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Stick a fork in me, guys, because ...
... I'm done!
At 65,000 words, that's one (1) rough draft of an original YA fantasy novel. *lays down pen*
(Well, okay, I write on the computer mostly, but laying down the keyboard is a much less satisfying metaphor. Besides, I'm still typing on it. *g*)
It's not entirely done from start to finish; there's one key scene in the first third that's still a rough, skeletal outline -- I didn't have a firm enough grasp on either the characters or the magic system to write it at the time, which is just as well, because I would've had to completely rewrite it anyway. The ending also feels a bit abrupt; I think I need to add an epilogue to tie things off more smoothly.
And I'm not going to write those extra scenes now, because I think I really need to just shelve this one for a while, let it sit, and then go back later and see if it's really worth cleaning it up and polishing it into a smooth second draft. I have some serious doubts about key aspects of the plot, and like I was saying to![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
auburn the other day, I think this might end up being another pound of clay on the wheel -- a learning experience and perhaps a character-mine for future projects. But I'm not really sure; I think everyone hates a story right after finishing it, so I need to let it sit and then go back to it with fresher and less jaded eyes.
But, YAY. This is the third original novel I've finished. The first was my writing-a-page-a-day experiment in 1994, when I was about 17; I wrote a 500-page epic fantasy novel in about a year, and while it was, let's say, not that great, it was awfully heady to realize that I could actually do it. The second was my NaNo in 2007, which I really like and which is, I think, totally good enough to rewrite into a clean 2.0 draft ... but it's going to require a ton of rewriting. I'd like to get to it sometime next year. (But first, I want to tackle something new.)
And then there's this one. I had the initial idea and wrote the first couple of chapters in 2004. Then in about 2006, I picked it up again, and made it to about 45,000 words before stalling out in a sea of loose plot ends. Something was really not working, but I couldn't figure out what.
This time, I tore it down totally, tossed out some 20,000 words, and massively rewrote a lot of the rest. I moved scenes and whole chapters around -- at one point I had a stack of colored index cards spread out on the floor, trying to figure out what happened where. At the end of the rewriting and rearranging, I had 26,000 words constituting the first of two "halves" of the novel (there's a natural plot break there), plus a number of later scenes that would need to be revised to fit with the plot changes.
Looking at my writing calendar, it looks like I launched into Part 2 on Sept. 26. And now, we're 40,000 words and one novel later. :D I can't take credit for having written every single one of those words in three weeks. There were quite a few scenes already written. But my daily word totals on my writing calendar claim that I've written about 30,000 words in the last three weeks -- and this was despite having my old job call me on Sept. 27 to tell me that (if I was available) they needed me back TOMORROW and for the month of October. And then, on top of that, a nasty cold totally kicked my ass for the last week and a half. At times I've been so dead tired that I can hardly stand up ... but I've still been counting the hours at work until I could go home and write.
I think I really needed the self-confidence from having finished this thing. I've started and then abandoned so many projects in the last few years, and spent countless hours worldbuilding original novels and series, only to find some sort of fatal flaw and wander on to something else. Even if this book is too flawed to publish, I needed to get past the first 10-20,000 words of something, because that's where I've been getting stuck -- I'll launch into the initial YAY period, creating characters and developing the world and writing like crazy until I hit a wall at the point where I have to actually develop a plot. Fanfic or original, it doesn't seem to matter; I just can't seem to finish any damn thing.
Just knowing that I can tough it out for 65,000 words means so much to me right now.
But more than that, I feel like I've learned so much about writing and especially plotting on this project. I've never been able to make an outline work for me, but I think I'm going to give it a good try on my next novel, because there was so much stress and frustration involved in trying to backfit a plot to the first half of the novel once I'd figured out where it was going. And I feel like I'm getting a better feel for what sorts of outlining techniques work for me. (Day-by-day breakdowns of where everyone is at any given time? HELLA USEFUL. Also, index cards. There is something about being able to physically swap scenes around that is more useful for me than huge text files of notes.)
Aside from all of that technical stuff, I was really fascinated to watch the characters' voices and personalities develop and become so easy and effortless to write. In the beginning, I really struggled with them, but towards the end the words were just flowing out -- I got to know my characters as people. I could feel the relative shift in the ease of writing them, from the struggle at the beginning, to being able to blast out 3000 words in an evening because I knew them so well that I could "hear" their conversations and anticipate what they'd do in any given situation.
I also got to work on just letting go of the voice in the back of my head telling me that I have to write "well", and getting caught up in the story instead. For some reason it's easy for me to do in fanfic, and horribly difficult to do in original fiction. Actually, with this project, I got some practice at consciously switching over from my paralyzingly self-conscious "original writer brain" into my gleeful, id-focused "fanfic writer brain". The better I got to know the characters, the easier it was for me to do that. (Lesson learned: I am a character writer. I always have been. Above all else, I need to love and know my characters. Fanfic is easier for me in large part because I know and love the characters already. In my teens, I used to plan not individual books but series. Epics. I need to start doing that again, I think.)
