Create a Defining Aspect
I wish everyone a blessed time tonight and tomorrow. May your day be filled with joyous time with those you love!
I believe developing unique traits that make a system its own is one way to stand out from everyone else.
Therefore, I developed the Antiphonal Metaphor Combat System for my grand-spanning novel series.
Those familiar with music will know it simply means a call-and-response metaphor system.
Since writing doesn’t make sounds, how can you make the prose musical besides lyrical flourishes to the writing itself?
The answer to that question is one that I solved with the notion that poetry has a rhythm to it, so why not use it as the vehicle for combat in my novels?
The reader experiences the poems themselves every time a character or monster attacks, but the battle is happening in the world concurrently. While damage is dealt out to the symphonists in my novels tangibly, only the reader sees the poetry.
The poem does not describe the battle, but rather, it IS the battle.
It is a metaphor for the attacks of each symphonist or negasongs.
Some poems will be back-and-forth attacks, while others might be one or two stanzas. This doesn’t mean I won’t be describing the battle itself as well, but I wanted my series to stand out with ideas of its own.
Poems have been used as a medium for telling stories, but I’ve never seen it done where poetry is a poem on its own merit, which is the attack.
Character A starts the battle using the color-spectrum emotion and musical magic system in-universe, but the reader sees the attack as a poetic emanation in a mindscape that is separate from the novel. It could be said of my Orchestrylus Odyssey series that battles are both physical and mental.
Some characters will have leitmotif poems that repeat here and there but grow and expand as their arc develops. Violeste Allegrette has one of these poems every time she meets someone from her past that was thought to be gone as the books progress.
The first encounter might be seven lines, then it might expand to twelve lines, or twenty. And it will shift and change based on the point of the story the party is at during their travels.
Diminished Seventh will have a darker aesthetic to his poems, using the alucinized acoustic guitar Terrest Dothan that the world fears due to events many repeats in the past.
Stanzielle’s poetry will be the most varied, because while she has green eyes, she wields Stellatina, the alucinized violin that once belonged to Maestraumus, and she can use more colors on the iroseva spectrum than other characters. The poems will have a theme or emotion based on what eye color someone has.
Heterochromia will obviously open the options.
There is an ancient tribe that speaks only in rap flow, so their attacks will not be poems so much as rap songs.
Some Easterners will use Japanese-influenced poetry depending on what sphere they are from.
The poems of the Nine Golden Masks will reflect their chroma finesse (iroseva spectrum abilities unique to an individual based on genetics) and articulate various aspects of Jungian psychology.
In what ways might you set your stories apart?
How might you develop your magic system to integrate it with reader participation?
Happy writing!
