May 29 2008
How to Write Origin Stories
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Here are a few tips to help you write better origin stories for characters in superhero novels and comic books.
1. Give us a reason to care. This does not mean that your character has to be similar to your readers. However, if your character is a prince from Atlantis or an alien emissary, you do have to convince us that we should care about his story. Persuading readers to consider a story about Atlantis’ court intrigue is possible, but it’s much tougher than selling a story about Peter Parker, the guy next store.
One way that you could help readers care about a highly exotic character is by giving him a few distinctly human characteristics. For example, even a savage alien warrior might have an affection for his family that seems positively human. For example, I have a picture for you…
This alligator’s smiling hatchling makes him looks very friendly. You might even forget that he’s a 750-pound predator! Does your character have a highly unusual origin story? In what ways will we relate to him?
Finally, it may help to show the character interacting with a familiar human culture. That will help us compare and contrast the foreign culture to our own and we will probably empathize with an alien struggling to fit in. For example, would an alien know how to use a doorknob? A doorknob’s function is not at all intuitive. I think readers would sympathize with anyone who struggled with something like that.
2. Don’t make your hero a Chosen One– give him a chance to prove himself. Characters generally make their strongest impressions on us as they fight through adversity. But if your character was born into a highly powerful caste or inherits some great power, that robs readers of the chance to see him prove himself. How has your character earned his story? For example, the Green Lanterns recruit someone only after they have proven themselves worthy. Likewise, the Amazons choose Diana to be Wonderwoman not because Diana was born a princess, but because she snuck into the Amazonian trials and won the competition. She became Wonderwoman despite her high birth, not because of it.
If you would like a character who has an unusual birth story, I would recommend making him the victim of chance. Instead of being born a prince, make him born into a low caste. Instead of making him an object of unbridled admiration, like Eragon, make him someone who has to overcome widespread doubt and/or contempt.
3. It may be useful to tie your character’s origin story to the villain’s plot. Ideally, your hero will have some link to the villain. At the most cliché level, the villain killed the hero’s family or received his superpowers in the same accident. (Fortunately, you can create more original links in your story).
Spiderman has an origin story that builds a tight plot. Spiderman gets his superpowers through a scientific accident, like his archrival Norman Osborn. The two also share a personal connection through Osborn’s son and, more importantly, they are moral foils. Peter Parker’s morals center on several ideas: “with great power comes great responsibility” and that revenge is rarely satisfying– his attempt to get back at a wrestling boss gets his uncle killed. In contrast, Osborn believes that power and entitlement come hand in hand, which is why he kills his business competitors. Finally, there’s a strong white-collar vs. blue-collar aspect to the fight, which is especially compelling because the series doesn’t romanticize poverty too much.
One example where the origin story leads to a random, jumbled story is Static Shock. Although he receives his powers in the same accident as his villains, he doesn’t share any other links with them (personal, ethical or otherwise).
4. Don’t make the character’s background too exceptional. For example, instead of being just a soldier, your character is a Navy SEAL. Instead of being just a government functionary, he’s a cabinet secretary! Instead of being a corporate flunkie, he owns the company… he won a Pulitzer… he’s won several Nobel Prizes, etc.
It’s much harder to write a gripping story about Bruce Wayne (the company’s owner) than Peter Parker (an entry-level nobody). No one’s going to get in Bruce’s face like a supervisor would. Additionally, someone who has truly mastered his sphere, like a Navy SEAL or Nobel-winning chemist, will probably be completely self-confident. Real people sometimes doubt themselves, so they can relate to self-doubting heroes. (However, for a mainstream story, pushing the self-doubt too hard will drive the story into emo wangst territory).
However, you might want to have a character with a relatively impressive background. I respect that. For example, when we were writing Superhero Nation, we wanted a government character who was reasonably high-rank but not so high that he’d be an agency head that doesn’t get fired even after punching his associates. Instead of making Agent Orange the head of the Office of Special Investigations, we made him the branch of its Human Resources branch. And his boss hates him, of course.
