Writing Blog: Tournament Arcs (Patreon)

It’s been a while since I have written one of these. You’ll have to forgive me for that. You’d think all the quarantines going on would give me more time to write, but I have rarely been as busy as I’m now. It’s not even April yet, but this has been one hell of a year already.

Anyway, tournament arcs. 

If you have ever read or watched shounen, you’re more than familiar with the concept by now. Tournaments are also fairly common in cultivation stories, so I knew I had to do a couple of them.

Spoiler Alert: Ave Xia Rem Y will have more than one tournament arc.

I could say it’s because I’m honor-bound to go through several cliches, but really, I just love tournament arcs. 

In fact, the Eastern Port City Tournament is something I had planned since the outline stages of Ave Xia Rem Y. You’d figure that’d mean it would be easy to write. I sure did. I thought I was all set up and ready to go, that I’d breeze through the past seven chapters or so. However, it’s the details that trip you up. As I started writing the chapters of the Eastern Port City Tournament, I realized one crucial thing.

I had to come up with a bunch of characters.

See, there are, speaking broadly, two ways of doing a tournament. Number one, you use the tournament as a way to show off your already existing characters and world. The tournament, in this case, becomes a way of taking advantage of all the world-building you have done and lets you push things to even greater heights. 

Number two, the tournament is used as a vehicle to expand the world and introduce new characters. These are not hard-set categories, and there’s always some overlap, but I hope they get my point across.

As I was writing, I realized I was doing the latter category. Sure, Yun Han was already an established antagonist, but it was only Yun Han. Everyone else needed to be introduced during the tournament. 

You cannot imagine my panic when I realized how many new names I had to come up with. 

Some characters I already had planned, but it was the minor roles that tripped me up. There are quite a few minor characters that needed to be introduced, and it was a struggle for me to decide how one-note they needed to be. 

I kid you not. Some characters started out named Guy 1 during the first draft and then grew on me as I kept writing them.