Tag: Difficult

Order! Order!

thestuartsadler

Good evening! I’m back again after having briefly forgotten I have a blog!

Anyway my latest writing woe is all down to the order of my chapters.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking surely they just go in order, one after the other? And indeed I would agree with you. Except the way I am writing this particular novel (this is not to be read in any tone that would imply that I am at all familiar with writing novels, nor that I have written or am currently writing more than one!) it’s not quite that simple.

You see I am an ordered soul. I like things to be ordered. I like things to line up, to fit snugly, to create a pattern. This was the plan for my chapters. I have three protagonists, so it only made sense to me that I would dedicate a chapter to each of them in turn. First would come character A, then B, then C, then back to A and so on and so forth.

It worked well enough for a long time. Then I started noticing that a bit more was happening with one character than another, and I had less to write for character A than for character C at certain points. It wasn’t a huge problem at first, as I simply combined the next two chapters for character A into one (and at first draft I didn’t have to worry about fleshing anything out, it all seemed fine).

But then the timelines began to creep apart, but I figured I could deal with that fairly easily at second draft so I didn’t let it slow me down. But then I wrote myself into a corner. I finished character C on a cliffhanger that not only meant the start of the next chapter would continue immediately from that moment (I’d already had that occur but it was fine to leave them and come back after we’d spent time with the other characters), but really it needed to happen in the next chapter otherwise the marrying up of timelines would seriously begin to suffer.

So, I made the decision to scrap the ABCABC system and just write it as it needs to be written. This is both daunting because it means there’s no more ‘pattern’ for me to follow, which makes me uncomfortable, but also it feels quite liberating and I’m excited to get writing the next chapter (which I had planned to do this evening but it’s quite late and I’m tired so I realised it would be a good opportunity to fire off a quick blog post! Oh if only I could write my novel as quickly as I can write this!).

Fingers crossed when I get some people reading through it they don’t complain about the order of the chapters! If they do I might have to pull some hair out! Early feedback (merely of asking the question) indicates that it won’t bother people, so fingers crossed!

Hope your writing is going well!

What’s in a name?

thestuartsadler

I am someone who obsesses over detail, and when it comes to writing a fantasy novel, that can often mean hitting some serious roadblocks.

I think I’ve mentioned before how I worry about fantastical things like my magic system not being ‘realistic’ (the absurdity of such an issue being both at the front of my mind and also swept aside by the thought that I’m simply not trying hard enough if I don’t fuss over it). There are a number of other things that slow me down though and naming things is certainly one of them!

I can be in a good writing flow, but the moment I need to come up with a name, be it a character, a town, or even a plant, it brings me to a grinding halt. I’ll roll consonants off my tongue, throwing in a vowel here and there until I get a sound I like, then try to build on it, but boy oh boy do I have a hard time.

With place names, I try to come up with meanings behind the names, to give at least some of them a logical, descriptive slant. I like names that sound like they have history to them, that you can imagine the first settlers finding the place, looking at the landscape around them and naming their town in honour of it. At the same time, the mind boggles at how these people would do such a thing without coming up with something you’d expect from a six year old.

‘Let us found our town in the crook of this river, rich as it is in clean water and fish to feed us.’

‘Yes, we should lay down our roots here, but what shall we name our new town?’

‘Why “Crooktown” of course!’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘Well… it’s a bit… y’know. I’d avoid the word “Crook” I think’

‘Hmm, well what about Waterbend?’

‘Waterbend?!’

‘Fishington?’

‘Wow.’

‘Well why don’t you come up with something then?!’

‘Easy. Rivertown’

‘Perfect.’

With people’s names I struggle as well. I know there can be a tendency to avoid common western names in fantasy, at least for the most part, but because they’re so ‘normal’ sounding to us, it’s difficult to come up with something with familiar sounds but isn’t either dull, or looks like someone was named after a coughing fit. I don’t want a hero named ‘Colin’ (no offence to the Colins out there), nor do I want people discussing the villain in such terms as ‘Oh I really liked A’kaqitchothferan, he was such an interesting character.’

Of course as a reader I never even bother about these things, I just accept them. I can think of perhaps two occasions where a name has bothered me and most likely by the time I’m a few chapters in I’ve just accepted it and forgotten I ever disliked it.

