Watcha Writin'?

[Valka D'Ur]

My story didn't place at all in the contest, which I guess is not unexpected, since I made edits after submitting that I think made it better. Somehow, I still feel kinda disappointed, though. Maybe this is a sign that there isn't any hope for the story.

What about you?

Dune was rejected by over a dozen publishers before Frank Herbert found one. It went on to gain an amazing legacy for FH.

In other words: Don't give up.

 

[Zkribbler]

Have you seen the movie "Maid in Manhattan"?

I own the DVD. Why?

My story didn't place at all in the contest, which I guess is not unexpected...
What about you?

Nope, struck out. But I'm not shocked because I wrote a Douglas Adams pastiche. which means I used Douglas Adams' "world," which is technically a violation on the rules.

Beginning next month, I'll be working on a new draft of "Come Hither, Springtime." Submissions end for the next contest in two months.

Submitting stories is like playing major league baseball. If you hit 3 for 10, you're one of the best batters in the league.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I own the DVD. Why?

She's a cleaning maid with dreams...

 

[Birdjaguar]

I just finished book 2 in Linnea Hartsuyker's viking trilogy. When I sought out info on book three I found this page about her writing process and thought that the writers out there might find it useful or interesting. The Half-Drowned King was her first book; the Sea Queen her second, so she is just beginning her career. Both books were excellent and I am looking forward to the next.

https://www.linneahartsuyker.com/2017/01/i-started-book-3-and-other-news/

 

[Zkribbler]

Thanks for the link. I especially found helpful the idea for adjusting words/day goals. I either don't have any or have them set in concrete. This new way is better.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I just finished book 2 in Linnea Hartsuyker's viking trilogy. When I sought out info on book three I found this page about her writing process and thought that the writers out there might find it useful or interesting. The Half-Drowned King was her first book; the Sea Queen her second, so she is just beginning her career. Both books were excellent and I am looking forward to the next.

https://www.linneahartsuyker.com/2017/01/i-started-book-3-and-other-news/

A few weeks ago I started working on Book 3, The Golden Wolf, which I think is going to be harder than Book 2–it covers more time, and has two separate climaxes. The beginning is certainly hard. I haven’t settled into a routine yet. I have some new POV characters and I’m not sure what’s going on with them. My previous POV characters are older and more settled but they still need to grow and change. It’s taking a little longer to get into this book than the last one…I think. I’m not sure. It’s hard to compare.

This time my process for getting it off the ground is:

1. Put all the major historical and narratively necessary events/proposed chapters into Aeon Timeline. So far that’s 25 items. The previous two books have 39 and 38 chapters, so I know there will be more, stemming from various subplots. Create those chapters in Scrivener as well. (Aeon and Scrivener work very well together.)
2. Start writing 500 words a day. This is a pretty small number of daily words. The main point is to put my mind in the world and characters; it is not as much about making forward progress.
3. Do a lot of longhand writing in my notebook to ask myself questions about plot and characters and answering them. I find this incredibly helpful at any stage in the process. Whenever I feel slightly stuck or blah about characters or story lines, I write to myself about them longhand. I will write down, “Why am I bored of character X’s story line?” and then write down anything that comes to mind as an answer. I can’t recommend doing this enough.
4. Recently I upped my daily word-count goal to 1000 words a day. This is still pretty small, but it’s important to me to end each writing day with a lot of energy and enthusiasm for the next day, and that means stopping well before I’m written-out. I think next week I will up it to 1500 words. I max out at 2000 or so.
5. At this stage I’m still working on whatever story lines and POVs that seem the most fun, to keep my momentum going. At some point I will end up working more linearly. Still, the previous book, the first chapters were some of the most vague, written later, rearranged frequently.

These are things I already do. There hasn't been a day since last November when I haven't written something on my story, and most of those days have had several hundred words. I still write longhand notes in a notebook, because there are times when a conversation between two characters will pop into my head and I need to get it written down now before I forget it. The point about not "writing yourself out" is critical. There have been days when I could have done more for NaNoWriMo, but I chose to stop at a certain point because I knew it would be a kickstart for the next day, to already know where I was going to begin. One of the keys to successfully completing NaNoWriMo is pacing yourself.