In short: *\o/*
Okay, now -- I had set aside the entire month of October (tentatively) for working on this novel, so now I have some free time, so to speak! The rest of October is going to be given over to fanfic (my SpookMe story; probably try to get started on my Sheppard_HC one too) and brainstorming/worldbuilding for my NaNo novel. Yes, Virginia, there is a NaNo this year!
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/288223.html with
comments.
At 65,000 words, that's one (1) rough draft of an original YA fantasy novel. *lays down pen*
(Well, okay, I write on the computer mostly, but laying down the keyboard is a much less satisfying metaphor. Besides, I'm still typing on it. *g*)
It's not entirely done from start to finish; there's one key scene in the first third that's still a rough, skeletal outline -- I didn't have a firm enough grasp on either the characters or the magic system to write it at the time, which is just as well, because I would've had to completely rewrite it anyway. The ending also feels a bit abrupt; I think I need to add an epilogue to tie things off more smoothly.
And I'm not going to write those extra scenes now, because I think I really need to just shelve this one for a while, let it sit, and then go back later and see if it's really worth cleaning it up and polishing it into a smooth second draft. I have some serious doubts about key aspects of the plot, and like I was saying to
auburn the other day, I think this might end up being another pound of clay on the wheel -- a learning experience and perhaps a character-mine for future projects. But I'm not really sure; I think everyone hates a story right after finishing it, so I need to let it sit and then go back to it with fresher and less jaded eyes.But, YAY. This is the third original novel I've finished. The first was my writing-a-page-a-day experiment in 1994, when I was about 17; I wrote a 500-page epic fantasy novel in about a year, and while it was, let's say, not that great, it was awfully heady to realize that I could actually do it. The second was my NaNo in 2007, which I really like and which is, I think, totally good enough to rewrite into a clean 2.0 draft ... but it's going to require a ton of rewriting. I'd like to get to it sometime next year. (But first, I want to tackle something new.)
And then there's this one. I had the initial idea and wrote the first couple of chapters in 2004. Then in about 2006, I picked it up again, and made it to about 45,000 words before stalling out in a sea of loose plot ends. Something was really not working, but I couldn't figure out what.
This time, I tore it down totally, tossed out some 20,000 words, and massively rewrote a lot of the rest. I moved scenes and whole chapters around -- at one point I had a stack of colored index cards spread out on the floor, trying to figure out what happened where. At the end of the rewriting and rearranging, I had 26,000 words constituting the first of two "halves" of the novel (there's a natural plot break there), plus a number of later scenes that would need to be revised to fit with the plot changes.
Looking at my writing calendar, it looks like I launched into Part 2 on Sept. 26. And now, we're 40,000 words and one novel later. :D I can't take credit for having written every single one of those words in three weeks. There were quite a few scenes already written. But my daily word totals on my writing calendar claim that I've written about 30,000 words in the last three weeks -- and this was despite having my old job call me on Sept. 27 to tell me that (if I was available) they needed me back TOMORROW and for the month of October. And then, on top of that, a nasty cold totally kicked my ass for the last week and a half. At times I've been so dead tired that I can hardly stand up ... but I've still been counting the hours at work until I could go home and write.
I think I really needed the self-confidence from having finished this thing. I've started and then abandoned so many projects in the last few years, and spent countless hours worldbuilding original novels and series, only to find some sort of fatal flaw and wander on to something else. Even if this book is too flawed to publish, I needed to get past the first 10-20,000 words of something, because that's where I've been getting stuck -- I'll launch into the initial YAY period, creating characters and developing the world and writing like crazy until I hit a wall at the point where I have to actually develop a plot. Fanfic or original, it doesn't seem to matter; I just can't seem to finish any damn thing.
Just knowing that I can tough it out for 65,000 words means so much to me right now.
But more than that, I feel like I've learned so much about writing and especially plotting on this project. I've never been able to make an outline work for me, but I think I'm going to give it a good try on my next novel, because there was so much stress and frustration involved in trying to backfit a plot to the first half of the novel once I'd figured out where it was going. And I feel like I'm getting a better feel for what sorts of outlining techniques work for me. (Day-by-day breakdowns of where everyone is at any given time? HELLA USEFUL. Also, index cards. There is something about being able to physically swap scenes around that is more useful for me than huge text files of notes.)
Aside from all of that technical stuff, I was really fascinated to watch the characters' voices and personalities develop and become so easy and effortless to write. In the beginning, I really struggled with them, but towards the end the words were just flowing out -- I got to know my characters as people. I could feel the relative shift in the ease of writing them, from the struggle at the beginning, to being able to blast out 3000 words in an evening because I knew them so well that I could "hear" their conversations and anticipate what they'd do in any given situation.
