesis Stone fell in ancient times, but the dragons, Alfyn and humans have yet to locate them all. Readers of the earlier series will discern that one stone lies somewhere in the heart of Andrakian forests, and another was located in the Shess forests.
 
That is a summary of the thinking and planning behind the fantasy stories and one of the unifying world factors that keeps my writing focused. Did I think of the Genesis Stone/amber concept when I first started writing? No. It grew across several novels as I came to understand it. Magic is fantasy and in itself is not true, but I, like many fantasy writers, do apply a form of logic to the source of magic to give it potential substance. Why are amber shards from the Genesis Stone able to foster wild magic? Yeah, I don’t know…it’s magic.
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Stereotypically...

22/5/2023

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May 22, 2023

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Creating characters is always a fun activity, but it’s fraught with critical attention and some of that criticism is ironically annoying when it is used to disparage the work. For example, I’ve read and heard so many criticisms of authors’ works based on their characters being stereotypes. By definition, a stereotype is “a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing” (various dictionary sources, 2023). You can think of plenty of examples, some of them sexist, racist, bigoted, ignorant, ageist and on and on: the character of a particular gender who falls in love too easily, the driver of a specific age, gender and origin country, the individuals whose skin hue and language identifies them as potential housebreakers, a specific gender that is prone to violence – all fall into the character stereotype list.
 
I do want to deconstruct stereotype versus flat characters first. While, by definition, stereotypes can produce an oversimplified character I position that aspect of the definition as being the basis for defining a flat character, not a stereotype. A flat character has no depth, no complexity. Flat characters exist to contextualise a story, but seldom exist to engage readers. At best, they are unfinished or simple sketches. By contrast, I believe a stereotypical character can have significant complexity, even insofar as that complexity still being an example of prejudice or profiling.
So, here’s the thing. I bet you and I can ‘people watch’ on the street and we would identify a host of stereotypes in everyday life, based on common fashion choices, hairstyles, movement and poise, interactions with others, family origins, gender. When we sit with family and friends and chat, more stereotypes emerge: common topics of interest, points of view, reactions to other people, voice tone and accent, gestures and so on. At work, we witness colleagues’ shared attitudes to the workplace and people, actions and reactions under pressure, drudgery and creativity, planning and chaos, success and failure. In all of the above people watching, we see common traits, shared personalities, physical similarities, and these shape stereotypes in our world views. And this is before we enter the less pleasant environments of gossip and media and prejudices where the stereotypes become vilifications.
 
Stereotypes have been aligned with profiling (consider the definitions) and negative connotations attached to the term. The accusations ‘He looks like that so he must act like this’, ‘She dresses like that so she must be this kind of personality’, ‘They come from there so they will believe these things’ are examples of stereotyping as profiling. At the heart of this conversation, then, is the politicisation of stereotyping. Where vilification and profiling are evident, stereotyping characters should be questioned, examined and determined as acceptable or not acceptable. Not only should the writer’s work be examined but also the motivation behind the critic’s criticism. Politicisation is a two-(or more)-sided action where all parties’ views need to be examined.
 
There are now more than eight billion humans on the planet, so it’s possible that you share similar physical appearance with quite a lot of other people. Note, though, the emphasis is on similarity, not exact duplication. There are so many people on this planet that you do have a small but possible chance of meeting your exact doppleganger, something like a one in one-hundred-and-thirty-five chance, but that’s like the conundrum of anticipating a monkey could write Shakespeare’s plays if left in front of a keyboard long enough. Basically, it has a probability, but it’s so huge it’s likely to never actually happen.
 
For every group of ten thousand people, there’s a chance eleven of them will share similar facial features with people in that group. The chance that you will meet someone with very similar facial features is apparently more like .0011%. A very tiny number? Absolutely. But distil that across eight billion humans and there could be as many as eighty to ninety thousand people who have similar looks to you.
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​https://petapixel.com/2022/09/01/doppelgangers-dont-just-look-alike-they-act-alike-and-share-dna/ 
For writers, one of many holy grails is to be able to create fresh and interesting characters that engage readers. Some critics expect, and I will say wrongly, the characters to always be unique for the work to be truly good, when, in fact, we, as readers, often engage with characters with whom we feel an affinity – someone who could be us. We also make associations with other characters and have expectations of those characters because they are, basically, stereotypes: the quiet hero, the overt hero, the nasty corporate or scifi/fantasy or murder mystery villain, the grey character whose motives seem caught between doing good and being selfish, the ideal and the flawed lovers, the milk delivery person, the shy introvert.

Writers do give us fresh views of characters by ironically creating what looks like a stereotyped character (and playing into our expectations and even prejudices) but surprising us by having the character not act according to stereotyped expectations: the soft-hearted gang leader, the blond fashion-conscious corporate lawyer, the geek athlete, the trans assassin, the highly inventive factory worker – oh. Wait. Maybe these are yet other forms of stereotype.
 
My point? Writers cannot escape using stereotypes because the world is full of stereotypes. In our own unique ways, we are stereotypes because we all share biological, psychological and experiential features. We are far more alike than different. The cult of unique individuals that seems to be permeating our culture is misguided, not because it argues we are uniquely different but because it denies that we are uniquely similar. We are shaped by our culture, our families and friends, our experiences, and those factors influence how we dress, how we speak, what we think, how we choose to feel, even what we choose to experience and observe. We become alike. We become stereotypical. And writers, as observers and recorders of humanity, reveal our stereotypical selves in ways that we sometimes applaud and appreciate and sometimes in ways we want to deny. Before you dismiss a writer’s work because someone has said the characters are apparently stereotypes, examine why the writer presents the stereotypes.
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Reading, writing and originality...

