So the novel I’m working on at present is an urban fantasy story with faeries at the center. I’ve been fascinated by faeries for a while, and haven’t always been impressed by the way they get presented in more modern works of fiction. To me, the traditional stories have always made them seem like big fucking trouble. Even when they help the main character in the story, they seriously screw someone else in order to offer that help. Not nice. That makes a good antagonist.
I wanted to present the fae in a way that was intriguing but also scary. I thought about making the faerie realm divided into two parts, a light part and a dark part, literally, with one side existing in perpetual daylight and the other in perpetual darkness, then having my main character forced to travel into the night side. Not a bad concept I feel, and even writing it out now, it sounds okay. Seelie and Unseelie, dark fae and light, okay, sure.
But when I started writing, I wound up with a light land that was almost sacchariny. Everyone was so polite and sweet, the main character had a magical horse that understood what she said, it was always springtime there with birds and flowers and butterflies.
Puke.
There’s also the problem of making the dark side dark enough to match the light side. If the light side is all magic horses and butterflies, what kind of horror show lurks on the dark side? Could I write it? Could I write it well, and stick with it, and enjoy writing it for as long as it needed to be written? I’m not a really dark kinda girl.
I still think this split world concept could be used and used well, but I was searching for something grittier. More believable. True to real life. Does that make sense? Wanting to write a novel about Faerie that’s true to real life?
Anyway. I hit upon the notion of making faeries wildly unpredictable. They can choose their own shape at whim, they can control everything in their own environment, and while they can’t change shape once they’ve left their own realm/domain/world, they do get any powers or abilities that come with the shape they are wearing when they leave. They are fickle creatures, tending to change their minds about what they like or want or even need in a flash. They can hang onto a desire for centuries, only to get bored with it and choose another desire the moment you think that’s what they’re all about. They can even choose to really need something for their very survival, and keel over seriously dead if they don’t get it, even though they are only dying by their own choice.
I wanted the fae in my story to be interesting, to be dangerous, and to mirror real life faerie stories. The infinite changeability I decided on makes them perfect for any story you’ve ever heard, and their fickle nature seems fairly universal to most of the stories I’ve dug up. I liked the idea immediately.
So what did that mean for my story, all sweet and darling on the light side, waiting to turn darker than I wanted on the dark side? It meant that I had to throw out every word I’d written to that point and START OVER.
I had written almost ninety pages and it all had to go. I tried to save it, I really did, but aside from a few paragraphs, it was awful. Real shit. I didn’t like my main character. I didn’t like my secondary character. I didn’t like my main character’s father. And I definitely did not like the sugary sweet side of Faerie versus the demonic dark side of Faerie. So I opened a new file, named it Faerie Story II, and began at page one with the whole new idea. I introduced the new faeries, I added childhood memories from my main character’s life, and I made my secondary character half human to make him unpredictable but more stable and able to actually be a help to the main character. Before he’d been just sort of an asshole.
I am now on page 137, and the whole story is just much better. I’m having fun working on it. I like the total freedom I have to make the fae my character encounters into whatever I need to spice things up right then, from a garden spider the size of a VW bug with a bad British accent to a tree that grows fruit that will turn you into a tree yourself, bearing the same fruit that can ensnare others. Fae that want to eat her, fae that want to serve her coffee, fae that want to turn her into a mindless slave, fae that want to trade her something for her plastic fork. Much wierder. Much more fun. Much more . . . is believable the right word? Maybe, because I can believe in the creatures I’ve come up with in round two a hell of a lot more than the stupid-ass flying pixies in round one.
And hopefully, if I can believe in it, I can make you believe, too.
