Onwards to Book2

- by ria, on Wednesday, 26th January 2011, 4:18pm

Hey, it’s Wednesday.

I have news, too. I’m 10% through the first draft of book 2. That’s why it’s been so quiet around here. I’ve been putting all my time into outlining and starting this draft.

Other writers may laugh at this, and a lot of you may wonder how I ever wrote book1 when I say this, but for the first time today, I really had to consider two character’s points of view. Unlike book1, this book has more than one POV character and the characters are completely different.

I was writing from Zan’s (whose name will change) point of view, about Zachery and while I really had to consider her reaction, I also had to think very carefully about his. Zachery is a complicated fellow and he has a way of talking and doing things that is almost opposite to the way Zan does things. When I’m writing from Zan’s point of view I have to be careful to curb my enthusiasm when it comes to Zachery’s dialogue. I’ve cut a bunch of small talk from the last scene, because while Zan is into making conversation, Zachery isn’t.

It’s a new thing for me to have to think this much about character actions. It’s a lot easier when you have one character to worry about. I wonder should I have been worried about this stuff in book1. Should this have come up before now, and because it didn’t, does that mean all the characters in book1 except for Zachery, are shallow and one dimensional?

It’s something to bear in mind for book1′s next revision.

- – -

Shoutout

I would like to give a shout out to Nathan Bransford. He’s running an opening paragraph competition on his blog: 4th Sort-of-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge. That post and the ones that follow are interesting.

Reading all the entries has given me a good idea of what I like in an opening paragraph, and I think I have to say that the opening of book1 does not contain the magic ingredient. I think it’s too much about the surroundings and not enough about Zachery’s wants / needs / conflict / him being an interesting character. I think I need to open with a display of recklessness.

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category: shoutout, writing

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A Bit About My Writing

- by ria, on Wednesday, 20th October 2010, 11:46am

I’ve mentioned the things I’m working on in other posts, but I figured I should dedicate an entry to getting everything straight. Let’s start with what I’m working on right now.

For the last few years, I’ve been writing a fantasy that centres around Zachery and his attempts to save the world from itself. It’s rather magic-heavy, and I like to think it’s a pretty fast paced adventure.

Artificer

I started writing it the summer I finished college (2006). I used the snowflake method to draw up progressively longer outlines. The outline I ended up working from was 23 pages, and included headings like POV Character, Characters Present, emotional angle, description, chapter number. It was divided into 80 scenes, or so. November of that year I started writing draft 1 and by the end of the month I had 55,000 words. (Thank you NaNoWriMo.) It took me a full two years to write the other 70,000 words. (One year of that involved travelling around the world.)

April of 2008, I started editing the horrid mess that was the first draft of my book. It was called The Fall back then. The Fall is a horribly cliché title, so you can imagine what the story was like. Not wanting to face a rewrite (and not really understanding that I needed to rewrite) I messed around with it a bit, tweaking paragraphs, changing a few things here and there.

By September of 2009, I had made very little progress. I sat down one day and made a schedule for the next 6 months. I wanted a good story by March 2010. One that was unique, exciting, infinitely better than what I had. Even though it had taken me a year and a half to face the fact that I needed to rewrite most of the book, it was the best decision I made. March came around and I had something better. Not amazing yet, but good. The feedback I got made me face the problems that still existed. So, I took another 3 months and came out with draft 3.

I’m now on draft 3.2 and have a query letter that I’m still not happy with. I haven’t sent it out to any agents yet, because it makes the book sound boring. So, that’s my current situation.

Familiar

When I was still in college, I had this idea for a short story. Two girls whose lives get really strange when a demon shows up at their door. I imagined it would be about 3 or 4 pages. I wrote it by hand in a yellow page notebook. 188 pages later it was finished. It took me the whole college year to write, September 2005 to May 2006. I originally wanted to write this story as a graphic novel, but I don’t have the same persistence to stick with a bit of art that I do for a bit of writing. Zachery was the bad guy in this story. I liked him so much, I gave him his own trilogy. This story is book 2 of the trilogy. At the moment it is only 32,000 words, so it needs quite a bit of work.

Fiendling

Book 3. I wrote this for NaNoWriMo 2008. Like my first NaNo attempt, I got to 50,000 words and just stopped. I stopped in the middle of a sentence, no less. This book is half written, and it is terrible. It is probably the worst 50,000 words I have ever written. I imagine I’ll be tearing it to pieces and rewriting 95% of it. The good thing is that rewriting Artificer has given me loads of ideas for this book. So I’m actually enthusiastic about getting to it – after I’ve done some serious work with Familiar.

2000 and Beyond (Before?)

I’ve also been working on a thief/magic adventure since I was about 12. I’d written about 10,000 words when I lost the file and had to start again. I did start again, and wrote 4,000 new, better words. I imagine I’ll be rewriting the whole thing again, though. I actually think it needs a whole new re-imagining. It think it’s a bit too straight-forward as it is at the moment. I’ve come to be wary of ‘quest-type’ fantasies (it’s easy to fall into clichés with them), and this was ‘quest’ at it’s most unimaginative.