Such is the eternal struggle of the writer, obsessing over things the reader will either not care about, or will immediately forgive. Readers can be good that way.

I’d be interested to hear any tips for not letting naming bog you down. I try to at least come up with a ‘placeholder’ name which I’m happy enough with to keep on writing, but might change later. Even coming up with those sometimes is enough to cause me to stumble and struggle to get back into a good flow.

Anyway, back to writing about my hero Chax’oqzim, in the magical fantasy realm of Landworld!

The Here and Now

thestuartsadler

Hello again and welcome back.

How is your creative endeavour going? Mine is going pretty well thank you. Slowly, probably, compared to a lot of writers, but then I am not a full-time writer so I don’t have a fraction of the time I would like to dedicate to writing available to me, and of course being human, I only use a fraction of the time I do have available to actually write!

But it is going well! I have written eight chapters of my first draft and am in a good enough flow that the last two chapters have been written in just a couple of sittings each, so I am particularly pleased with that! And though I do claim not to write as much as I could, I am also prioritising it over a lot of other things! I’ve not played any PS4 games for months now and have probably halved the amount of TV I watch (which I don’t think was a lot anyway). My goal is to complete the first draft this year and I am really going to push myself to do it sooner than that.

But I thought it was also high time I wrote a blog post!

I originally started this blog to highlight the issues I came across whilst writing and recently I have identified something new that I am having difficulty with, which is what the title alludes to.

I’ve realised that the vast majority of what I write is what I suppose you would call ‘real-time’. I start a scene and write what happens to my character there and then until the scene is done. Then I will begin another scene and do the same. This might sound perfectly fine, but I realised that there are going to be times when I just want to describe general things going on, over a longer period of time, so writing in this style is not something that will work.

I’ve just finished reading A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book of the Earthsea series and I think Ursula K. Le Guin does what I am aiming to do perfectly. As I was reading it I realised that my interest was being held while the protagonist’s actions and life were, a lot of the time, being skimmed over. That is not to say that detail is missed, but that over perhaps two pages, the same number of days will have passed, and I will know everything I need to know about those two days.

This is something I think I struggle with. My worry is that without describing the immediate surroundings and actions of the characters, my writing will just read like a boring list of things that happened (‘John got up and had breakfast then went to the shops. When he got home he cooked dinner and sat down to watch some television, staying up late into the night.’ As an extremely bad example). I struggle to find the salient and interesting points in the overall story of the day or week that my character has lived, or at least I struggle to visualise how to write it in an interesting way.

It may be that I am focussing too much on two things: First is the narrative perspective of my story, and the worry that by stepping back in order to describe events that happen not in an immediate sense but an overarching one, the voice I use must be that of the narrator and less so the character, which may distance the reader and thus they will lose interest. The second is the idea that everything must serve a purpose for the story, that the writer should cut out everything that is unnecessary. In this sense a part of my mind says ‘well if you’re not going to go into detail about what John did on Tuesday, why write about it at all? Surely it will not add enough to the study to be worth mentioning?’ This is difficult to overcome, and as I’ve mentioned I therefore find it very difficult to write from such a perspective.

I am trying though and I know that the more I try, the more I will do it, and the more I do it the more I will improve. At least I hope so! I would be interested in hearing any tips of this that any of you might have!

Until next time! (Which I will try to make sooner!)

It’s A Kind of Magic

thestuartsadler

Hello again! I thought it was about time I wrote a post on my novel writing which, as mentioned previously, took a bit of a backward step a while ago when I decided that I had gone a bit overboard with background ideas that I quite literally lost the plot!

This weekend though I reached Chapter 40 in my outlining which I’m pleased with, and another positive is that I know its going somewhere and is close to a resolution! About ten chapters ago I started to wonder whether I would just end up planning chapter after chapter in a subconscious bid to avoid actually writing the novel, so it’s good to know that my brain is working with me on this one and that things are heading in a very definite direction!

Now, I think I made it clear in my initial post that I’m writing a fantasy novel, and in case I didn’t mention it, there’s going to be magic involved!

