My First Draft

I have finally finished the first draft of my novel. It's been a long time coming, but years later, after ninety-six thousand words, I'm done. I've taken my time on this road, occasionally taking time off, sometimes more time than was good for me, but I've learned a lot during the process and I'm confident that future projects will benefit from what I've gone through to finish this book.

Of course, I'm not completely done yet. It's only the first draft and I have plenty of editing to do, but I'm excited to send it out to some alpha readers and get some feedback that will give me an idea of what the readers are looking for. I know that certain chapters need some polishing and that some might need a complete overhaul, what I don't know is what's missing or what doesn't work at all. That's what alpha readers can offer and I can't wait to hear back form them.

But now, on to what I've learned over the time that I've spent writing this puppy.

Time: It takes me a while to get into my writing zone. I've found that if I know I don't have more than an hour to sit down and focus on writing, then I won't be able to concentrate and would much rather distract myself with something else. This has often led to me not writing at all on some days, and that's no good. I've learned that sometimes it's just better to sit down and tell myself "write!" It doesn't matter what or for how long as long as I keep at it. When I do find a larger block of time it will be all the easier to get into that zone and write like mad.

Persistence: This is on a similar note as mentioned above and it had a drastic effect on how long it took me to finish this draft. After I ended up not writing for a couple of days, I found that a week had passed and then a month with no progress whatsoever. I didn't have a deadline so there was nothing much pushing me to get back on that horse once I was off. I told myself that I wasn't in the right mood and I needed to wait for some more inspiration to keep going. But that brings me back to my what I learned about time, because if I don't sit down and write, the chance of being inspired sinks dramatically. If I write every day, ideas and solutions to problems within the story seem to grow over night.

Outlining: This is the big one. I've always known this about myself, I like things done a certain way, but I had to learn how I like to do things when it comes to writing. This ties in especially well with the reasons that sometimes led to writing droughts. I need to know where my story is headed and I work best if I've figured out what the most important parts of a chapter are, my story beats, so to speak.

    I found myself not wanting to continue on several occasions, because I didn't quite know what should happen next. I was stuck and didn't know how to get free. I can think of two situations where persistence was key, because I just sat down and told myself to write. I began and at some point things started to flow again - what I had written wasn't necessarily good, but while writing I found where I wanted the chapter to go - and I was free to continue writing the story.

    For a long time, I knew what my big ending would look like. I had a few scenes in mind, but the overall picture was still pretty hazy. I didn't quite know how I got there and what some of the characters would be doing. I also felt like there was something missing. A lightning bolt of inspiration struck at some point and the tools of outlining that led me to the ending that I didn't know I was missing until I had planned it all out.

These are the main things I've learned, but there are many more when it comes to writing prose. I'm excited to see how my experiences for this novel will help me write the next one. It's November in a few days and while my alpha readers get busy reading my first draft, I thought, I should get busy writing a new first draft for another book. I don't think there's a better time for this than NaNoWriMo. This will be my first time participating, but I'm confident I'll get a heck of a lot done in this coming month.

I can't wait to get started.

A Random Approach to Writing a Novel

I recently looked back into some old word docs that I had on writing from when I was just starting out. At the time, I had a few ideas that were mainly focused on my Of Orcs and Men series, originally called Battle of Blood and Treachery. I was struggling to find new ideas and different settings to write in and wanted to expand my craft. That led me to the idea of creating a story at random with the help of rolling dice.

I was of course influenced by role-playing games, but also by a book called "The Dice Man" by Luke Rhinehart. The novel is about a psychotherapist who casts dice in place of making decisions. It leads him down a perilous road, but the thrill of having to do what the dice tell him is too good to stop.

(by Ian Llanas)

Fitting to rolling the dice, I found some great artwork by Ian Llanas. He has some more great stuff on his Deviant Art's page or his website.

Back to my random novel idea.

I knew I wanted to write other things and of course, I had specific settings in mind, but I had no story ideas, no characters, no conflict. I was basically starting from scratch. So, I set up a plan for how to go about creating a story with semi-random elements, which ended up turning into the novel I am writing now.

First, I needed a world, a time and place: the setting. This is partially a genre selection, but since my interests have always been focused on fantasy, I made a list containing medieval settings with or without magic, supernatural and superhero settings, steampunk and urban fantasy. I had fifteen settings, some of them very specific like an "A Song of Ice and Fire" setting. Don't do that. I've written a lot since then and have learned a lot. You can of course use other known settings as inspiration, but you should really try to make the world your own.