Alternatively, you might want to use a character who has an impressive but low-ranking background. For example, a Wall Street stock-broker or Army sergeant are not especially high in their respective organizations but either would have many useful skills.
5. Give us a chance of a happy ending. If the character’s origin story hinges on an overwhelming tragedy, what’s he fighting for? No matter how many criminals The Punisher executes, it won’t bring back his murdered family. Your ending doesn’t have to be happy, but if readers think that a happy ending isn’t possible, they probably won’t care about the story. Effective tragedies usually generate drama by playing on the readers’ hopes and expectations that the ending will be happy.
If you plan to use a tragic origin story, I’d recommend looking at Spiderman and maybe Spawn. Even though they’ve lost loved ones, these characters still clearly have something to fight for.
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This is very helpful.
What’s a good way to do a good origin for a human character?
Well, for a beginning author, it will probably be easiest to work with an origin story that is familiar to your readers. For example, Peter Parker, Static Shock and Harry Potter are pretty much in high school at the start of their stories. If you’re working with a story that is more fantastical than those three (for example, one that’s not set on Earth), I think Luke Skywalker has another basic, relatable origin. However, please do not take inspiration from the new series. Destiny and the “chosen one” detract fromLuke’s Anakin’s character development…
[B. Mac adds] Although basic origin stories are more relatable, a novice writer can probably handle a more exotic origin if the story lies in that direction. But you have to ask yourself whether your hero really needs to be an alien prince rather than something more mundane. Even the introduction of something like a magical or psychic hero into an otherwise realistic story will probably make publishers uneasy.
…Luke wasn’t the chosen one though. Anakin was :)
This is a very good list. I’m trying to write my first superhero story, and I like the advice this gives.
Ok, I’m writing the character’s origin story… Jamal lives in the inner city of Pacific City. He is struggling through life and he is always in trouble. His parents decide to send him to a government sponsored camp to straighten them out, unaware that a covert section of the government called Project Vector is taking these kids to do genetic engineering experiments. They subject Jamal to gene manipulation and they endow him with the ability to have his body produce a type of biokinetic energy which he can use to fly, shoot energy beams from his hands, a degree of superhuman strength, durability and endurance. They see that he is excelling in his abilities but need better results from the rest of the testees, so they subject them to more gene manipulation and there is an accident and they all acquire super powers, but here is a huge fight and they all escape including Jamal.
What do you think?
I mostly liked that, Armond, but I have some observations.
1) In a previous post, you said that Jamal would eventually put his mother in a coma. If he has escaped from a military testing project, it might be a bit harder for him to return home to his mother… wouldn’t Project Vector look for him there? You can get around that in a few ways, though.
A. Jamal goes into hiding with his mother.
B. After the huge fight makes the news, the military disbands Vector and Jamal is free to go home.
C. Jamal does not go home, but manages to recklessly inflict a coma on his mother anyway. For example, let’s say that he’s been living on his own and he robs a bank to help pay for something his mom needs. He intends to drop the bag of cash off at his mother’s house so she will find it. But Project Vector agents were waiting at his house and a fight ensues. In the fight, Jamal accidentally puts his mother into a coma rather than allow himself to be captured.
2) I like “Project Vector.”
3) Let’s assume for a moment that Project Vector’s tests go perfectly. What was it planning to do with the kids? Does it just return them to their parents, even though the kids will all report that they’ve been the subjects of illegal and unethical military experiments? Their new superpowers would be indisputable proof. The conventional way to explain this conundrum would be to have Vector plan to kill the kids all along, but the parents would inevitably raise questions about why hundreds of kids died at summer camp. Also, the kill-them-all strategy would make Vector look a bit cartoonishly evil.
I had an idea that Project Vector would be like a black ops military branch and that there was a secret genetic arms race going on between global powers. But since it’s technically illegal and unethical to manipulate genes and DNA on a public basis, they use the delinquent and other so called government camps to collect teens. When the allotted camp time is up, since they have had access to their DNA, the Project sends back clones to the unsuspecting parents all the while keeping the originals as government metahumans.