I knew there would be a few things to think about when developing magic within my story. I’d already decided I didn’t want spells, incantations and potions for example, preferring my characters to have a more innate ability than one that requires use of an object or words etc.

Still, that has not stopped me from obsessing over the details from time to time.

And it is precisely my obsession over something like magic that has me worrying I’m lacking in the imagination department too much to be a decent writer. You see, I’ve spent far too much time in all trying to figure out the actual physical possibilities of how my characters would perform magic. Magic! I’ve literally sat and questioned how they might produce light using magic. Literally how they might do it, how the magic would work, how the light would exist and what would be required to sustain it. And half the time when I respond to myself with ‘it’s magic, Stuart, that’s the whole point. It’s magic, and magic isn’t real which is why you can’t do it in real life so stop trying to figure out how and just make it interesting.’ the rest of me is thinking ‘Hmm I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason.’

It makes you wonder why I love fantasy so much, and why I would choose to write a genre that requires such suspension of belief and in the laws of physics and nature, and yet here I am! It just seems to be my default. Every idea I have cries out for an element of otherworldliness, of things beyond the human experience, so for now at least I’m just going with it!

I have my basic idea down as to how my magic exists, but I need to think a little harder on the cost and limitations my magic users might suffer so as to avoid any ‘deus ex machina’ level issues. I just need to make sure I don’t overthink it to the point where I make the magic either pointless, or too powerful!

So yes, another thing to add to the list of ‘gosh isn’t writing a story harder than it sounds?!’

Finally, I would love to hear from anyone else who has written magic into their story and the processes they went through to try to ensure they retained a level of realism that kept things interesting!

Battling The Tide of Change

thestuartsadler

Hello again and my apologies for being somewhat on the quiet side recently! Unfortunately I am not in a position to write as and when I please, having committed myself to working one of those pesky things we call a job, in order to earn money to pay off the inordinate amount of debt I have accumulated since deciding that we did in fact want to live in a house we could call our own. That job has been somewhat hectic as of late, and a lot of the rest of my free time has been taken up with other things.

Still, here is what I have done in the world of writing since last we met.

  • I entered my first short story competition! A 250 word ‘Supernatural’ flash fiction under the prompt ‘otherworldliness’. 
  • I’ve also a near final draft for another short story competition which I will be sending off in the next few days, under the prompt ‘Dark Matters’ (can you sense a theme to the way my mind works??)
  • Finally I have been up and down and round and about with my bloody novel… which is what this blog post is really about.

I really hope I’m not the only one who fixates on details of their story to the point of self sabotage?! Please say I’m not.

Here’s how I seem to work:

  1. Have idea
  2. Start writing
  3. Feel pleased
  4. Write more
  5. Hit a plot point that needs examination/explanation
  6. Come up with an amazing back story to explain the plot point
  7. Realise the back story negates some of what I’ve written, but decide it’s worth pursuing
  8. Go back to 2.

After a few iterations of this I realised the following: that I was now miles away from my original idea (but kept telling myself this is what being creative is like and everyone probably does it), that I was basically writing myself in an outward spiral, creating ever more complex threads, and that every time I came up with a new idea it conflicted with someone else I’d set up which either required changing or scrapping.

Yesterday I decided enough was enough. Coming up with an amazing back story I’m NOT going to write, does not help me with a  novel I AM going to write! I’ve realised that I need to stop having ‘ideas’ and focus on the story I first wanted to write. Yes, I’ll still make a few changes, but I think I let myself get carried away and was making things far too complicated for myself.

So, I’m going to do two things. The first is that I’m going to go back to basics and make sure I know where I’m going this time. The second is that I’m going to scrap the pen and paper and write on my iPad. I’ve realised that the paper option for me is feeling too much like ‘notes’ as it’s harder to keep track of what I’ve actually written. I think the urge to edit while typing will be less of an issue that constantly changing my mind which is what I have been doing!

I’ve still got a few things to iron out in my ‘back to the original idea’ plan, but I already feel like it’s a more coherent story idea than the wild and wonderful things my brain was coming up with, without bothering to check how they would fit in with what I already had!

If you’re a writer and you’ve experienced this (particularly in Fantasy where you really can go off the deep end!) I would love to hear how you’ve dealt with it!

Until next time… wish me luck!