So there you have it. My writing life all neat and summed up.

I’m not sure if there will be a post next week. I’m going away and can’t guarantee I’ll be at a computer / have the inspiration to write.

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category: thoughts, writing

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Worldbuilding, or Lack Of

- by ria, on Wednesday, 11th August 2010, 3:39pm

I think my series on pre-production is coming to an end. They were fun to write and I’ll have to keep them in mind as I head into draft 2 of book2 (which will be happening sometime soon – I’ve already started a very rough outline). But just for the record, I would like to write a quick note on worldbuilding.

Learning things the hard way

Don’t tell any agents or publishers, but I don’t really do any worldbuilding. When I started draft 1 of book 1 (I’m currently on draft 3 of book 1, just so we’re all straight) I had a 16 page outline that set out everything that was going to happen in the plot. I had a very vague idea of what the world was like, I knew there were planes (dimensions of reality) and portals but that was pretty much it.

As I wrote the first few chapters, I let the world build itself around the story. If I needed a forest, there was a forest. If I needed a city, there was a city. It was pretty haphazard, and I think it led to quite a shallow world. I still feel this way. My book is not about the world, it’s about the characters and the adventure. By the end of draft 1, the setting was all over the place, because I’d put no thought into it. A lot of the rewrites in draft 2 compacted the world and solidified the magic system.

That’s why drafts are essential for me, even though they are time consuming. If I had everything set from the start it would save me a lot of effort. But my brain doesn’t work that way. I can’t come up with a whole world,because I don’t know what my world will need and what it won’t need. Between drafts 1 and 2, I did a bit of worldbuilding. I came up with cultures, places, professions, etc. But it was all a bit superfluous, because none of it made it into draft 2.

So, I still have a lot to learn about worldbuilding. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

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category: pre-production, writing

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Drafts and Edits, Edits and Drafts

- by ria, on Friday, 28th May 2010, 8:15pm

As you may have noticed from the sidebar, I am half way through draft 3, so editing is on my mind. And since I’m thinking about it a lot, I figured I’d write a post about it. You’d think the first post containing actual helpful content would have something to do with setting up for writing – creating characters, world building – but no. I like to do things a bit different.

Anyway. Editing and the sequence of drafts.
When I was younger, I thought the difference between the first and second drafts was that the second draft had been spell-checked, sentences flowed nicely. The second draft was just the first draft but easier to read. That was before I actually sat down and wrote a first draft. That was when my writing had been confined to ‘essays’ and short stories. Safe and dull little pieces that weren’t long enough, or complex enough, to develop plot holes.

Enter the novel written over seven months, four continents, and numerous A4 pads and I quickly realised the editing would need quite a bit more than just a proofread. It would need a second draft. This was when I figured out that a draft is not just fixing up the language, it is changing the plot, characters, setting in order to convey the story I wanted to tell.

Each draft, I have learned, is significantly different from the one previous. Draft 2 of my novel was about 80% different from draft 1. I removed and rewrote most of the thing, keeping only a few paragraphs that contained the essence of the story. I completely changed the world and the races in it. So while the setting was similar, most chapters had to be rewritten to reflect the changes. Draft 3 is the same, though not as drastic. Only about 10% has been rewritten, this draft involves writing new content – better descriptions, deepening the characters and setting, working on pacing (a post for another day – pacing is a beast I have yet to tame).

You might think, ‘Well, I’m organised. I know what my world is like, and how my characters work.’ I promise you, 100,000 words and a good few months from now, that will change. And if it doesn’t you might want to leave it alone for a year, come back to it and see if it does. Because, in my experience (which is pretty limited, I will give you that), the first draft is usually made up of the first idea that came into your head as you wrote. Your characters have some cool attributes, some cool swag, now you need them to get into some sort of adventure. So you work something out, probably put a lot of thought into it, but you can’t possibly know all the twists and turns. As you write, more ideas will come to you. Better ideas. The ending might need set-up or foreshadow earlier on that you didn’t know about when you wrote the first draft. You might need a new character to fill in a role that you didn’t plan for. Loads can happen over 100,000 words.

So what I am saying is: go into your first draft knowing it will change. Write it like it doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t. Anywhere between 50 and 90% will be trashed and rewritten anyway. Use this inherent attribute of the first draft to have fun. Play around with it. You have more freedom at this stage than anywhere else in the novel-writing process. And when it comes time to start on the second draft, look at what you have, cut anything that doesn’t feel 100% good to you, and come up with a better idea. And again, write like it doesn’t matter (but try to stay true to your core idea / story). You can keep coming up with better ideas in the next draft.

It is not until the final draft, until you are 100% sure of everything on every page, that you can start editing for language. Do not tidy up one sentence or trim one paragraph until you are very sure that you will be keeping it. Because there is nothing worse than having to cut a perfectly worded sentence, one you slaved over to get just right. Wait until the final draft to polish, and you can keep all your gems.

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category: writing

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