Hmm, that’s interesting… remind me never to send MY kids to summer camp, haha.
If the government is able to clone the kids, one thing you might consider is that the government sends the real kids home and then does the experiments on the clones.
Yea. I thought about that while I was drafting scenes, but I can’t seem to come up with a better solution. Do you have any suggestions?
Here’s one possibility…
1) Vector sets up a fake summer camp to do tests so that it can establish a safe and reliable genetics program that it can use on soldiers. Soldiers are far better candidates for the super-soldier program (they’re more restrained, willing, better-trained, and more mission-orientated than a bunch of inner-city kids pretty much stolen off the streets). But the enemy superpowers are getting too close and there’s no time to waste on animal trials, so Vector plans to use inner-city kids that were probably going to end up in prison anyway.
Vector’s plan was this: test on the kids until the mutagen was safe and reliable. Then it would wipe the kids’ memories, deactivate their superpowers and send them home because they are no longer needed– at that point, Vector would bring in willing soldiers for safe tests and all would be good. But the plan falls apart when something goes wrong and the kids break out. Suddenly there are many superpowered teenagers with behavioral problems running loose.
At this point, the plot might go in one of the following directions…
POSSIBILITY 1-A: Vector sends in its own men to attempt to recapture as many of the kids as possible. Depending on how desperate the situation is, you might have Vector use its mutagen on its own people at this point, even though the mutagen is still highly experimental. (You could make one of Vector’s agents into a minor villain this way, but it’s probably too cliche to use for the main villain).
POSSIBILITY 1-B: Vector gives up on the idea of recapturing the kids and tries to silence as many as possible. The ones that try going to the press die in one accident after another. If one of them is a friend of Jamal’s, that’s something that might compel him to get more involved in the plot.
Can you think of any other scenarios where they try to accelerate testing and cause an accident or one of the kids formulates an escape?
Hmm, let me try.
Let’s say that Vector starts out with reasonably ethical plans. Their schedule calls for using mostly test-animals with only supplemental tests on the teenagers. Then a crisis or near-crisis erupts. You mentioned before that Vector was racing against enemy superpowers. Well, the crisis might be that one of the other superpowers makes an enormous and/or horrifying leap in genetic engineering. The Pentagon comes to Project Vector and says that “we expect that the Chinese [or whoever] will have an army of superclones in approximately 18 years*. We need this supersoldier program NOW.”
That would put a lot of pressure on Project Vector to cut corners with its experimentation schedule. Instead of carefully developing safe tests on mice then working from mice -> monkeys -> teenagers -> soldiers, they might cut straight to teenagers.
I think that accelerating testing could easily create an interesting moral dilemma with two sets of three-dimensional characters: a government agency pushed to violate its citizen’s rights for (what it sees as) the greater good on one hand, and the kids on the other. One option you have to develop the kids is that delinquent inner-city kids are frequently gang members and they will probably not get along with other gang members. So we would expect that at least some of the kids at this camp are going to fight with other kids because of gangs (and maybe racism, if you’re comfortable with that). As the kids realize that they’re being exploited by the camp, I think you have a great opportunity to show the characters gradually overcoming their former animosities amongst themselves to band together and break out.
As for formulating an escape plan… I would just try to keep in mind that (obviously) your prisoners are street-savvy teenagers rather than criminal masterminds. Their plan doesn’t have to be extraordinarily technical or brilliant. It could be something as simple as figuring out when there are the fewest guards at the camp and then determining how you could initiate a riot at that time.
If you’d like to make things more complicated, you might also consider giving the teens an ally at the camp, maybe a guard who feels a bit uneasy about being as strict as his supervisors want him to be. But I would caution that books for younger readers frequently suffer from the “deus ex parentis” problem, which is when an adult swoops in and saves the day. I would make sure that any supportive parents are limited to a minor support-role rather than anything really important.
