Tag: Fantasy

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!

You Can Go Your Own Way

thestuartsadler

Obligatory apology for it being so bloody long since I last posted anything. My excuse is that I’ve spent at least some of the time writing my novel instead so I think you’ll forgive me that!

Now, this blog is supposed to be about my experiences in writing, from a novice/amateur/whatever person’s point of view, and a few months ago I experienced something I had always been a little dubious of which I had planned to share with you long before now. But as I said, I got on with my writing (and the rest of life’s distractions) and the blog was left to gather dust.

Recently I’ve realised that in all those snippets of time I have sat in the kitchen with not quite enough time to really get my teeth into writing or practising the piano (another thing I always wanted to do but had always left for ‘later’) or any number of other things it feels like you have to set aside a good chunk of time for. In those moments I realised I could probably rattle off a blog post. I figure it’s better to post regularly, than have quarterly epics etc.

So I’m back with a post I’ve been meaning to write for ages and I think I’m repeating myself.

The thing I had always been dubious of was when I saw people say things like ‘Sometimes my characters surprise me’ or ‘I had this in mind, but my character decided to do such and such instead’.

I always thought ‘How can you not know what your character is going to do? It’s YOUR character, YOUR story.’ It never made sense to me that, if you had a story in mind, your characters would not follow that story, because otherwise what the hell was going on?

Such is the part of me that focuses on logic and order. How wrong that part of me was.

There I was writing away. My character was following the path I had outlined for him and things were going smoothly. He was supposed to be framed for stealing from a ship that he had worked on and, deciding he’d had enough of being treated like crap, leave and travel to another city where he would meet up with my other characters and the story would continue as planned. AS PLANNED.

Then it happened. My fingers were typing the word ‘stowaway’ and I realised that he’d decided he wasn’t going to leave for the city to meet my other characters, the cheeky bugger was going to set sail and end up on another continent. What the heck was happening?

https://giphy.com/embed/3oEduQWmX8DaioK4cU

That was a few chapters ago and I’ve since planned a new path for both him and my other characters. One I’m happier with. I had always said about my outline that it was a roughly drawn map, and I was happy for my story to wind it’s way from start to end, so long as I knew basically where it was going. I never imagined my characters would end up forcing me to add other continents to that map, but perhaps that is a sign I am being more creative than I thought I could be, and I can definitely live with that.

Everyone’s a Critic

thestuartsadler

Hello!

It looks like it’s been a couple of months since I last blogged which isn’t ideal but I’m not going to make a big thing about it. I remember reading a blog post about blogging no-no’s and one of them was the ‘Oh my gosh it’s been so long since I blogged!’ post, so this isn’t going to be one of those. Of course I can’t exactly ignore the fact that it has been a while… but we’ll just move on like old friends.

So, things have been pretty good for me writing-wise actually. There was of course my competition win at the end of last year which was a huge boost. I have yet to crack open the bottle of champagne I won, but I’ll get round to that soon enough I’m sure! I also celebrated with my writing teacher and fellow alumni of our evening class!

Another part of the prize was to have up to 1000 words of a work in progress critiqued by WriteStars, and this past Friday I finally got round to submitting the first section of a short story I have been writing for the past couple of weeks. To say I am excited about this is a huge understatement, though I’m not sure quite why I’m so looking forward to hearing back from them! They may well tear it to pieces, but let’s hope that’s not the case.

There were a few reasons I decided to send them the short story instead of an extract my my novel. The first was that 1000 words from my novel will only really amount to a quarter of a chapter and I felt it would not give them enough of a taste for the story to appreciate context, characters etc. Conversely, what I have sent them will probably amount to over a quarter of the finished short story, so their comments should help make it a good one (and I plan to enter it into another competition! See what I did there?!).

Having said that, while I had told myself that I was confident I would be able to apply a lot of their comments to my writing and style in general, and therefore use it in consideration against my novel, it did occur to me yesterday that the style of my novel is vastly different to the short story so it may not be so applicable. Still, at the end of the day I am getting a free critique on something I’ve written and I’m still very excited to hear back from them!

As for the novel itself, it is going well also. I finished my procrastination project of writing a chapter by chapter outline of the entire story and have really enjoyed getting started again. I’ve written four chapters and will be starting chapter five perhaps even today! Plus the extra little writing class our teacher arranged at our request are critiquing an extract from the novel this week so I will be getting feedback from everyone in the class which I’m sure will also be very helpful!

Onward and upward as they say!

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!

Oh. Em. Gee

thestuartsadler

So just moments after posting that last blog post, I hit refresh on the competition page and there it was in the (longer than planned) shortlist of 10, my name and story title!

At first I was like

forreal

 

 

But then I was all

wow

And then I was just totally

omg

 

 

Unfortunately I have no idea when the final results are announced, so as of now I’m basically

hurry

I guess I’ll let you know!