The Writer Within: Creating and Overhauling Marik Aneys

It's already Monday! I hope everyone is having a good start to their week so far. I know this week is going to be busy on my end of the world. Between wedding planning, writing, and kicking my cartography business into gear, I have a lot to accomplish this week. That's good, though. Busy hands means I won't have time to be bored!

Today, I want to discuss a character near and dear to my heart: Marik Aneys.

Marik began as a jerk named Jake. He wasn't a kind guy, and he was the second character I created after Clae's original design. Marik hasn't changed much appearance-wise over the decade and a half that I've been writing this tale, but his personality has shifted quite a bit. Back when I first drew him, Jake emitted a sort of... personality that I wouldn't think endearing to readers. In fact, my very first reader (my mother) hated him with a scathing passion. And he wasn't the sort of character you loved to hate. He was just a terrible character.

Turns out, Jake was also Clae's older brother initially, though I think it was some sort of ruse to trick readers and that he and Clae were really cousins. I don't know. Fourteen-year-old Kira was a weird chick. Since it made no sense that a half-human amüli would have a pureblood older brother by the same parents, I nixed their sibling relationship pretty quickly and turned them into cousins.

As you can see by the drawing above, I didn't know a great deal about Jake at the time, just that he was an aggressive person and that he was involved in Clae's life. As time wore on, Jake transformed. At some point along the line, I decided to ditch traditional English names (except in two cases) for something a bit more exotic, and then used those names to start building and polishing the amüli language of Beokasvo. Jake's name transformed to Marik, which is comprised of two Beokasvo words. The first is firstborn, or mar, and the second is blood, or ik/ic/ac/ak. Clae's name also changed from Clei to its present spelling, which means to outlast.

Something strange happened when I changed Marik's name. His personality mellowed quite a bit. Almost overnight, which I recall thinking rather odd at the time. He became more reserved and observant, and while he still maintained a temper (a family trait, I think), he managed to become far more likable, at least for the most part. I remember thinking as I worked on the fourth or fifth draft of the series, "Gosh, I like Marik a heck of a lot more. I like writing him more. I think he might be my favorite character." And he sort of is. Anytime I consider ending my writing career, Marik is the most persistent in keeping me on track; not the loudest, mind you. That honor goes to Clae and Eti and Kel. He's just the one who keeps telling me to write more, even if it's terrible.

Marik went from picking on Clae and being a brutal bully to caring for his cousin and acting as his only friend, which was a strange transition for me at the time. This was the sudden, quick change I mentioned above. I think there's a reason for it, though. At the end of the first major draft of the Soulbound arc, Clei and Jake became good friends, and that might be why Marik and Clae started out as companions in The Soulbound Curse and the earlier drafts of that novel. Perhaps they worked off of the friendship they'd built in past drafts; then again, they may not have. The characters changed so much that I'm not sure they'd be recognizable by anything other than name and a few similarities in appearance.

Marik's change in personality ignited some major alterations not only to the Soulbound arc, but also to the amüli homeworld. It was a pretty slow process, but I can't deny that he was the one who started the drastic shift in the entire story--from other characters to the actual, physical appearance of Inrugia. One of the major changes he underwent was becoming more involved in politics, which gives him a reason to be around during The Soulless King and subsequent novels in the arc, and allots him a sort of power his former iteration may not have held. Second, he went from making rash choices--like Clae currently does--to thinking things through (at least, the majority of the time; Marik made a huge mistake in The Soulbound Curse, and it's not one easily remedied, but he was pretty emotional at the time and being manipulated didn't help much) and being more logical about decisions vs. outcomes. I tried to take these traits and use the same logic to develop each character's motivations and goals, which helped to clear things up quite a bit in the overall story within the Soulbound arc and the greater Amüli Chronicles.

His impact on Inrugia itself wasn't something I'd noticed until fairly recently, though. Way back when I first started writing, Inrugia looked like this:

But with Jake's upgrade to Marik, the shift began for not only he and Clae, but for the entire amüli and ekra species. This was around the time I finished reading Amy Thomson's The Color of Distance (amazing book, by the way; if you can find a copy in good condition grab it and read the heck out of it), and as I mentioned in my post about the ekra people, I pulled back from writing so I could revamp the ekra species as a whole. I also worked on smoothing out the amüli, their relationship with humans, their relationship with ekra, and their relationship with their planet and the gods (who, before this point, had only very minor roles in the series and no major impact on the way magic worked).

Marik's transformation urged me to make everything more realistic and less haphazard and fantastical. Inrugia once had dragons. Dragons no longer exist there, but now, massive bone-armored monsters wander the north and beasts covered in thick, stone plates graze in the south. From the need to turn one character from a nonsensical bully into a reasonable, likable person whose emotional torment is understandable, came the transition of the entire world of Inrugia.

No longer was the planet made up of only two continents, but now the Amüli Kingdom only covered a small portion of the world. The floating islands were transformed to the Shattered Seas. A reason for the world's massive crater was created, and lands beyond become the focus of other tales (Frendyl Krune and the Stone Princess, Frendyl Krune and the Nightmare in the North, Frendyl Krune and the King who Steals Hearts, Axis of the Soul, The Glass Heart). Inrugia became a much larger place and the peoples and cultures inhabiting the planet developed into a multitude of fantastic and sometimes terrifying varieties.

While Amy Thomson's book is probably the major reason I made so many changes, I do like to credit Jake as being part of the influence behind the overhaul. Marik, to me, is a much more fascinating and well-rounded character than Jake ever could be, and after him came many, many more characters I enjoy writing about.

And, by sheer happenstance, Marik is Kira M. backwards. ;)

What books have impacted your writing the most? Have you completely rewritten and developed characters because of something you read? Why did those books (or that single book) have such an impact on you and your writing? Let me know in the comments below!