*In real-life, cloning does not create a copy with the same age and memories as the original. The clone is actually a new-born, so allowing for a gap between the invention of the cloning process and the eventual arrival of the clones as a militarily significant force is realistic. (If this 18 year gap concerns you for whatever reason, you can use a line or two to explain that the clones are designed to age more rapidly. That has worked quite nicely before).
Let me know what you think.
You present really interesting ideas and I thank you for them. I think that I have enough information to at least get going. I will let you know how the book goes. Thanks again.
I saw a similar picture to the gator one. It was on “I Can Haz Cheezburger?” There was a tiger cub being hugged by a woman at a zoo, and it had the caption:
“Your so naice, hoomin. I eets yoo last.”
I forgot it was going to grow into a huge predator, even when being reminded by the caption! But it was so cute.
Haha, that’s pretty funny. If you could link to that, I’d really appreciate it.
Here’s the picture of the tiger getting a hug:
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/08/12/funny-pictures-i-eets-yoo-last/
Hilarious. :)
Aadrello Tegee is a big time graffiti artist dreaming of turning Neocomet City into his personal gallery. Despite his notoriety he is broke and homeless. His immoral dreams are halted when the city and the sector (the cluster of planets it belongs to) are cast into a depression. Thus, the city lost its gleaming, inviting appearance as well as Aadrello’s interest (who wants to ruin something that’s already ruined?)
He was rollo-blading from the police(as he usually does) when an intricately designed book fell to the ground near him. Thinking it could be worth value he scooped it up and eventually eluded the police(as usual). Later, he skimmed through the book and learned that it was completely blank and that the pages never seemed to end, he thought that it would make an awesome sketchbook. The next day he was about to draw in his new sketchbook, when he opened the book he saw that all his finished works had somehow been copied into the book. Soon after, he realized one of his drawings had been parading around the abandoned house he spent the night in. The drawing explained that the book was called “Animata” and was passed through history to great artists to help them accomplish what they most desired. The Cyborn Moon had been tracking the progress of the book through time in order to destroy it and its user(seeing as it can only be used by a chosen artist). In their attempt at destroying the entire planet, for resources as well as the books’ destruction, they failed to kill Aadrello who escaped thanks to his new ability to animate pictures.
Just to sum up his origin story, he learns to effectively summon his drawings and creates a costume for himself, he becomes “Sketch.” Alongside his two partners, “Mz. Corpse” and “Emerald,” he fights to defeat the Cyborn Moon and free the Omniverse from oppression and tyranny.
Is there a question I should respond to here? Or would you just like general impressions?
The plot seems functional, sort of like Star Wars with an urban twist. I think the names are still a bit extravagant, but you’ve mentioned that those are set in stone, so let’s try to improve what we can. Hmm. When you write your proposal, you should indicate who you think the book will appeal to and why. Give a few reasons to help the businessman reading your proposal understand why your book will be financially successful. Ideally you’ll draw on comparable examples of comic books that have succeeded in the past few years.
If I were trying to sell your story to a business, I might look at series like Star Wars (10-20 year-olds love sci-fi action), Spiderman (kids love young, poor protagonists) and Green Lantern (your hero and he share vaguely similar powers and both stories are space operas).
Haha Space Opera, I’m actually pretty glad you like it, I thought you’d be like NO!, THROW IT OUT!! haha
Publishers will reject the vast majority of stories almost instantaneously (before the reader is done with the first page). I am fairly confident that– assuming you get a good proofreader on board– your piece will survive to page 2. And that, in itself, is a major accomplishment.
How encouraging, haha.
A frighteningly large proportion of manuscripts get rejected within the first sentence.
I honestly have no clue as to what to title my book/comic. I don’t want to say something and then have it posted in “Bad Titles, that Can Be Fixed.” Could you suggest something?
You guys know my story. The Cyborn Moon (or whatever I change the name to) is a galactic superpower that want to destroy any chance of uprising and dominate the universe. Aadrello “Sketch”, Irabella “Mz. Corpse”, and Jornai “Emerald” are the three main characters each strong-willed and young. The story is based on multiple planets, each completely unique in both appearance and government. Along their “path” to get strong enough and defeat the Cyborn Moon, they meet many other heroes as well as minor villians. Once they do finally defeat the Moon other sequential good and bad things will happen, thus continuing the story. At least that’s what I’ve got so far.
