World Building

OK, so I really suck at world building. For any who aren't aware, world building is what they call the process of developing the setting for a novel. If your novel is set in modern day Chicago, your world building is pretty easy to do. If you aren't familiar with Chicago, you might have some research to do, but then I would wonder why you chose to use that as your setting.

But, if you, like I do, choose to set your novels in some sort of fantastical place, you will need to take some time to determine what that place is like. I have read lots of great fantasy and sci-fi novels where the authors were amazing at world building. They create a deep and intricate, while still internally consistent, history and culture for their world.

In the process of world building you'll need to answer lots of questions ranging from the big picture: what is the climate like? what is the class structure like? what is the politics/ruling structure like? what are the rules of physics that must be obeyed? all the way down to minute, persnickety details like: what is the form of currency called? what naming convention is used for towns, streets, countries?  

As you may have guessed from my use of the word 'persnickety' I find answering these types of questions kind of boring. I'm more of a leap into the writing process and then find out what is important type. But, if you're going to write a fantasy-type novel (and by that I mean pretty much anything that isn't set in a purely realistic setting), you need to at least do some thinking. And the big reason for this is that phrase I used before...no not persnickety, 'internally consistent'. 

For a world to be believable, it must be internally consistent. I think this applies to any type of world building, whether you're writing a novel, working on a role-playing campaign, or just day dreaming. In any type of fantasy world there have to be rules and these rules have to be consistent. If superman is weakened by kryptonite, he has to always be weakened by kryptonite. And, if there is going to be a situation where he is going to have to be around kryptonite, but he can't be weakened, you need to come up with an...say it with me now...internally consistent reason why not.  Maybe he's shielded by lead? Or, maybe it's underwater? Or, maybe he just doesn't look at it and thus discovers that it is the sight of kryptonite and not its presence that bothers him? Whatever you decide, will work as long as it's consistent from one end of the story to the other. He had to have specifically looked at the kryptonite every other time, or you're going to lose your readers in an instant. I know, because I've been that reader many times.

But, beyond just not wanting to sit down and answer all of these questions at once, I also had difficulties with conveying the information that I did have in my story.  That sounds complicated, so I'll give an example. How often do you sit around your house, or in the middle of some exciting adventure, and think, "I live in the  United States of America, which is an electoral democracy. The President of the United States is the main guy in charge, but his power is limited by two other branches of government. This type of governmental control was put into place by the founders of this country because..."? No, really, how often does anyone think like that? Like never, that's how often.  So why would my characters?

So, now that I have spent the time deciding that my world is a temperate world, with a medieval type caste system, ruled by a feudal structure led by a king, the currency is gold, silver, and copper pieces, and the towns are named similar to Anglo Saxon styles, how do I get my character to convey that information to the reader?

I like to write very much from a characters perspective, so I don't do much from the perspective of the author/narrator, but maybe I'm going to have to. That would allow the readers to know this information, but I'm worried that it would be too dry. So, I guess I'll just have to experiment and see what works.

I'm thinking that I'll start editing Demon Knight next week, so my next post may be the first chapter of the second draft. Hopefully I'll have more luck editing it this time than I did before.  In the meantime, Beyzl is going to sit for a bit. I think taking some time to work on another project while that just stews and simmers for a little bit will be good for it, because the flavors always get better if you let them sit and blend together for a bit.

Characters

I have a friend who is reading Demon Knight and providing me feedback as he goes. He is the first person to provide feedback on any of my writing, really since college. So, it is kind of interesting. The things he is pointing out are things that I already knew were issues, generally, but I think it will be helpful to have someone else tell me what they saw that needs to be changed.

One of the biggest pieces of feedback that he has given (and admittedly he is only about a third of the way through the book so far) is that my secondary characters are interesting and vivid, but that my main characters seem more boring. Unlike some of the other feedback that he had to give (none of which was particularly harsh or at all undeserved) this wasn't at all hard for me to hear. My reaction was pretty much, "Yep."

