Looking for Writing Help

[the_rck]

I need someone to bounce ideas off of for a WIP. The bit I need help with is a descriptive passage in a Weiss Kreuz story. I don’t think that canon knowledge is necessary because I’m pretty definite on the starting choices for the house I need to describe. The things I need to figure out are tiny things that would look wrong because the house’s appearance is drawn from a particular character’s mind. I want hints that he’s holding things together less well than might be expected by my POV character. I don’t want to beat readers over the head with it, though.

But I’m really, really terrible at this sort of description, and the story’s been stalled out for months on this section. I will likely put [insert description here] in and come back to it later, but the problem will still be there, so I thought I’d ask if anyone feels up to helping.

I’m pretty sure that the starting setting for furnishings was Danish New Modern and that the house used to be bigger than it is now and had rustic cabin retreat as the setting for the exterior and layout. The things the occupant uses regularly will still be in good shape; it’s everything around the edges that should be iffy.

Comments

[jennaria]

Just to clarify: is this taking place in a purely mental landscape (so things look wrong in a 'stairs tilting oddly' sense), or in a physical one (where things look wrong in a 'magazines piling up that nobody's bothered to take to the trash' sense)?

[the_rck]

Somewhere in between. The characters are physically there, but the landscape is shaped by the whims of the creature (demon) that owns the world. That creature set up the house as a sort of a prison but, rather than trying to maintain that with its own mental effort, hooked the details to the memory and desires of the occupant.

He's been there a long time. There are some bits that aren't going to be firmly there because he hasn't paid attention to them, but there are also bits that are wrong because his mind is slowly going. The other person, the one visiting, is a telepath and has been warned that there are issues, so he's going to be looking for any sign of them. He knows what the other man was like before but hasn't seen him in a long time.

[lemon_badgeress]

I would be rubbish at actually helping, but this sounds fascinating.

[the_rck]

::laughs:: Well, the draft so far is on my other DW journal if you want to take a look. It has Manx in it, and I think it's the only thing tagged for her.

[st_aurafina]

So the message to the reader is that they're not able to maintain the projection or mental landscape as well as they used to? Could you show it with things like corners not being quite 90 degrees, or with joinery not meeting flush, corridors ending in places that don't make sense or doors opening onto walls and so on? Or maybe they've brought things into the landscape that shouldn't be there, like paintings or furnishing from other places or indicating other thought patterns? I don't know the canon, so I don't know quite how it works, but something like pineapples in the fruit bowl, the wrong view out of a window, snow coming under the door when it should be sprint? That sort of thing?

[the_rck]

I'm actually a long way from canon here. In canon, there's an attempt to summon a demon that fails. The what-if-it-had-succeeded? AU is an occasional thing in the fandom, but canon gives us pretty much zero information about what powers the thing had or where it was coming from. That means I'm in the realm of things working however I want them to work.

The character who's trapped has precognition and is a canonical villain. He's always one step ahead of everyone and mentally in control (except when the very silly plot demands that he miss something obvious).

Weiss Kreuz is one of the fandoms I return to over and over, but I can't actually say that it's, you know, good. The plot holes are big enough to run highways through, and, well, florists by day and vigilante assassins by night is a pretty silly premise. A lot of canonical plot decisions seem to be driven mostly by whether or not they'll create angst for one of the main characters.

I'm writing this story for an LJ friend who's also still in the fandom. They gave me a prompt of having a reunion between two specific characters and told me I could go as dark as I wanted to. I think I'm one third to halfway through the story now.