Annotation Elantris Chapter 29
Chapter twenty-nine
So, here we get the payoff for several hundred pages worth of hinting at Iadon’s insecuirty and paranoia. Plotting is all about payoffs, in my estimation. You have to earn your plot. You do that by putting the pieces together in the right places, so when you finally get to a climax (even a smaller one) your readers accept what is happening.
The build-up doesn’t have to always be subtle–and it doesn’t even have to be done through traditional foreshadowing. For instance, if you want a character to be able to defeat a small group of bandits, you have to have earned the payoff that says that he/she is compatent with a weapon. It’s like an chemical equation–you balance all of your pieces on the one side, and they should equal what comes out on the other end.
In order for Sarene’s speech in this chapter to work, I needed to do several things. I needed to build up that she’d be both capable enough to make it and brash enough to go through with it. I also needed to build up that Iadon would crack beneath this kind of external pressure, which I hope I did.
Some other small notes. First, the proverb about the Lion. It’s actually a Korean proverb, one which always stood out to me because it was almost identical to our proverb ‘Speak the name of the devil, and he will appear,’ refering to someone who arrives right when you were talking about them. The Korean version says “If you say the name of the tiger, he will appear.” I embellished this a bit with use of my handy creative liscence, and you get what we have here.
Actaully, from what I’ve seen, you’d be surpised at how many proverbs span cultures. They may sound a little different, but the meanings are often very similar.
And, in Kaise’s ‘Why did YOU have to get sick,’ line, you can see a remnant of the cut scene I talked about in the last Sarene chapter. Kaise and Daorn were supposed to be able to go with Sarene into the city, and when I got to this scene, I thought I’d forgotten to add them. So, I came up with the sickness excuse. This was actually an error on my part, since this triad is actually happening several days after the last triad, and the twins got their permission to go with Sarene for the ‘next day.’ Therefore, their trip into Elantris would have happened during the intervening days.
Kaise’s comment, however, seemed like a nice little nod to things happening in the world off-stage. Things like this give a nice feel to a book, so I left it in–despite the fact that the original scene it was tied to got cut early on.
And, as a note on the final exchange, did you forget about the cliffhanger at the end of Raoden’s chapter? My hope was that knowing, from Raoden, that the gates to Elantris opened sometime after the attack, the reader would assume that Sarene actually failed to stop the soldiers. Now that she has, however, stopped them, you are reminded that SOMEONE is entering the city. One guess who it is.