I've noticed this phenomenon in my role playing as well. A character that only has to fill one particular niche can have all sorts of quirks and foibles. And let's face it, its the foibles that make a character lovable. One time I had an NPC that I created who was a dwarf, but the dwarves were at war, so all of their powerful magic users were out at the front lines, so I decided this would be the loser dwarf who was really only getting through magic school because he didn't have any competition, and he didn't really have any teachers to fail him anyway. He turned out to be a great character.

My players actually liked him so much that one of them decided to use him as a PC for his next character. What I thought was strange, though, was that this NPC had only been made to fill a very small part of their campaign. In fact, in all honesty, I think I spent less than 5 minutes coming up with the entire character, including the back story and quite a bit of hemming and hawing about his name. It ended up being Heinrich.

On the other hand, though, when a character has to have three fully fleshed dimensions, when it has to be able to fit into any situation that I want to throw at it, I find that those edges get worn off. That they become more...bland, I guess is a good word. They go closer to the middle.

So, how does one have a main character, who has to be able to be sympathetic for the reader and has to be well rounded so that they can deal with any situation, while still having them be memorable and have quirks? I don't really know for sure, but I think I achieved something like this with Jasin, one of my characters from Beyzl.

He is technically probably the 'hero' to Beyzl's heroine, but since it isn't really that kind of story, I think of him as more of a slightly less prominent main character. He is dark and brooding, one of his quirks, but he is also emotional and passionate. I think the trick is to determine what those quirks are going to be from the beginning and stick with them. Honestly, that's probably what works for the side characters, too. It's just that with them, I generally start with the quirk (You know what would be funny? A dwarf mage who's really crappy at magic!), while with the main characters I generally start with the more heroic parts of their personality (So, for this story I need a powerful sorceress who falls in love with a dragon.).

So, going forward, I guess what I need to do is have as part of my story prep, before I even get started, one or two personality traits that make that character distinctive. And, wouldn't it be great if those traits went completely against the conflict that they are going to have to resolve!?!  (I need a personality trait for the warrior who is going to take down the entire undead army...how about making him a pacifist!)

Theme

I finished Beyzl during NaNoWriMo! I actually finished a few days early and have been taking some time off to relax since then. Since I am most productive on the weekends, I had three 3,000+ word days over Thanksgiving weekend and knocked out the rest. The total story ended up at just over 50,000 words, but I think there is some filling out that I need to go back and do at the beginning. At least, I can remember having the thought that I need to go back and add stuff. But, I didn't take notes, so I hope I remember what I was thinking about.

What I wanted to talk about today is Theme. Writing the end of Beyzl brought up some interesting things about the theme I had in mind. For anyone that doesn't know, theme is basically the general point of a story, the 'moral', if you will. I'll take an example from a well known story. The novel "Watership Down" is told from the perspective of a group of rabbits whose home is destroyed. So, they travel and face many hardships in order to find a new safe home. But, once they get there, they realize that almost all of the rabbits are male, so they make forays out to find some female rabbits to join them so they can have a long lasting, safe home. In the end, this is an allegorical tale about the importance of home and safety. That would be the Theme of this story.

As you can probably see, theme is often a little bit of a fuzzy concept. I might interpret a story's theme a little different than someone else, and it generally isn't 'hit you over the head' obvious. Unlike in an Aesop's fable where it's written out at the end.

In fact, from what I've gathered, most writers don't write with a theme in mind. They come up with a plot or character first, and then write the story and see what theme emerges. I generally don't work that way. For me, the theme is kind of the point of writing. I don't always start with the theme, but figuring it out and exploring it during my outlining is an integral part of my process. And, it helps me to know what it is during my writing, because if I get lost or don't know what to do next, the theme can be like a signpost telling me which direction I should head.