For my novel, I ended up with a contemporary setting in which there are people who have special powers. I decided that these powers have been present throughout our history and were responsible for witch hunts in earlier centuries. The existence and reality of these powers were forgotten until they resurfaced within the last century and the people with these powers were no longer persecuted. This is a rough draft of what my setting looked like before I started writing.

After you have a setting you need a plot, at least that was my idea back then. Others might want characters first and go from there, but I had specific overall themes in mind and made a list of nine major plots the story could be focused around.

I originally rolled the dice and ended up with "Power" as my main theme. So I knew there was going to be at least one antagonist who wanted to become more powerful. Did he want more magical strength, money or more political power? I didn't know yet, but that brings us to the next bit: characters.

The first thing I had to decide was how many characters I would have. Here, I made a rookie mistake. The more point of view characters you have the harder it is to write, especially when you are a novice at writing. I knew that I would at least want four characters, but I was also really into "A Song of Ice and Fire" where it seems you can never have enough characters. So I decided twenty would be the maximum amount of characters that I should have, the dice would probably give me a lower amount anyway.

I rolled the dice and ended up with fourteen characters. That is way to many, especially for your first novel. However, the dice had made their decision and I followed without question. A few months after I started this project, I enrolled in a "Novel Writing" course and quickly came to the conclusion fourteen was too many. I cut it down to six and my tutor told me that would still be a lot for me to handle as the writer, but could also be too overwhelming for the reader. So, I cut it down to four.

The character creation was also randomized by giving them different personality traits from a list. They each got two traits, decided by the the roll of the dice. I did the same with their first and last names and their individual magical abilities, which I borrowed from a role-playing game I was playing at the time and then heavily modified to fit my setting.

Last, I gave each character (I still had fourteen at the time) a reason for being involved in the main plot. This list of reasons was a modified version of my plot/theme list and gave each character an individual quest or conflict.

So many of my characters randomly (by the luck of the dice) ended up being in debt or finding themselves in need of a lot of money quickly so that "Money" became a second theme of the story.

Things developed more naturally from there, without the help of rolling the dice. I found my antagonist who was power hungry and took advantage of people in need of money, forcing them to do his evil bidding to become more powerful, politically and financially. A group of other characters became my "heroes" who would combine forces to bring an end to the "villain."

This is a rough depiction of how my novel idea started. It helped me when I didn't know what it was that I wanted to write and I think a great story grew out of it.

For the fun of it, I think I'll have more posts on this method in the future where I explore what other stories could grow randomly from the wiles of the dice.

Telling Stories

I was wondering the other day how there seem to be so many writers out there who can say, "I always wanted to be a writer." They loved reading when they were kids and they started writing stories of their own early on. I didn't have that. Actually, I have video footage of me unwrapping presents on my seventh birthday and saying, "more stupid books!"

Now that doesn't sound like a kid who wants to become an author some day. Looking at that video now, I feel really bad about how I acted, since my mother was an avid reader and wanted to encourage me to read more. Eventually, when I was thirteen I ventured into the world of books and started reading a book here or there. The Hobbit was one of them, which opened a doorway into fantasy. Ender's Game was another that introduced me to science fiction. Harry Potter was another great influence.

However, it wasn't until I was about seventeen that I went into the bookstore and searched for a new book to read. Until then, I had only picked up books I had at home that had been birthday or Christmas presents. Mostly sequels to Ender's Game and Alvin Maker, another one of Orson Scott Card's series. When I was in that bookstore I made a list of several books I wanted to have just from reading the back cover and the first few lines to see if I like the author's style.

I distinctly remember three books I had on that list. The Game of Thrones, Orcs and Quicksilver Rising. Orcs was the first one that I read on a summer vacation. It was an omnibus edition, three books in one and thus a quite big book, bigger than any other book I had read so far. That didn't daunt me though, since it was action packed and was just the kind of page turner I was looking for at the time.

That book actually lead to one of my first attempts at writing. I was sick at home and had been thinking about orcs and elves and started writing about a band of orcs that were waiting for the elves to attack them in the forest. They knew that it was on the elves home turf, but they were preparing an ambush. How that battle would have turned out, we'll never know, since I didn't finish it. That story didn't have an ending, but it soon lead to what would be the beginning of my Of Orcs and Men story.

