Kamen Rider Calliope Update #1!
When I write something, especially a fiction piece, the question “why am I writing this?” passes through my mind a lot. It’s not referring to the large-scale, navel-gazing “why”; if that hadn’t been answered for me already, I wouldn’t have even started writing the piece in the first place. It’s the smaller, more close-and-personal “whys” that make me sit back sometimes and take a more scrutinizing look at how I’m writing something.
Why am I writing a character that embodies certain traits? Why am I using this setting? Why am I skipping over these details to focus on some other ones? For a writer, every word is a drop of paint on a canvas; no matter how small it may be on its own, a single tiny morpheme ultimately plays a part in shaping the audiences’ perception of your piece. To quote some already-abundant advice, make every word count.
This fiction piece I’m writing, Kamen Rider Calliope, is meant to fit into a pre-existing framework with well-established tropes and traditions. However, using prose instead of film as a storytelling medium creates another degree of separation between my story and the “purest essence” of what Kamen Rider is as a work of fiction. It would take a work of genius beyond my imagining to write a fanfiction that would perfectly evoke the sensation of watching Kamen Rider as a TV show. I never want to say that a creative endeavor is utterly impossible, but saying it would be attainable is almost insulting to the art of cinematic storytelling. There’s magic that can be produced through the lens of a camera when actors, script and cinematography all catalyze perfectly; words fail to describe the many layers of emotion and symbolism that can be seen in a tiny instant of a film.
I’m going to stop there because I’m in no way trying to say that prose is inferior to film; the two are simply different, and there are creative apexes that neither medium can truly cross over into, respectively. In following my intention to evoke the trademark feeling and pace of a Kamen Rider show, I’ve found that the scenes I’ve got planned out require a much higher wordcount to get through than I was expecting. At the time of this writing, I’m about halfway through act one of my outlined narrative, which would translate into the first two episodes of a Kamen Rider TV show. I’m predicting this act will be around 15,000-20,000 words in all… Now consider how most Kamen Rider series are 40 to 50 episodes total.
I’m not quite sure what I’ve gotten myself into, but for now I’ve still got the optimism to keep going full-steam.
— Nagi
