It was time to set about outlining Illidan. I knew who the main point of view characters of the book were going to be. The story of the Burning Crusade and Black Temple pretty much dictated three of them: Illidan, Maiev and Akama. The Demon Hunter Vandel was in the briefing document I got from Blizzard. Since this novel was going to tie into Legion and show us something about demon hunters, he was going to play quite a big part. Before I set out to write the outline I needed to think about the characters since a lot of the action would flow from them.
I needed to make some decisions. How much space was each going to get in the book? Which was the best point of view to use for the various events? How was I going to show their history and relationships with each other. More to the point, what did I want to show about each of them? What was their role? How do they interact? Who were they?
Illidan was the easiest to deal with. His name was on the title. He was the central figure around which everything revolved. He is a towering charismatic figure. To me, he’s not really a hero, although I know many people disagree. He’s more complicated than that. He’s a very bad person trying to do an awesomely heroic thing. He is driven, domineering, sardonic, and his own worst enemy. He’s the smartest man (ok elf) in the room and he knows it. He has no time for fools. He is lonely, thwarted in love, far too proud for his own good. Above all he has a mission and he is going to complete it. No matter what the cost to himself or anyone else. In some ways what destroys Illidan, his tragic flaw is hubris. He is too proud, too confident and too self-reliant. It brings him down in the end. He is also ambiguous. To most of the world he looks like a villain, a traitor that has betrayed his entire world to the forces of destruction.
Maiev is in some ways Illidan’a mirror image— a driven hunter with an over-riding purpose, which is to bring Illidan to justice. The irony of her position is that she has much more in common with him than the people she serves and protects. She too has given her life to a mission. In her case, imprisoning Illidan and now bringing him to justice. In the book, she was going to be our window into the world which Illidan has come from, and the one that sees him as a villain, quite correctly by their lights. She too is a charismatic leader, fighting a battle against overwhelming odds.
Akama always seemed to me an interesting character. He engineers Illidan’s downfall for what he sees as the best of reasons. He is a mighty spiritual leader of his people but he is kinder and gentler than Illidan or Maiev. He has a kind of ruined decency to him. He also mirrors Illidan from a different angle. He is forced to treachery and wickedness in the service of a cause he believes to be good.
Vandel was the easiest in some ways, the hardest in others. During the original discussions of Demon Hunters in Irvine it was made clear he would need to be either a Night Elf or a Blood Elf. I chose Night Elf, not just because my original main character was one, but because it was the background that would show the depth of the transformation he is to undergo in the strongest possible way. Blood Elves already had a tainted slightly corrupt nature that put them further along the dark path a demon hunter must follow. Making him a Night Elf would give him the furthest distance to travel and make the ordeal he was to endure all the more shocking to him and the reader.
As all of this thinking was going on I was also trying to look at things from a technical point of view.
The reader was going to have to spend some time in Illidan’s head, getting to know him. The idea was slowly to shift the reader’s perception from seeing him as an ambitious villain to something more heroic. One problem in doing scenes in this way, is a very basic one for a writer. Illidan is smarter than I am. A lot smarter.
Showing the mental processes of someone cleverer than you is always difficult. There are some tricks, of course. A very smart character can figure out solutions to complex problems that it would take me hours to solve (if I could solve them at all) in moments. All you need is the solution and you can show the lightning fast mental processes at work.
The other main trick is to show him from the outside, from the point of view of people closer to my own mental level. Both Akama and Vandel would be useful for this. They would have a lot of scenes with Illidan, and they both had ambiguous relationships with him. These would allow us to see both them and Illidan. Akama and Vandel provide foils for Illidan that let us see him as his own followers see him.
Maiev would tell us a lot about Illidan simply by the relentless nature of her pursuit. You can judge characters by the potency of their foes, and she was a very potent one.
By the time I finished writing my character sketches I had a pretty good idea of the people I was going to be dealing with. I needed to find some way of fitting their stories together. It was time to deal with the outline proper. Of which, more next time.
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