On Creating the Weir by Jay Posey
If you’ve read any of the Legends of the Duskwalker trilogy,
you’ve bumped into the Weir; the glowy-blue-eyed fiends that wander the Open
wastes of the Duskwalker world at night, harvesting anyone unlucky enough to be
caught outside when the sun goes down. If you haven’t read the books, thinking
of the Weir as (fast) cybernetic zombies is a pretty good starting point. But
it would be a mistake to think that’s all there is to them.
I wouldn’t blame you, of
course, because that’s pretty much what I thought about them at first too. I
met them about the same time readers did, which was in the Prologue of Three, the first novel in the trilogy.
When I started writing that scene, I knew it was a bad idea in the Duskwalker
world to be outside when the sun went down, but I didn’t know exactly why. I
just knew there was Something Out There.
When the Weir showed up,
they were a terrifying mystery. There was no doubt they were the Something Out
There, but I had no idea where they’d come from or what they wanted.
That, in fact, was part of
what made them so frightening. There’s no way to appease them, no way to
negotiate, nothing that you can offer them to make them go away. When they show
up, you fight or you die. (And actually, it’s worse than that … you don’t die,
you get taken away and converted into one of Them.)
And as I started fleshing
out my characters, I came to realize that many of the inhabitants of the
Duskwalker world didn’t have any more answers than I did as to what the Weir
were or what they were after. That knowledge had been lost in the collapse,
many years earlier.
But I knew there was more
to the story of the Weir than just “mysterious cybernetic zombie”. I just
didn’t know what that More was, until I saw it through the eyes of one of my
characters. In one scene, a character sees an old friend, now converted into a
Weir. And though most Weir behave more like pack animals, this one was clearly
at war with itself; trying to return home, against its new programming.
That moment revealed an
entirely new side of the Weir to me, and I knew I was on to something. More
than that, I know I was on to THE something; the something More I had
intuitively known was there long before my conscious writer brain had figured
it out.
Once that moment opened
the door, though, the Weir became a different creation to me. They were still
terrifying, of course, but I also found myself pitying them. And I as explored
them more deeply, I discovered their history, and what they’d been created to do,
and why. And though I don’t reveal that full history in the current trilogy, I
suspect one of these days it’s a story I’ll have to tell.
But the most interesting
thing to me about the whole story of the Weir is just how much it taught me
that creation feels more like discovery than I’d ever previously
imagined. It’s a weird sensation. I know I wrote these books, and I know I made
the Weir up. But as I wrote and did my best to make the Weir more than just
scary monsters, it came to feel less like I was creating them and more like I
was uncovering a mystery that had existed in the Duskwalker world before I ever
arrived.
With the release of my
latest book Dawnbreaker, the Legends of the Duskwalker trilogy comes
to a close. But with so much of the world still unexplored, I can’t help but
think there are many more stories to be told.
Author Bio:
Jay is a narrative designer, author, and screenwriter by trade. He started working in the video game industry in 1998, and has been writing professionally for over a decade. Currently employed as Senior Narrative Designer at Red Storm Entertainment, he’s spent around eight years writing and designing for Tom Clancy’s award-winning Ghost Recon and Rainbow Sixfranchises.
Author Bio:
Jay is a narrative designer, author, and screenwriter by trade. He started working in the video game industry in 1998, and has been writing professionally for over a decade. Currently employed as Senior Narrative Designer at Red Storm Entertainment, he’s spent around eight years writing and designing for Tom Clancy’s award-winning Ghost Recon and Rainbow Sixfranchises.
A contributing author to the book Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing, Jay has lectured at conferences, colleges, and universities, on topics ranging from basic creative writing skills to advanced material specific to the video game industry.
You can find him online at his website, jayposey.com, as well as on Twitter (@HiJayPosey).
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