This page serves as a work-in-progress collection on different hints, tips, and tricks that help to get into style and to keep it.
The style is in the great contrast with other styles used in the Anno Ruini books. While other books are written in a modern or contemporary style (skewing a bit towards reference tropes), this style should feel like a fairy tale, that is written down from the words of the narrator, who knows a lot of all the characters, of past events, and even of future ones.
The purpose of the style is to shift the reader into somewhat archaic and magical perspective on the world in which the story is wrapped.
Such perspective allows to omit some realistic details as reader doesn't expect them in such texts, and instead leverage tropes of the ‘world full of magic, demons, and wandering gods’.
This style is predominantly used to describe events happening in the Dark Years Era, where humanity itself fell back from rationalistic high-tech view on the world to mythology and magic which always were hidden in the backpocket of humankind.
In the books covering the Calm Era, this style is used to provide sharp contrast with other points of view of the story, as well as to subtly hint to the reader how things magical by looks are technological by nature.
A hidden purpose of this style is to introduce a special kind of narrator that is a person from the Anno Ruini Universe.
This style is heavily influenced by the famous Chinese epic Journey to the West (JTTW).
This novel was published in 16th century in China, hence its somewhat archaic style and specific metaphors. Good translations try to keep these properties of the text. Our goal as stylists is to do the same — to make impression that the reader holds a book that was written quite a while ago, and tells the story as being written after a spoken word of a narrator contemporary to the depicted events.
It is a comic adventure story, the characters of which are very emotional and vocal. They jump, scream, bellow, applaud, roll on the ground, point fingers, and do other things that we don't expect to happen with grown people.
It is a bright story, full of colours, and at the same time not overburdened with details. The story can be looked at as it is an animated movie, where the action grabs the focus of the reader so they don't delve into sidebar thinking.
This is the story that dive deep into philosophy and religion, and presents readers with morale and ethical values.
Here we can find materials on the reference:
The latter searchable PDF document is very helpful in discovering cliches which we discuss below.
Here are some tips, tacks, and tropes that we borrow from the reference.
Each chapter has a name of a very specific structure: it always comprises two sentences that tell in non-direct way two key events that will happen in the chapter.
Next to it, titles are often, if not always, very pompous and spiritual.
After the title, there is (almost always) a one-two sentence-long recap of the previous chapter, as if it was told just yesterday's evening.
Sample Headings from the reference
Each chapter ends with a sentence of a very special structure: it urges the reader (some times very directly) to keep reading if he wants to get answers on the questions that should came to his mind. Those questions — in case the reader didn't come to it themselves — are provided in the same sentence.
The pattern is very simple:
It is very evident that such style reminds of itself in a very explicit manner by using ‘listen’ instead of ‘read’.
Examples from the reference (cliches in bold)
Both the thoughts and words of characters are almost always quoted and provided with a descriptor such as ‘said’ and ‘thought’ (with great variety). Sometimes the descriptors are omitted, and we can play with it, however we must clearly keep the reader from assuming the first-person perspective.
There is no deep introspection in the mind of a character, only peeking from time to time. Narrator uses it to provide the place for a joke shared with the reader.
Instead of joining the character that is going into disaster, the reader sits next to the narrator and observes how the character helplessly fights and then finally overcomes his challenges. There is a plenty of research on this topic which hopefully will find its place in this wiki.
Another thing that should become our tool, is specific cliches. Below are some observations.
There is a lot of poetry in the reference. Our books, however, are much lighter on this topic.