Ranger of the North wrote:Hey, sure!
Okay, bear with me as I'm lousy at naming characters/places so I usually just use placeholder names while writing so I can procrastinate naming things.
Also, the beginning of the story is rather dark so I'm afraid I can't go into details about that, so I just say that after this part:
- My 'heroine', Ida (pronounced 'ee'-da) (hey, I named this one! Go me
) has a legit reason to be furious with the antagonist (I'm just going to call him that, cause Ida is the main character).
- The antagonist, who is the leader of a country (country 1 for now, sorry about this
), has basically lost his mind and fallen back on the things he learned from his father. Only that was a complete different era.
Back in the day country 2 was an enemy of country 1, however there has been peace for years. So, the antagonist, who really just wants to protect his people, makes the mistake of heightening their defences and the border control between the two countries. Now Ida, who is from country 2, sees this as perfect opportunity to ruin his reputation. She starts spying on him and reporting her findings to her country's old allies, basically falling back into the 'old days' as well.
These allies don't take it the way she had anticipated though: they see her as a heroine who is risking her life to warn the world that a superpower (country 1) has a mentally unstable and potentially dangerous leader.
In response they send troops to protect some countries that used to belong to country 1: a fatal mistake. The antagonist wouldn't have invaded them, he thinks they are still his! There was no problem, but now there is. Obviously he sees this as an invasion and in response he sends troops as well to 'defend' these countries. Ida takes this opportunity to make things escalate even further and brings the old resistance group in these countries back together.
Basically in this story what happens is that one person starts basing his choices on an era that is no more. This leads to a series of events that end in the return of this era. The antagonist is truly trying his best to be a good leader while the protagonist who everyone sees as a brave heroine is really the one stirring things up.
So, in the beginning of the story I mainly focus on a few characters, their lives and relationships, and only later on do I get to the big picture. It was a story in which I mainly wanted to experiment with the psychology of my characters. I also wanted to show that a seemingly insignificant (to everyone outside my main characters I mean, on a personal level it was devastating) event can have a large impact on the world as one thing leads to another and creates a snowball effect.