Not dares carried out by characters. Dares accepted by the author.
There's been a
thread in the NaNoWriMo forums for a month now about character quirks. People stop by, drop off a couple of interesting character traits, pick up a few, and head back to their writing caves. Some of these quirks are truly odd, yet people "snag" them anyway. I think they must be daring themselves to somehow make these quirks work in their novels.
I sort of believe, from a noveling standpoint, that this is a reasonable strategy, even if it does smack of college creative writing classes. (Well, nearly all of NaNoWriMo so smacks, one could argue.)
I did a bit of this kind of thing to myself this week. I was pondering on the nature of hyperspace in my multiverse and how it would work, and decided there needed to be some entity who rules this realm. (With "demons" as Openers for faster-than-light, there needs to be a "head demon.") I had already established in the thumbnail sketch of my protag that his own brother had disappeared decades ago through a set of circumstances for which the protag blames himself, but which is revealed later to have been an "alien abduction." This is a bit weird, because the same mechanism (well, it's really being shanghai'ed for duty on a passing spacecraft) is what draws the protag off Earth and into the larger universe. This cannot be a coincidence, but how deep is the connection of the character and his brother to the rest of creation? I haven't chased that line of thought to the end yet (and I won't until I'm actually cranking out words), but in the spirit of combining disparate ideas it occurred to me that it would be entertaining if the brother is actually the ruler of Hades / hyperspace.
Doesn't make much sense on first think-through. So there's the challenge, and I've dared myself to make it so.
Now, it'll either work or it won't. The beauty of NaNoWriMo is that one needn't end up with a linear narrative on 1 December, just a collection of 50,000 words that all go into the same novel. If I chase that plot rabbit and it turns out to be a 'possum instead, I can retrace my steps and try something else, without penalty. So I'm not risking very much by taking the dare, but if the "edges" of the idea add drama and uniqueness to the story, I've gained a great deal.
Of course, things can get out of hand if one is willing to try to incorporate every wild idea that pops up, so some discretion is called for. But this one intrigues me enough to try it on and see if it fits.
Less than 24 hours to go. I'll start writing before I go to bed tonight (after midnight local time!), and tomorrow afternoon is the Orlando-area kickoff meeting at a local coffeehouse. I'll blog next from there.