When I first came up with the concept for Beyzl, I didn't have a theme in mind. I just had a story that I wanted to tell and a character that I wanted to get to know.  So, I spent some time thinking about what it would be. I finally latched onto the idea that it would be about a girl realizing that she was strong enough to depend on herself. But, when I worked on the outline I found that I had lots of scenes about my characters betraying each other, not trusting each other, or having to trust each other despite the earlier betrayal. So, I thought that maybe the theme would be more around trust and how it can be fragile and hard to develop, but is absolutely necessary to get through some things.

I decided to run with that and got almost all of the way through my rough draft, getting to the climactic scenes, before I ran into real issues with it. Well, that's not exactly true. I had difficulty writing Beyzl as not being trusting. In my mind, she's just an open kind of person, but I tried to lay the betrayal on hard so that she would have a reason to not want to trust. But, in those climactic scenes, I ran across a couple of other possible themes that I think might be a better fit. The first is the idea that a single insignificant person can make a big difference in a big system. And, the second is the importance of 'home' to someone who's never had one.

The first one I think will play a bigger role in the sequel, so I don't think I'm going to focus on it too much, but I would like to leave the seeds of it in there. But, I really like the second one. It feels like something I can sink my teeth into. So, what does that mean? That means that when I start doing my revisions, I'll need to work that into my story from the beginning, rather than just having it show up in the last few pages. But, I think that will tie it together much better than the idea of trust did.

Endings

It's been a few days since my last post, and I've made some progress on Beyzl. I'm up to 47,000 words as of today. Because of the long weekend, I set myself the goal to write 3,000 words each day this weekend, so I'm hoping to finish the NaNo 50,000 words tomorrow.

Today's 3,000 words were particularly tough. From writing Demon Knight last year, I remember that writing the end of the story is harder than writing the beginning. In my last post, I think, I wrote that the hardest part is starting a new project, but what I've found is that when you get past that first hurdle, the first part of the story is easy to write. I think of it in terms of chemistry (because I'm a bit of a science nerd). In a chemical reaction, there's an energy cost that has to be met to start the reaction, then once you get over that bump, the reaction runs at lower energy. What a catalyst does is it lowers the height of that first energy bump. If I can find a picture, maybe I'll add it in here:

So, NaNoWriMo works like a catalyst for me. It helps me get over the first energy requirement to get the reaction started. Then, from there the first part of the story goes easily. But, as the story goes on, I find it gets harder and harder to get the words out. Part of that is because I lose some of the excitement and energy that comes with starting a new project. But, I think part of that is because as the story goes on, I get more and more boxed in.

I think of it kind of like...I guess like a tree, or something like that. When you start, there are lots and lots of branches, and you're close to the edge, so you can do just about anything you want. But, as you go further and further in, there are fewer and fewer options, until you end up at the trunk with nowhere to go but straight down to the ground. Plus, you've got to keep track of everything that you've done up until then.

At the beginning you get to make all of the choices--what color are her eyes, what style of dress does she wear, what am I going to name this town. But by the end of the story, you have to remember what all of those choices were. He gazes down into her eyes, were they green or brown? She lifts the hem of her dress to step over a log, or did I make her skirt shorter so that she wouldn't have that problem? They return to the bustling metropolis of...what was that again?

But, even without those issues, the last few scenes seem to be the hardest for me to write. I have to be sure that I get it all right. They are the main purpose to read a book. Right? No one picks up a book and really enjoys the first few chapters, but is OK if the last part is crappy. Heck, I've read books, and loved books, where the first part was terrible, but it really picked up at the end and was really good. So, writing the end of a story brings with it a terrible onus. A requirement to be at least as good as everything else so far (along with maintaining the energy and the continuity) but preferably better.

With all of that, I can kind of understand authors who write their stories out of order. I could see why someone would write the last scene or scenes first. But, I just don't think I could ever do that. As much trouble as it is, I really enjoy the journey from beginning to end. And, I think if I wrote the end first, I would end up shoehorn-ing the story to fit this perfect ending that I have in my head.