Putting yourself into the setting and minds of the characters, asking yourself questions and answering them, etc. are now daily habits I've acquired. Even in this alternative version I've been working on, I have to answer some critical plot points about an original setting and original characters that were never in the game this story is based on. Artifex Mundi/Cordelia games developers have no advice to offer about King Osric or the internal politics of the Kingdom of Ravensmoor as it relates to the Kingdom of Griffinvale, because King Osric and Ravensmoor are my original inventions. I have to consider the in-game characters and setting of Griffinvale and how they would logically interact with this new setting and collection of characters (or illogically; fortunately one of the villains is psycho, so I can write her over-the-top nuts at times with a little bit of inconsistency, since even in the game she can't decide whether or not she wants to really kill the heroes - even though she made a sincere effort at it prior to the last chapter).

 

[Zkribbler]

Yeah, I know I said:

Hrumph!

I'm getting awfully tired of wrestling with novels. Around the 2/3 - 3/4 point they just grind down and halt.

My head still agrees with this, but my heart insists on novels.

From my time-travel fraud story "Bethlehem Delictum," I've taken my near-future world and my main character and have now started With Charity for None (a Gabriel Santos Thriller). I'm about 1/2 way done with chapter one [1450 words].

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yeah, I know I said:



My head still agrees with this, but my heart insists on novels.

From my time-travel fraud story "Bethlehem Delictum," I've taken my near-future world and my main character and have now started With Charity for None (a Gabriel Santos Thriller). I'm about 1/2 way done with chapter one [1450 words].

That's what a lot of prolific authors do. They use their characters and settings in other ways.

I'm continuing to explore the culture clash my main character is going through in the alt-history version of Kingmaker. As MZB pointed out in one of her Darkover novels (about an Earthman who marries into one of the families in the Darkovan nobility), it's often not the major differences that really get to a person, but the smaller, everyday things that are different. Customs and mores you think are normal by your own standards and therefore should be normal everywhere, suddenly aren't. And then you have to adjust.

Or not. There are consequences for refusing to adjust, as my character is finding out.

 

[Patine]

What am I writing? A lot of run-on sentences (which I'm sure a lot of people have witnessed in my posts here) - a habit I have to break myself of if I'm to write anything serious. Also, the ideas for my fictional settings, characters, and plots need to be gotten into an order that's actually presentable, coherent, and sensible to more than just me and a friend of mine since Elementary School (30 years or so) I've been creatively collaborating with.

 

[Zkribbler]

... the ideas for my fictional settings, characters, and plots need to be gotten into an order that's actually presentable, coherent, and sensible to more than just me and a friend ...

Wait I'm confused. Are these all fragments from the same story, or are these various fragments of innumerable stories?

 

[Patine]

Wait I'm confused. Are these all fragments from the same story, or are these various fragments of innumerable stories?

The latter that I aspire to forge into the former.

 

[Zkribbler]

The latter that I aspire to forge into the former.

I quickly see two potential remedies:

A character arc for your main character, in which he begins with a crippling personality flaw, and which he battles throughout the story, overcoming it at the story's climax.

A theme for your story. For example, in With Charity for None, my main character just raged against those members of the economic elite who believe themselves above the law and who prey on the poor and the weak. It's already clear that he will spend this story exposing them and bringing them down.

 

[Patine]

I quickly see two potential remedies:

A character arc for your main character, in which he begins with a crippling personality flaw, and which he battles throughout the story, overcoming it at the story's climax.

A theme for your story. For example, in With Charity for None, my main character just raged against those members of the economic elite who believe themselves above the law and who prey on the poor and the weak. It's already clear that he will spend this story exposing them and bringing them down.

Except that I use the ensemble cast technique, like War and Peace, Game of Thrones, or most soap operas. I don't have a definite, clear, actual "main" character, per se.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Except that I use the ensemble cast technique, like War and Peace, Game of Thrones, or most soap operas. I don't have a definite, clear, actual "main" character, per se.

So write about several, and sooner or later you'll discover which ones interest you the most and which ones can be downgraded to secondary and tertiary-level supporting characters.

It helps to have a list of characters. For instance, in my Kingmaker notes I've listed people according to which noble house they belong (that gets a bit confusing for the characters who intermarry with another house or who discover that oops, they're not who they thought they were and were in fact born with a completely different identity; fortunately there's only one of those). For the commoners, I've listed them more in terms of geographic location, loyalties, and occupations.

Some characters have similar names (or the same names; I've created multiple characters named "Daisy" for instance - one is a farmer's daughter, one is an assistant cook, and the third is actually several generations of ewes born on a particular farm). To add to the confusion, the assistant cook character is only present in the alternative version I was working on for Camp NaNoWriMo; the others are part of the original version that's closer to the computer game.