Of Orcs and Men started when I was eighteen and bored in class. I know, not the greatest example, but that's how I started writing this story. At first, it was all one big battle and didn't have much of a plot, but it did have the style of jumping from one POV to another between orcs and humans with every scene.

So that's when I started writing, but I realized that I started telling stories a lot earlier. As a kid I used to have a great action figure collection. I had all kinds of superheroes like Spiderman, Batman, Goliath from the Gargoyles, all of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I even had Captain Planet. I also had lots of the villains, maybe even more than the heroes, because lets face it, the villains were always cooler than the heroes.

I'm not entirely sure how other kids played with their action figures. I imagine that they would pick two or three and just have them fight and usually the hero would win. End of scene, end of story. But for me the story never ended. My entire room was set up to house the villain lair in one corner where all the baddies were plotting their evil plans and in a different corner the good guys had their headquarters. I even had a few neutral encampments spread out here and there in the room. I was lucky that I had such a large room otherwise I don't think all that would have been possible.

Years of playing with these action figures turned into an epic saga of Good and Evil fighting it out on the carpet. Heroes turned on each other and villains switched sides for their personal gain. There were treasures and weapons that everyone tried to get a hold of to become more powerful. And the story never ended. If I had to stop playing to go outside or eat a meal, I would set everything down like putting down a book or pausing a movie. Then when I returned I would keep going from where I left off.

Occasionally, some figures would break, they would lose an arm or a leg. Sure, that could be upsetting as a child, but I'd get over it and patch them up somehow and have them deal with their situation. Nowadays, I call that character development. Sooner or later some action figures became dated or were so broken they weren't fun to play with anymore, but even then I didn't just throw them in a box and stop playing with them. They received a meaningful final scene in which they might have a heroic death and their demise could lead to further conflicts of revenge.

The epic story I was playing out with my toys as a kid is one of the greatest memories of my childhood, because it meant a lot to me and I was so involved with the characters. I missed out on reading and connecting with fictional characters in books for a long time, but I was already telling a great story long before that and I'm sure that will influence the stories I'm going to write in the future.

(by Paolo Pantalena)

Fitting to my action figure epic saga of my childhood, here's a piece of artwork by Paolo Pantalena. He has a lot of great drawings of all kinds of superhero characters and more. The link is to his website, but I found this piece on his deviantart. If you like this piece, go ahead and look at what else he has to offer.

Priorities

Today, my rambling won't focus on fantasy itself, but on the creation of it, the writing of it. As the drama in the first paragraph of my first post of this blog may have hinted at, I was worried that starting this project may take away time better spent working on my novel. So far, I can positively say that it has. Yes, it has interfered with my working schedule and I've written less then I would have liked since I started this project.

You may wonder, how much interference could there have been? I've only made 2 posts so far and they're not even especially long. True, but that's not what takes up my time. I've spent several hours researching for posts to come. Research means, looking at blogs, looking at artworks, reading articles, etc. I've actually already started writing another post about the new Star Wars movie, but it's not done yet, so this will be published first.

I enjoyed my research and I don't feel bad about having spent some time away from my stories, but at some point it's time to stop procrastinating with other great projects and start buckling down and getting to work. I already have 70.000 words written and another 30.000 planned for the next 15 chapters.I still have a bit to do, but if I sit down and do it I should be able to have my first draft done within the next few months.

(by Rafael Zanchetin)

Now, on to better things, like this work of art. When I found this it spoke to the fantasy rogue lover inside of me. This all out brawl in a tavern with cards, drinks and knives flying everywhere is wonderfully done. I'm no artist, but I think the details of the knife, hand and face are beautiful.

There are quite a few more wonderful works by Rafael Zanchetin on his DeviantArt page, so if you liked this go and check it out.



On to the next promotion, Auden Johnson's blog Dark Treasury really caught my interest. Especially, this post: Why Do We Write Dark Fantasy? I could see myself in some of what she wrote and although I haven't written too much dark fantasy, I totally get how it can fascinate the reader and writer. It's a way of letting your inner demons run free and do things that you would never consider doing in real life. The tricky bit when writing such things is to make your main character likable, even if he/she is a sociopathic maniac. That's one of the things I'm working on with a short story of mine.

All in all, I think Auden Johnson's blog is very interesting and especially informative with lots of posts and links about different things ranging from writing dark fantasy to world building to writing fight scenes to book marketing and much more.

So if that sounds as interesting to you dear reader as it does to me, then go take a look.