d1/82,000 words

I am getting ready to start on the final act of my first draft. Unfortunately, I enterer into this project with a lot of excellent worldbuilding and sci-fi details, but very little plot. I also had some interesting character ‘events’, meaning some interesting coincidences and sparks in their backstory. What I was lacking was a clear understanding of the characters themselves, their arcs, and the story I wanted to tell in this freshly-built world. This is not the way I would ever write another story, but it is what it is and I certainly think I can retrofit the story in a satisfying way. However, it does make things more difficult.

The specific problem this approach has created is that I do not have a clear idea of my ending or my final conflict. I have a number of ideas I like, but ultimately the options are wide open, even though I am nearly ready to start laying words to those final chapters. The task ahead of me is to focus on the conflict, and flesh out the way it should unfold. Specifically, I need to find a way to make each character resolve their conflicts by leveraging their special abilities. For Nick, that means either his Spawn nature, his lack of memory, or his Mute Elevated nature. His primary nemesis is Golithias. For Evaya, that means her immunity to overdraw. Her primary nemesis is the Erebossi. So that is the name of the game for the next month: find the right sequence that makes sure each character’s key abilities enable their final victory.

d1/80,000 words

As I am writing the conflict scene that closes out act 2 of my 3-act novel, my protagonists are coming face-to-face with the antagonists for the first time, which is giving me the opportunity to have the antagoist justify himself somewhat. I think it is important to do this for realism — make sure he remains believable. However, I am nervous about making the distinction between good and bad ambiguous by over-justifying the antagonist’s actions. It so happens that I had good reasons for him to act the way he is acting, and anyone else in his shoes could well be driven to the same things. I have made him extreme to be sure, but when the fate of the human species hangs in the balance, who wouldn’t go to extremes?

I need to spend some time thinking about the right way to balance this to make sure the villian does not become sympathetic. I have a few options: I could leave some of this motivation out, clouding him behind a generic ‘evil’ nature. That could work. The next option is to just dedicate a few more words after, either in inner dialogue or conversations, where the characters can pick apart what the antagoist said, so I have the opportunity to keep it cast in the right light. The last option is to bump up the extreme nature of the guy, taking him from cruel to evil. If I make him cross more ethical lines, it might clear things up even easier.

This will be a problem for draft 2.

d1/71,000 words

I had a little genre scare today. Since I am a new writer, I do spend a lot of time on blogs and podcasts getting advice, and considering things (some of them obvious) that had nonetheless never occurred to me. I was gathering some opinions about drafts and cutting characters, and I ran across one article where the blogger insisted that it was a bad idea to have two POVs / protagonists unless you are writing in the romance genre. I am not.

I see why he is saying that, but I am thinking the key is to make sure this approach works for the story I am telling. It will, except for one thing… do I need to make one of the protagonists primary? In other words, who is my story really about? I don’t have an answer for that because I have not cast the story into those terms before. In my mind, it is a story about their combined voyage. Maybe that is a good enough answer, but maybe not — does that mean I am too plot focused rather than character focused? I think my draft 2 rewrite will need to address this.

d1/55,000 word

I wrote a chapter today that I really really love. Everything just came together… the dialogue, the setting, the sequence of events… it was a perfect culmination of try-fail cycles ending in sync, and all around the build up just sent me off the deep end uncovering excellent emotional connections between my characters, and blowing through barriers that I planned to break down eventually between the characters anyway.

Unfortunately, I have to rewrite it. The emotions between the characters are just a little too premature to be believable… it was close, but just 2 or 3 chapters early. This is a real pity because the chapter unexpectedly turned into a brilliant opportunity for the internal barriers of two characters to come down together and reveal some interesting things about them. I love it, but it is premature and has to go.

I’m going to numb it down, refocus the emotions, and hope another opportunity presents itself for this instead.

d1/38,000 words

I am revising some secondary features of my world that I feel overlap too much with other works. It is a strange thing, when I came up with these ideas 5 years ago, I thought they were quite original. However, I recently re-read a few books I had enjoyed many (many) years ago, and I was shocked to see some of the themes there have made their way into my work without enough creative differences to justify themselves. At first I was panicked, but stepping back, the overlaps are with non-essential filler in the world-building, so I am removing them.

Goodbye ‘Deimos’.

d1/26,000 words

Although I have a decent chunk of words on paper right now, most of my effort so far has been outlining. I wrote some discovery scenes and backstory scenes, to get the hang of the characters, and I jumped ahead and wrote a couple of the scenes I am excited about. Other than that, I am going through the mechanical process of dividing the action into chapters, assigning POVs, and checking the logistics (scene-sequel, and motivation-reaction units) to make sure when I write out these scenes, they work. And they go somewhere.

It sounds boring and technical I am sure, but I am actually loving it. I create a possible story vector, then just pull it this way and that, add characters, twist, what-if, until I end up with something cool. Then I break down that something cool into its distinct parts, making note of where each character is in their arc, and try to figure out exactly what part to show in a given chapter.

One thing this process has clarified for me is the difference between an epic fantasy, and a single novel. I am writing the latter, but my original outline was meant for the former. 6 POVs is too much. WAY too much. So I’ve narrowed it down to just two: alternating between Nick and Evaya. I’ve also trimmed the plot arc from 4 parts to just 3. I have part 1 outlined in detail, and part 2 and 3 outlined in general. Time to start writing these out.

d1/15,000 words

To help me visualize my characters, I used a girl on fiverr.com to draw them out based on my general descriptions of clothing, build, skin/eye color, etc. I LOVE the results! It is so cool to see them rendered. As a novice writer, it makes it so much easier for me to write with these visuals. I’ve posted the artwork on the homepage.

d1/0 words

Ok, it is time. I am doing this. So I had this screenplay — a shitty screenplay — that sat on my desk for a couple years. Then I tried to make it into a game with my buddy, but that fell by the wayside. All told, it is about 5 years since I did the worldbuilding on this thing, but I still want to make something out of it.

So here I go. I bought Scrivener today, and loaded it up with my notes and maps and character bios and location deascriptions. I am starting to outline my story arc and character arcs, drawing from the screenplay, but with massive restructuring. I’ll post updates here as I go!