Got any ideas? I’m stumped.
What do you think about the title “Shooting the Moon” ? It has some rhythm and a sci-fi vibe that I suspect will attract the right readers.
I like it. It also has a “shooting the breeze” rhythm that reminds me of the main character.
Thanks.
Flare Blade, I responded to your question here.
Ok, I’m still working on the Hellions, but this is another idea for a story, well the character’s origin at least. I got this idea after watching Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme and thinking are there any young, black, and male magic superheroes. None that I can think of.
Ok, Boy (no name yet) is an inner-city black youth. Just so you know he and Aadrello are very much alike, except he doesn’t do graffiti, he just draws (I like artists). Boy is constantly picked on for him personality and his different style (very white-boyish, I didn’t want a stereotype). He is lower middle class, borderline poor. He thinks very positively and hopes to be great someday and get out of the hood.
This is the other-side of his origin, the mentor’s side, they will tie together.
The Whatever Magic Coalition (no name yet) sponsors the search for the next group of great Mystics, to watch over the realms. Hundreds of sorcerers and sorceress, including evil, are to train one pupil into the next greatest sorcerer(ess). It’s become sort of a contest. Weird Wiz (no name yet) is a notoriously eccentric wizard who although is a ditz is extremely powerful. He goes to Blank City or Ville (no name yet) to find his pupil, by randomly searching crowds for youths that he deems fit.
This is where the stories ties. Boy is at school in his last block class, having finished his work before the others, as usual, he begins to draw on his hand. He draws a series of circles and lines in no definite pattern. He doesn’t think much of it. School is out and Boy rush to someplace to urgently do something (I know, it’s still under heavy construction) while running and not paying attention he crashes into Weird Wiz and they both fall. As boy helps WW to his feet, WW senses the well known incantation drawn on Boy’s hand, Boy just thought it was a drawing. WW only says “I’ll you around, Boy” (but says his real name), freaking Boy out.
WW later wisps Boy’s astral body to his home in that is between many realms, and offers apprentenship. Before Boy can quickly refuse, WW puts on a flashy show, showing Boy want he could do if he was his apprentice. Boy is amazed and accepts, signing a contract. Boy then wonders why him. WW says because Boy already already knows magic, he is the best pupil (the hand incantation). Boy states that, that was just a random drawing wherein WW bursts into laughter and say “So I poisoned you (the hand grab), to test you and you didn’t even know Ha, I could have killed you”. WW takes it jokingly, but Boy wants to quit, too late he already signed the binding contract.
The really interesting part is how he has to use his powers but I’ll explain that later. What do you think of this origin, What I hope to accomplish is make becoming and being a mage a structure system with tests and a heirarchy, instead of just you learn magic to a degree and claim the title mage or sorcerer or whatever. Suggestions? Opinions?
They are for the most part on earth and are human.
Look up, It got erased from the recent comments. I will add more serious factors to my story. I don’t want it to fail. I think it’s a fresh idea that COULD work.
Oops it wasn’t erased. It was camoflauged though.
Camouflaged? That’s weird. Hmm. What do you mean by camoflaged?
Because the two titles on the recent comments looked similar, I thought they were all “What Origin Stories are Plausible” comments so I put on here and then I saw the difference.
OK, R.B. I glanced through your story and I think it has very much potential. I suspect that setting it on Earth will help quite a lot. Another factor that I think is a big positive is that the story feels less like a magical superhero story (a la Sailor Moon or American Dragon), but more of a real-world magical fantasy like Harry Potter or So You Want to be a Wizard. The distinction probably feels very minor, and maybe it is, but I think that more publishers and readers will go for the magical fantasy than a magical superhero story. Anyway. Enough hair-splitting from me.
I think that the aspiring borderline-poor protagonist is very strong and has a lot of dramatic depth. I think that him being black will also help your marketing efforts and may help distinguish the work from books like Harry Potter.