15/5/2023

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May 15, 2023

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This one will be a ramble of thought… 

Writing demands reading and oddly one of the limitations I used to have as an English teacher was finding time to read after all the preparation, delivery, marking etc. That’s not a teacher whinge – simply a fact that I struggled to want to read after spending so much time ‘reading’ the same texts over and over for teaching ideas and personal knowledge, and ‘drafting and assessing’ hundreds of student responses.  

​I remember a colleague’s comment at a SSABSA assessment session using an exemplar student paper reviewing Courtney’s The Power of One to determine our marking standards. ‘(Expletive deleted), I am sick of kids using this text and not finding something fresh to use. How many times do we have to read this one?’ Someone reminded the colleague that it might be her thousandth time marking student papers using The Power of One, but it was almost certainly the student’s first time engaging with it, and so for the student it was extremely fresh. For us, it was droll, but for the student it was eye-opening. The same is true with so many ‘repeatedly popular’ pieces of literature used in classrooms. 

Another fascinating moment was at a conference several years ago, when a university student remarked to me that he loved the Paolini dragon novels and had just discovered another writer named Feist. He was enjoying Feist’s writing but felt it was not fresh because Paolini and others had written similar work. What the student failed to realise that Raymond Feist was the original (in this case), not his preferred writers. Context and experience when reading is extremely important. 
 
Last year I re-read a book that had a huge impact on me at 13: Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. It was a hard slog and, frankly, I have no idea how I read that book back then – the language and style is so foreign, because of time and context. And yet that book and memory dictated – still influences – my story and character construction, so 13-year-old me had an experience 67-year-old me didn’t have. 
 
My current fantasy project will be the fifth fantasy series I’ve written, representing 17 novels in the genre. Tackling the project is challenging in a very different way than earlier projects because the person and writer now has experiences and perspective that are significantly different to those of the person who started writing Guardians way back in 1988. The challenges now are to bring freshness to a familiar genre much like I had to create freshness to specific English lessons that I had taught twenty of thirty times before.  
 
While the frequent stereotypical fantasy overview remains the struggle of good to overcome evil against seemingly impossible odds, the freshness can come from the characters and their idiosyncrasies, the parameters of their ‘world’, and greyness around what constitutes good and what is perceived as evil. Andra in the Andrakis series is fundamentally a clearly a good character, and Mareg the dragonlord clearly not nice, but A Ahmud Ki set the tone for blurring good and evil – sure, he pursued self-power to become what Mareg was, but he had a degree of ‘humanity’ that could have redeemed him, much like Shakespeare’s Macbeth on whom A Ahmud Ki was partly modelled.  
 
And so it will be with several characters in the current project – flawed individuals with the capacity to be good or not so good, according to circumstance and need. Food for thought...
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We love our readers...

1/5/2023

1 Comment

 

May 1, 2023

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This morning I received an email from a reader who enjoyed the Andrakis series way back when. In his words, “A Ahmud Ki…I remember… as the most fascinatingly complex character of any story I read in my childhood,” followed by his satisfaction that he can source the books online for his children. You can imagine that an email like that has made my day.
Over the thirty years, so far, of writing, I’ve been privileged to receive occasional letters and emails from readers providing feedback on my work. Writing is, for very minor writers like myself, a solitary passion, and positive emails and comments affirm we are making human connections through our stories. At least, that is why I write – to connect, to spark imagination, ideas, conversations. It’s not so much that I write FOR, or ABOUT, but TO other people. I write in the hope that readers engage with my characters and their hopes and struggles in personal and ‘bigger picture’ matters, and perhaps reflect on their own hopes and struggles in those moments.
 
The email also affirmed why, no matter how minor one’s works might be, it’s important to keep the works alive. For years, I had to reply to readers with the phrase, ‘I’m really sorry, but the books are out of print,’ until the online self-publishing world came into being. My first clumsy attempts to revive novels from the 1990s were frankly embarrassing, but I am getting better at formatting digital text and designing covers, and I can now add self-publishing to my armoury of writing skills – although marketing and distribution remain challenges for this year.
 
The self-publishing revolution in this century is a form of democratic socialist freedom in that it brings a host of positives to anyone who genuinely wants to be a writer but can’t break into the big publishing houses (or smaller ones for that matter). While voices bemoan the ability of hacks creating and publishing books that are terrible, the reality is that so many more amazing stories have found light that would have been denied them in the ‘old world’ publisher-owned market of the C20th. And for the very lucky few, self-publishing is an avenue to the bigger publishing houses if their works prove popular. They ‘get seen’ and acquired.
 
Anyway, if you read a book and it really does resonate with you, please consider dropping an email to the writer, or leaving a comment on the writer’s web site. While the ‘big’ writers are often inundated with fan mail, lesser-known writers really do appreciate being affirmed in what they create. For many of us, it’s the only human communication we have with the people to whom we write.
 
Finally, I’ve found my focus project-wise. I’ll make comments on that project next blog.
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    Writing is my passion. Ideas, opinions, beliefs, experiences expressed through language - through words and images - pervade and create my life. Writing is my voice, my soul, my self. My dream is one day writing will sustain my life...

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  • Home
  • Writer's Journey: A Blog
  • Writing
    • Fantasy Fiction >
      • Andrakis Trilogy
      • The Ashuak Chronicles
      • Dreaming in Amber Quartet
    • Teen Fiction >
      • Joy Ride
      • Caught in the Headlights
      • In My Father's Shadow
      • The Need
    • Historical Fiction >
      • Girlie
    • Anthologies and Magazines >
      • The Red Heart
    • Poetry
    • Other Works
    • Writer FAQs
  • Who Am I?
    • Writer
  • Contact