Friday, March 5, 2010

Shattered Glass

These past few weeks...no, ever since last summer I've been working on a new story for a manga. After spending about a year developing Kami-sama (I'll be posting info about this soon, since it's my only completed manga story so far) I decided I wanted to create another supernatural, slice of life romance.

This one however takes a different approach from Kami-sama, and it follows the same kind of Linear Girl Story Progression (fan made term, by me, but I think you understand) that you see in Visual Novels and even some anime (which are mostly VN adaptations anyway). A main character meets several girls as the story progresses, however, I've taken a different approach.

In most of these types of things, you meet the girls early on as side characters and they hardly get a lot of screentime until their arc occurs, and then either the story restarts itself, or it moves onto another girl. In my story however, all stories begin at once, and each of these stories is woven and (fused?) into the main plot.

Eh, its hard to explain, but it doesnt move onto one girl at a time. All stories link, and as the central character learns from experiences of the last girl, and uses them in the future in the actual main plot. Its hard to explain at this stage.

It works because these mini stories only help to support the main story, which Im not spoiling at the moment. The title, Shattered Glass, is a metaphor for the main female character. When you think of broken glass, obviously you think of 1 solid piece of glass that then breaks into many smaller pieces. In a way, that's perfect to describe the main female character, a "broken" girl with her pieces scattered across the world (or city).

I can't really go on more, but its about a guy trying to find these pieces and save the girl, before she completely becomes unrepairable.

It also doesn't help that the reason the girl is "broken" is because of an experience involving the main male character.

What are these pieces though? No, the girl doesn't have her arms or legs or even her head scattered across the world (nasty?) but rather pieces of her "heart". What do you think of when you think of "heart" (no not the organ)?. That's right, emotions.

And this girls broken "heart" pieces, or emotions, are scattered across the world, and make their way into new vessels, with each specific emotion going into a "vessel" who best matches it, or even a character who completely lacks that piece.

Then there is one emotion, with which gives birth to all emotions, which makes another vessel that is KEY to the whole story.

Do you understand it? Its about a guy trying to find these broken pieces and restoring them by helping each of the characters who have one of those pieces. In the end, the main character shall learn the importance of each emotion, and how it works etc. With each new piece he will grow, and the girl will be closer to being saved. However, while his views on life may grow, his views on a certain character will also grow....and maybe he wont want to save this broken girl anymore.

There is also another concept to this, restoring each piece in the correct order. Obviously, if he restores anger into the broken girl, and only anger, the girl will be...well angry. Anger isn't a positive emotion. What about sadness? A person filled with only sadness is a tragic character. The main character has to make sure things are done right. In a way, this means as the story progresses, it only gets more tragic.

That is the basic gist of my story, but I kept things either vague, or just plain basic. I feel really good about this concept though, and I hope I can create a touching story from this

I'll have some artwork and more details in the future. Thanks a bunch.

3 comments:

  1. Seems like you have a good plot going here, but you'll have to be careful with it. I don't know how many details you left out, but based solely on this post, I can say that if not approached correctly it can lead readers to a great deal of confusion.

    For starters, when you said "all the girls are fused into the main plot", it can be interpreted as all the characters being present simultaneously, and the main character trying to deal with them almost all at once. This can be difficult to pull off effectively, and if you aren't careful this can destroy your story by creating group of events in which the character deals with each one too slowly, boiling the plot down to boring, monotonous crawl.

    It can also be interpreted as the very thing you're trying to avoid, which is having them appear in a sequential order, just like in common VN's. Unless you tread carefully, you'll essentially be forced to take this route for the story to make any sense. I think I understand what you're TRYING to get at, but to do it takes a bit of skill with storytelling.

    As for the concept of the story, seems interesting in theory. Main character messes her life up, and is trying to make amends by fixing the problem himself. This approach can be a bit precarious, as having too many characters in the supporting role can leave them underdeveloped, or too many main, but non-primary characters, can lead to a slew of characters that are underdeveloped. Or, a third scenario would be that if you try to develop all the characters too much, you can bog down the story with too much side-story and stray from the main plot a bit too far.

    The rest of the plot seems like pretty standard stuff. Not difficult to pull off by any means, and gives a good premise for a variety of different story scenarios with an easy base to work off of. The premise is structurally sound, if a bit cliched. Put some serious work into it, and you could have a decent story here.

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  2. Hey I didn't know you liked Britney Spears. I like her too. (:

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