I also got to work on just letting go of the voice in the back of my head telling me that I have to write "well", and getting caught up in the story instead. For some reason it's easy for me to do in fanfic, and horribly difficult to do in original fiction. Actually, with this project, I got some practice at consciously switching over from my paralyzingly self-conscious "original writer brain" into my gleeful, id-focused "fanfic writer brain". The better I got to know the characters, the easier it was for me to do that. (Lesson learned: I am a character writer. I always have been. Above all else, I need to love and know my characters. Fanfic is easier for me in large part because I know and love the characters already. In my teens, I used to plan not individual books but series. Epics. I need to start doing that again, I think.)
In short: *\o/*
Okay, now -- I had set aside the entire month of October (tentatively) for working on this novel, so now I have some free time, so to speak! The rest of October is going to be given over to fanfic (my SpookMe story; probably try to get started on my Sheppard_HC one too) and brainstorming/worldbuilding for my NaNo novel. Yes, Virginia, there is a NaNo this year!
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/288223.html with
no subject
Hmm. *thinks* I'm pretty sure it's sort of a back-and-forth thing -- the characters and their setting/story are created together. I rarely have characters wandering around without a setting or without a general idea of how they fit into the cast. On the other hand, now that I'm really trying to think about it analytically and figure out how I do it, it's very much a chicken-and-egg thing -- I can't figure out which one comes first!
What I used to do when I was a teenager was invent large casts and then let the story develop from the way they played off each other and the process of fleshing out their characters. For example, my Kismet story-setting is a former mining colony on the frontier of space, and I sat down in about 1994, before I had any kind of story for it, and created a large cast of characters to fill all the typical roles of such a setting -- bounty hunters, cops, gamblers, prostitutes, thieves and so forth. Over the years, some of the characters developed main-character status while others faded away. Kismet (as it currently stands) is a webcomic series that I haven't worked on in awhile, and most of the stories -- see here and here -- are totally character-focused, and grew organically out of the character-creation process, as I developed their backstories and in the process figured out what stories they had to tell. (That's probably why Kismet is so fragmented; it's a series of interconnected shorter stories, rather than one overall plot.)
... come to think of it, that was how I always used to get started during those fantastically creative years before I started college and began channeling my energy into other areas. I'd have a general idea of the sort of story I wanted to do -- steppe nomads or bounty hunters or epic fantasy or whatever -- and I'd build a cast from scratch, throwing in a lot of id-stuff as I went along. :D (I had tons of long-lost siblings, frenemies and that sort of thing; also lots of teenage girls having to prove themselves to the world.)
In some ways fanfic may have pulled me away from that -- I used to have to do all of that before I could write, but having casts of characters come pre-established may have weakened my ability to come up with casts of characters. Hmmm ... *ponders*
And, er, sorry for talking your ear off. :D Obviously I do like to talk about this!
no subject
Unlike you I don't often come up with large casts of characters; I have a core pair (or three people, max) who then accumulate secondary characters around them. The one project I have that does have a huge cast ... I'm having trouble not getting sidetracked by everyone's own potential stories to focus on the main plot. *g*
Huh, I just realised ... these days I'm very much about the two or three main characters, with their relationship(s) taking centre-stage; when I was younger I tended to focus far more on one central character. That's quite possibly the effect of fanfic and shipping on me. *g* But I think it's a good effect; these days even as a reader, stories that are too much about one character's journey tend not to affect me as strongly. And I do like to write what I'd want to read ...
no subject
I've always been someone who preferred ensemble casts; I've never particularly been fond of the lone-hero archetype because I don't really fan on characters in isolation -- it's characters' relationships with each other that I'm drawn to, more than the individual characters themselves. (I think this is probably one reason why I don't really ship, most of the time; I'm drawn to the character relationships in canon, so I don't really want to see them change in a major way ...) This is not to say that I don't get into characters as individuals also ... just that for me, it's always been about groups rather than individuals.
I'm having trouble not getting sidetracked by everyone's own potential stories to focus on the main plot. *g*
... which has always been my other big problem. *g* I think the ideal story paradigm for me is a series of interlocking, related stories that allow different characters to rotate into the spotlight, because I do want them all to get their chance to tell their own story. But this is actually one of the big things that bogs me down. I can never figure out how to narrow my focus, or even where I want to start the story. (... there was always something interesting happening last year, or last decade, in the characters' lives.)
no subject
Heh. For me, I ship because I'm drawn to specific character relationships and want more of them, more focus on them, more exploration, but without fundamentally altering the dynamic. *g*
I can never figure out how to narrow my focus, or even where I want to start the story.
Ha, that last is my problem in one of my projects. In theory, I know where the story should start, but then there's so much backstory I really want to write about, and I haven't yet figured out what truly needs to be in it and what doesn't ... and how to include it gracefully. That's with only three main characters, mind you, so I dread to think what it would be like with a larger cast!