In my method, I know kind of where I want to go, but I allow it to change and flux as I write. If another character decides he wants to come along, too. Why not? If the main character decides that she wants to have a crisis of faith and breakdown in the middle of the story, completely changing my intended theme. Well, I guess I can roll with that.

In the end (no pun intended, but it is kind of funny), it all leads up to what I hope with be a believable and exciting finale for my story, which I'm hoping to write tomorrow.

Beyzl Inspiration

Had a good weekend. Wrote almost 5,000 words today alone, and about 2,000 yesterday. I was going to stop after 2,000, but then I thought about the carrot that I've put out there for myself and decided to keep writing. Last year during NaNo, I set the reward that I'd get a Starbuck's Chai every 10,000 words, and that worked pretty good. I'd planned on doing the same thing this year, but I never seem to make it into Joplin when I'm due for one. So, I'm now at 36,000 words and I haven't had a Chai yet. Strange.

But, this year I've set myself a reward for finishing. Or more accurately it's more of a punishment for not finishing. There's an ebook series that I'm crazy about right now (the Touchstone Series by Andrea K. Host), and the last book is due to come out on November 25. I know that if I buy it on the 25th, I won't get any other writing done until I finish it, so I've made the deal with myself that I have to finish my 50,000 words before I can buy it. If that takes me longer than December 1st, so be it. But, I'm kind of hoping that I'll be able to get to it sooner rather than later.

I also thought I'd talk about the inspiration for Beyzl in this post. I first had the idea over a year ago. In fact, I thought about writing it for last year's NaNo, but something about the story made me not want to have it be my first novel. I've heard that authors get a lot better the more they write, so I wanted to be better than I was for it. I'm still not sure if I'm good enough, but I also didn't want to put it off any longer, so I'm working on it now.

The idea came to me in a dream. Isn't that a cliche? But, it's true. The dream had mostly been about the feeling of being chased. And, I can remember that I had stolen something and was being chased by the guards of the person I had stolen from. Then I hid the item that I had stolen and went to meet an older woman who reminded me of my mom. Then I recovered the item and returned to the place I had stolen it from and confronted the person there.

Looking back, I guess part of it was more of a nightmare, huh? The strongest parts were the hiding parts. But, I guess that's what makes something stay with you. When I woke up from the dream, I quickly wrote down the general outline of the story:
Girl steal something from someone powerful (I made it a queen)
Girl has to run and hide
Girl meets a 'hermit/teacher' type who trains her in the use of her abilities
Girl returns to the queen

The outline has gone through some changes since then. The biggest is that I have been having trouble finding a really good reason for why she would go back. I need a really good reason for why she has to, something with good (read terrible) consequences if she doesn't. Currently, I'm having her attempt to retrieve the daughter of the 'teacher' type from the queen's control, but I'm not sure if I'll keep that. It'll be a shame to have to rework the whole story, since that's the driver for like the whole last half, but I just don't know if it's a strong enough motivation.

Introduction: Part 2

In my last post I promised that I would get to the "getting to know me" stuff next, so here we go.

My name is Sarah, and I am planning to use the pseudonym Sarah J. Halter for my writing. I'm not using a pseudonym because I want to hide who I am, or anything like that. It's just that my real name is kind of hard to pronounce, and I thought that changing it a little would be a little more marketable. Of course, it's possible that I will change my mind at some point, and this whole paragraph will seem a little silly in the future.

I currently live in Carthage, MO, and my day job is working for a food production company that you've probably never heard of, unless you also live in Carthage, MO. I enjoy living in a smaller town, but I really appreciate that we are within fairly easy driving distance of Joplin, which is big enough to have plenty of restaurant options and a mall. But, I do sometimes wish that we had a Starbucks here in town.

I am married but don't have any children yet. I do, however, have two dogs that probably think they are part of the family. My family lives down in Arkansas, just an hour's drive or so. And my husband's family is up in Wisconsin. Since the company I work for is based out of Green Bay, Wisconsin, we've kind of thought that we would eventually move back up to Green Bay and be closer to his family, but that will depend on what happens with my job.

