Whee!
Ok, that's a bit out of line. Jami is arguing about 'ordinary people' but with teh strong inference that ordinary is defined as real world ordinary. Your scenario posits an author creating an 'ordinary' where the ability to, for example, sing a werewolf to sleep isn't anything special.
Maybe it isn't. Maybe the heroine of the book is simply the first to try it, for whatever reason. She's not under direct attack, is witnessing one, can't get away, and is singing to a child to try to calm it down before Certain Doom overtakes them in a large mass of fur and fangs and the song has the unintended side-effect of making the beast stop to listen, it settles down, it turns back into a human a la Hulk/Bruce Banner.
Why not?
And I swear, if you say "Because that's not the way it really works", I'm going to laugh.
Just because it hasn't happened in other werewolf stories doesn't mean it can't happen in a new one, with a new take on things.
Moreover, what I'm reading from Jami's posts isn't 'ordinary at the start of the story', it's stock standard, 100% vanilla human, no powers, abillities or heritage other than what an unenhanced, real world human would have.
People aren't just disagreeing with Jami for the hell of it. I'm certainly not. I disagree because I hold a different opinion.
Which can still work. Unless you take the view that knowledge is itself a special ability, and once our posited ordinary human has experience with the supernatural, she automatically becomes extraordinary.
Quite aside from being unnecessarily rude, this doesn't make sense.
I honestly didn't think it was rude. Flip and dismissive, perhaps, but that was just answering kind with kind.
And I wish the board allowed nested quotes...
You agree being able to sing to werewolves isn't ordinary, then later on, claim that the person who possesses this extraordinary ability, is, in face, still ordinary, just in an extraordinary situation.
Again, unless you re-write 'ordinary' to be 'singing can put people to sleep, especially in a high stress situation', this just doesn't fit that.
Moreover, as I said, that LEVEL of singing talent would make you an extraordianry human, rather than an stock standard one.
Why? Why can't you write the world, write werewolves, in such a way that they are affected by live singing to a heightened degree? And maybe putting them to SLEEP is, indeed, a bit much, why can't you write a world where you can stop a werewolf from "rampaging" (to use Jami's original word) through a well-sung melody?
Who's writing? who's tried this?
Well, nobody. Isn't that the point of this entire thread? What you wish was being done in Urban Fantasy that isn't currently being done, or at least not done much (with the emphatic MORE in the thread title and all)?
Jim could do what he did in Alera partly because he's working with concepts, which he could define.
Er... yeah. Ok. And how is "ordinary human being with no powers/abilities/birthrights who gets involved in the paranormal" not a concept the author can define? If you're the author, you get to create the world! Sure, you're limited by urban fantasy generally taking place in the "real world" only with supernatural elements, but you get to define the elements. You get to put any spin you want on werewolves or vampires or elves or fairies or...well, ANYthing. That's the fun part!
Jami is doing the defining, and then complaining that no one has written the story that fits her definition yet.
Yeah, we all are.
Again, that's the point of the thread, no one's writing the stories we want to read most. Or so I thought.
This has been answered above already. It's not just only if it's WRITTEN that way. Unless this is a common ability in the book, it's NOT ordinary.
Yes, you can write it like that, but then it fail's Jami's definition of 'ordinary person'.
Exactly so. So MAKE it a common ability that no one's tried yet. What if it's a weakness the werewolves know about and have tried to suppress? Maybe the werewolves then target the singer and anyone who witnessed the event. Maybe there are people who want to know how she survived and they're trying to protect her, maybe they run trials and confirm that it's possible to do but only with a live voice.
It's your world! You're the author! ANYTHING is possible, anything.
I'm with Borealis Belle. If you want to see it, write it your damn self.
See? Flip and dismissive. That same last sentence could apply to ANY post in this thread, but you're throwing it out at one idea only. Why does this idea get "write it your damn self" and none of the other ideas in the thread?