There actually is a reason for identical or similar names. It's like in RL there are many people with the same names. In my story I have two dukes with essentially the same name: Duke Stefan Pendleton of Ravensmoor (not quite the villain his son Robert is - who I've described before as a jerk but in the alternative version he crosses right over into villain territory), and Duke Stephan Westmore of Griffinvale (not very likeable but is more of a villain in the original version and more of an ally in the alternative version). They don't know each other, but in the alternative version they will meet (not sure yet whether they will get along; I suspect they won't).

I need to resist the temptation to delve into so many of my characters' backgrounds. It's like creating an NPC in a D&D game. The character should be more than just a collection of stats and source of extra hit points when you order him to fight for you, but you usually want them to at least have a name and motive for what they do. It's normal to leave the NPC as an NPC rather than elevate them to a PC. That said, some of the more interesting ones insist on being elevated anyway.

 

[Zkribbler]

Except that I use the ensemble cast technique, like War and Peace, Game of Thrones, or most soap operas. I don't have a definite, clear, actual "main" character, per se.

What is your story about?

BTW: I just found a great vlog on different ways to outline.

 

[Zkribbler]

From my time-travel fraud story "Bethlehem Delictum," I've taken my near-future world and my main character and have now started With Charity for None (a Gabriel Santos Thriller). I'm about 1/2 way done with chapter one [1450 words].

I got bogged down on a car-chase scene. It's rare for me to do these, and this one is on a little-traveled narrow highway, high up above the ocean. (Usually a car chase is in an urban environment, which leads to lots of near misses and car crashes.) But I finally fixed it.

Now I fret as I look ahead to the eventual ending. This is a legal thriller. Unless I can djinn up some kind of "You can't handle the truth!" confrontation, this might end up as exciting as jury duty.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Since my characters either walk or ride horses, I won't be having any car chases.

I suppose I could do something with boats or ships. After all, most of my characters live in a city situated on a vast lake, and I've decided that one of the supporting characters is going to be murdered (everyone thought his drowning was accidental, but when the main character meets him in the afterlife during a dream, he [the dead guy] informs his friend that he was murdered, and would his friend mind avenging his death already, since it's indirectly his fault the murder occurred in the first place? Thanks.).

Yes, the above is from my version of the post-game events of Kingmaker: Rise to the Throne, and refers back to some events that happened a couple of years before the game starts. It's from the original, not the alternate one I was working on during Camp NaNoWriMo.

 

[Patine]

Since my characters either walk or ride horses, I won't be having any car chases.

After all, most of my characters live in a city situated on a vast lake, and I've decided that one of the supporting characters is going to be murdered (everyone thought his drowning was accidental, but when the main character meets him in the afterlife during a dream, he [the dead guy] informs his friend that he was murdered, and would his friend mind avenging his death already, since it's indirectly his fault the murder occurred in the first place? Thanks.).

Like the speculation, even to this day, almost 1000 years later, over whether the sinking of the White Ship in the English King, and the Anglo-Norman King William II (William Rufus) and his rowdy, festive, drunk, and quite debauched passengers sinking along with it was just bad weather - or engineered by one of his many enemies in the Royal Court?

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Trying to write a fantasy novel, and it looks like I'll have to scrap or rework a quarter of what I have so far. I planned a 10 - 15 year time skip, but I'll have to scrap it because I can't synchonize the different plotlines in a way that doesn't seem forced.
Now I have to create and retroactivel insert a new major character and kill a five yar old girl.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Trying to write a fantasy novel, and it looks like I'll have to scrap or rework a quarter of what I have so far. I planned a 10 - 15 year time skip, but I'll have to scrap it because I can't synchonize the different plotlines in a way that doesn't seem forced.
Now I have to create and retroactivel insert a new major character and kill a five yar old girl.

It's sad when child characters have to be killed off. I'm trying to talk myself out of writing in a miscarriage for one of my characters (in the original version of my Kingmaker story, not the alternate one I started last month). But I need to put a female on the throne of Griffinvale to follow King Randall, since the game narration says he's the "last great King" and I didn't want the reason to be because his male descendants were inept (like in real history Henry V was a warrior-King and his son, Henry VI, was an idiot). So I'm opting for him to have a daughter become Queen by right of birth. That means no male heir, or at least not one who survives childhood.

This will also be very difficult for Queen Julia to deal with, and cause a rift in their marriage (I wish I could think of a different scenario, after all the effort of thinking up a way for them to marry in the first place that wasn't just a typical medieval-era arranged marriage with no emotional connection).