I like the connection between the boy and the wizard, although it seems maybe a bit contrived that the wizard just happens to run across the boy that just happened to draw a magical incantation. It may be problematic if the boy is chosen because he was born with great magical potential, for chosen one reasons. That’s pretty easily fixable, though. For example, the distinguishing trait of the boy could be that he’s a very quick learner and observant. If he just happened to see the wizard working magic, and was able to replicate a minor spell with his art, I think he might feel a bit less like a chosen one.
I think the story might benefit from the injection of more competitiveness. For example, perhaps the wizard has selected several pupils and plans to gradually send them home until he’s down to just one. That would give the protagonist many chances to demonstrate his skills against students that are just as interested in becoming the wizard’s one pupil as he is.
Quoting you… “What I hope to accomplish is to make becoming and being a mage a structured system with tests and a hierarchy, instead of just learning magic to a degree and then claiming the title of mage or sorcerer or whatever. Suggestions? Opinions?” Could you elaborate on that?
If I understand this right, you essentially want to make magic into an accredentialed guild where your ability to call yourself a mage of rank [whatever] depends on how well you have performed on the guild’s standardized tests. So magic would be less something that you individually could do on your own, and something that was regulated from above? That’d be an interesting twist, I think. The danger is that the hierarchy might get burdensome to explain. I think the later Dragon Knight books spent too long explaining the organization and ranks of wizards…
I do realize that if I want an older audience,which I do, I’ll need more serious aspects. I can make the the origins of the search more dark. There have been magical murders or an evil entity is destroying realms and I can make death a more normal story aspect. For example, some competitors might tell their students to kill or be killed to take out the competition. Teen death always make stuff more serious. There can be time when WW and Boy go to magic death scenes and study them. There will also be demons and dark entities so, all in all, I definitely feel this would appeal to older readers.
I like the idea of giving the wizards some underlying motivation for putting together the search. That will make the stakes higher and give the boy something to do after he wins the competition. (Erm, assuming he does. He doesn’t have to, of course).
As for darkness, I’d recommend looking into The Dresden Files as an example of a magical story that worked on a very serious, noir level. With demons and mangled victims!
Yeah, like not anyone can just be a mage you have to be granted the title. I think I could regulate the hierarchy to work and not overload the reader with ranks. You could do it on your own, but you’d probably be doing it wrong. I love the suggestion for a competitive team, it creates alot more drama. I don’t fully understand what you mean when you say “If he just happened to see the wizard working magic, and was able to replicate a minor spell with his art” you mean like he drew a picture of the incantation?
One of the things I like about this story is that the protagonist seems pretty cheerful and proactive. Even though he operates in a world that will sometimes be dark and horrible (particularly when demons and killer competitors attack), his positivity will help keep the world from feeling overwhelmingly bleak. It will also help keep him likable. Everyone likes a go-getter…
I’ll have to pick up “The Dresden Files”. And I still have to make him meet the Wiz someone. Maybe after he draws the incantation, he runs away ,and all of a sudden the Wiz is right in front of him and uses a binding spell while talking to his.
Also, I wanted to apologize for acting rashly yesterday. I’m kind of struggling with workload issues right now.
You acted rashly? I didn’t notice.
Basically, Boy and his fellow competitiors are known as “Ordained Mystics” for as long as they are contracted, unless they win the competition. Ordained mystics have a limit of their power equal to their ordainer and must use an object as a familiar, they have to channel their magic through a certained predestined object in the beginning of their magic learning. They go through a different exercise every week and someone is eliminated and mind wiped if they don’t meet the standards. I want The Wiz’ team to have odd famaliars seeing as their teacher is eccentric.
Could I recommend “neophytes” or another single-word in place of ordained mystics?
Works for me. I looked it up. It works.
I’ll start coming up with details soon.
I still don’t understand this exactly “If he just happened to see the wizard working magic, and was able to replicate a minor spell with his art”, you mean he draws a picture of the incantation? or a picture of what the spell conjures? Even so he’ll still have to meet the Wiz somehow.
