Tag: What I’ve learned

The joy of worldbuilding

When I was a kid, I used to spend hours dreaming up imaginary civilizations and writing their histories (I stumbled upon one of these histories recently and noticed that, in its unfinished state, it was just a little bit shorter than my Master’s thesis!).  I would take bits and pieces from the real world civilizations I was reading about and combine them into fantastic shapes.  It would be scant exaggeration to say that I spent most of my childhood immersed in these fantastic realms.

All that ended up being good practice for fantasy writing.  Even though my stories are all set in the ‘real world,’ the presence of magical elements allows me to do a lot of worldbuilding.  Usually, it’s in the form of a system of magic or the backstory that shapes the events I’m writing about.

While worldbuilding is a lot of fun, you have to be careful because there’s always a strong temptation to fill your writing with all the delicious details of the world you’ve created.  An egregious example of this would by H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness.  The story is chugging along fine (at least by Lovecraft standards) until the protagonists enter the ruined Antarctic city of the Old Ones.  Then, the reader is forced to endure pages and pages of the narrator telling you about the history and society of the Old Ones, as gleaned from their wall decoration.  (The idea that human scientists could divine that much information about the Old Ones from their wall carvings strikes me as ludicrous.  We have a hard enough time interpreting ancient Egyptian art, let alone the art of an alien civilization!)  It’s not even that the material is necessarily boring; it’s just that such a lengthy digression dissipates the atmosphere of suspense.

J. K Rowling, on the other hand, is much better at working her worldbuilding into her writing.  She does an excellent job of hinting at the details that underly the story without going off on tangents about the parliamentary procedure used in the Wizengamot or the relationship between Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw during the interwar years.  Rowling realized, unlike Lovecraft, that you need to keep the story going without bogging the reader down in endless minutiae.

Revisions done, for now

Last night, I finished making my revisions to AToB.  Not only am I seventeen days ahead of schedule, but I’m happy to report that the revision process wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it would be.  It wasn’t as fun as the original writing, but it wasn’t the hours and hours of drudgery I’d been dreading.

I’m really glad I took the time and effort to make the corrections in longhand first.  Putting them into Word forced me to reevaluate each one of them and there were a number of occasions where I decided that the original text was better than the revision.

Now AToB is ready to enter the beta stage.  I’ve lined up a diverse group of beta readers and I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to say about it.

While they’re diligently reading, I’ll be shifting gears and jumping into my Egyptian project.  I’m going to start off with a short story set during the tomb robberies in the reign of Ramesses IX.  I also have several ideas for the main novel, which will probably take place several decades later in the reign of Ramesses XI.  I have a feeling that this building is going to play a significant role in the plot:

Moving right along

Last night, I finished making the longhand corrections to A Theft of Bones, thus completing Stage 1 of the revision process.  I’ll admit that I was a bit wary of printing out the manuscript and making the corrections by hand, but, in retrospect, I made the right decision.  There’s a real difference between reading something on the page and reading it on a computer screen, and I find that the former is much more conducive to the business of editing and revision.

The downside, of course, is that it does create more work since I now have to go back into Word and type in the changes.  I think of this as Stage 2 of the revision process because I’ll also be revising my revisions, so to speak.  But when it’s over, I should have a tight, clean manuscript that I can ship off to my beta readers with confidence.

Once my beta readers have returned the manuscript to me, I’ll be able to embark on Stage 3, the final stage of the process.  That’s when I go through and make the changes my beta readers have suggested.  I’m going to try very hard to stop revising after that.  It would be easy to continue revising ad nauseam, but at some point you need to close your eyes, take the plunge, and get your work out there.

I’ve been giving some thought to what I want my next project to be.  I have ideas for more Andrew-related novels, but, since they’re continuations of the story told in AToB, I don’t want to start work on them until I know whether AToB will be published.  If it’s not, I’ll have to modify their plots accordingly.

Instead of working on anything Andrew-related, I think I may try my hand at an alternate history set toward the end of pharaonic Egypt.  I have some ideas for a hero and a plot, but they’re still vague at this point since I’m trying to keep myself focused on AToB.  I’ve started a writing journal for this project and I can’t wait to see what kind of ideas take root there!

Shifting gears

Last spring, I took a break from my WIP and wrote a short story involving the novel’s antagonist.  I submitted the story to my writers’ group and, while it received generally favorable comments, one member made a particularly trenchant criticism: he said that my writing was too academic.

What he meant was that I had unknowingly structured my story much like a paper.  I started out with a ‘thesis’ and the rest of the story consisted of the ‘proofs.’  Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for suspense and, consequently, the story kind of plodded along.

That incident taught me that I’d have to unlearn (or at least ignore) a lot of the writing skills I’d picked up in grad school.  In academia, you’re supposed to make your point as clearly and concisely as possible with a minimum of obfuscation (though I’ve read many articles where that wasn’t the case!).  But in fiction writing, you must delight in deception in order to build a sense of suspense in the reader.  Instead of giving them a road map, you’re often giving them vague or even misleading directions.

As I work through the revisions of my WIP, I’m on the lookout for any instances of ‘academic’ writing.  Thankfully, I haven’t found any yet, so perhaps I learned my lesson.