For my writing history, I used to write a lot when I was kid all the way up through college. Looking back I seemed to be a fan of rather heavy-handed morality tales featuring some form of sentient or anthropomorphic animal. One of my favorites was a story about a flying horse that discovered the joy of exploration, but also the comfort of returning home, that I wrote some time around second grade. I illustrated it and everything. It was really cute. :-)

Since graduating from college, I've been mostly wrapped up in my 'real' life, and I've been too busy to even think about writing. Then, last year I first looked into NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org). It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November.

I'd heard about NaNoWriMo vaguely in the past, but I'd never really paid much attention to it, because it always seemed like I only heard about it from 'real' writers, so I assumed it wasn't anything that I should concern myself about. Then, last year, some of my regular friends were talking about it, talking about how they had tried it, or won it, in the past. So, I started thinking, if they can do it, why can't I?

Last year, was the first year that I tried NaNo, and I won, writing 50,000 words and some change on a manuscript titled "Demon Knight". It's a fantasy romance about a girl who gets possessed by a demon and falls in love with the knight who is sent to kill her. Unfortunately, for that style of novel, 50,000 words was only about half of the story, so I spent the next 9 months finishing up the rough draft, and in August/September I finally got to write "The End". The finished rough draft is just shy of 100,000 words.

That put me pretty close to this year's NaNo, so I did a quick clean up edit through the manuscript, just looking for really obvious typos and strange phrasings, and sent it out to some of my friends to read and offer advice on. Then, I started outlining for this year's NaNo.  Going forward, I think I'll do NaNo every year, because it seems to work really well at motivating me and giving me a good deadline to work for. Plus, like I'm sure many other authors have found, starting a new project seems to be the hardest part. Once you get going, it's sitting there staring at you from that computer screen, going, "Why aren't you working on me?" pouting like a child. But at the beginning it's just an idea in your head and it's easy to ignore. So, I think NaNo does a good job of making me get started.

This year, I am working on a new novel currently titled "Beyzl: Gem Maiden". It is a YA fantasy novel about a girl who is raised to use her supernatural abilities for the government, but then finds that the government is corrupt and runs away. Then, she has to decide if she will return and fight the corruption or if she will just settle for an easy life of obscurity. At least, that's what I think it's about at this point. Currently, I'm at about 30,000 words, and about halfway through the plot. So, it is quite likely that it will change as I keep writing. Stories seem to do that.

So, now that we're through the introductions, my plan is to post updates as I write and edit each of these first two manuscripts. Then, I'll give you the opportunity to follow along with the progress of my career as it continues, hopefully in a wonderful and spectacular way. :-)

Introduction: Part 1

 I imagine it's pretty typical to start these things with an introduction, but I thought I'd save that for the next post and instead start with talking about why I'm starting this blog, focusing mostly why I'm starting it now.

Since I started on my first manuscript last year, I've been thinking about what I would need to do once/if I get published. One thing I thought of was starting a blog. They seem like popular ways for authors to communicate with their readers, and I've found that I enjoy the personal connection that they allow.

However, when I started looking around at blogs, especially those by other authors, when I found one I liked, I found that I like to go look at the older posts and see what's been going on and get a feel for if I'm interested in following. So, I thought it might be a good idea to have some past content available before I start publicizing, or even telling anyone about this. :-)

Also, I thought about what sort of posts I would be interested in reading from an author. For me, personally, that would be posts about the writing process. I'm interested in how their ideas were formed, what their inspiration was, or what their writing process looks like. So, I thought it might be more interesting for my future readers, whoever you turn out to be, to get the chance to learn about my process as I'm writing, rather than just my random ramblings after I'm done.

So, with those two main reasons in mind, I'm all set to start up this blog. So, here we go. Next, I'll post a 'getting to know me' post, then I'll go forward with talking about why, how, and what I'm writing as I write it, more or less. I hope that it turns out to be interesting to someone...someday. :-)