I think what I was envisioning was that the wizard is walking from the home of one prospective student to another. At some point, he pulls off to an alley to work a spell by drawing a set of runes. He thinks he’s alone, but the hero somehow watches him (either from around the corner or from across the street).
A minute later, the boy tries redrawing the runes with his photographic memory or whatever. This alerts the magical authorities because an unauthorized wizard just performed an illegal spell. The authorities call the wizard because they knew the spell was his (perhaps the spell was so eccentric that he was the only one who could have been the spell’s owner). When the wizard realizes what happened, he sees a fantastic opportunity to gain another apprentice for the contest. So he claims that the protagonist was his hero all along so that the police will let him go.
What do you think?
Hmm, you just gave me an idea. Earlier you said “That will make the stakes higher and give the boy something to do after he wins the competition. (Erm, assuming he does. He doesn’t have to, of course).” Maybe he shouldn’t win, but at this point he would have a common understanding, so he would still worm his into magic society and “the final battle”. If he lost I would make it so that he still has close connections with his master, so he can still become a “certified” mage and continue his training. I think the twist would be so deliciously juicy, it would throw the reader, who probably thinks he’ll win, off and have them on their toes.
If I’m following this clearly, two elements of your plot are:
1. The students are competing to pick a wizard to get trained and beat on some really powerful evil wizard.
2. The student that wins will go off to fight said wizard.
Another possibility is that the student loses and he illegally goes off to fight the wizard anyway, without any sort of authority to do so. He might not even have the mentor, but rather a team of students that also failed in the competition. I think that could make sense if the wizard somehow commits some grievance against them over the course of the competition, and it is clear that the person that won the competition is not really the most qualified to face the wizard (because he cheated or whatever).
The students (plural) that win will fight said evil entity, but each wizard can have only one winning apprentice, who will then go on to compete to be in the small group of final winners. I look your idea for how Adrian (the Boy) gets chosen as an apprentice, I like how the spell is so eccentric that it has to be the wizards. I’m still kind of fuzzy on your idea, there has to be a way for Adrian to continue his training, preferably with his eccentric mentor (of course there would be reasonable space betwwen the characters at this point i.e the wizard is assign to jobs and Adrien does tasks alone).
You really confused me with this “The students are competing to pick a wizard to get trained and beat on some really powerful evil wizard.” the wizards are picking the student, they train along the process and are ,one my one, eliminated if they don’t have adequate skills. The final three go to the magic society (no name yet) and go into more rigorous training. Two are eliminated leaving one winner per master wizard. The winners go into a tournament to prove themselves, whereafter winning they are part of the mystic group (no name yet), this is (possibly) where I’ll have Adrien fail, but his teacher being a rule-breaker continues to secretly train him instead of mindwiping him and sending him home.
Quoting your comment at 6:42 pm, you said that “There [may] have been magical murders or an evil entity is destroying realms and I can make death a more normal story aspect.” That’s what I was talking about with the evil wizard.
OOh, blonde moment. I get it now. Okay so now that I have the origin set up, I can start with details I will post accordingly. Teacher alert!!! I’m in class. Talk later haha.
I’ve been toying with an idea. What if it was a failure that brought the hero into whatever the heck he ends up doing? I thought of this in class today.
A boy of fourteen opens his mid year exam results as he walks home from school, sees that he failed (again) and angrily screws the paper up, throwing it down on the ground. Then he realizes that his parents will want to see them, and he’ll be in big trouble if he doesn’t bring them home. A gust of wind picks it up and flings it into the air, and he chases after it. They land in the local park, and when he picks them up he inadvertently pulls on a piece of material that’s partially hidden by grass and dirt. Curious, he pulls harder and finds a rosewood box which has a strap attached. He takes it home. He opens it later and finds a message from (undecided) who want him to (undecided). I think it’s a nice little start.
This boy is extremely selfish and decides to use this to his advantage. He could do with disappearing for a few days because he thinks his parents may go easier on him. But this adventure is harder than getting top marks in class.