Tag: Fantasy

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!

You’re The Voice (Try and Understand It)

thestuartsadler

Something I, and I think many inexperienced authors struggle with is narrative voice.

It can be difficult to decide not only which to use in the first place, but also to realise how it can limit (and obviously be used to work for) your story and how easy it can be to trip up and do it wrong! From the very beginning I knew I wanted to write my story in 3rd person, though it wasn’t until I took a creative writing course that I really learned that there were actually different versions of 3rd person narrative. The differences aren’t difficult to understand, but sometimes when you get into the finer details of what is and what is not permissible, it can get quite confusing! At least for me!

I am writing my novel in 3rd person limited (sometimes called 3rd person close). I won’t go into too much detail as there are much better resources out there for this kind of thing, but for anyone unaware what this means, it describes narration from the 3rd person perspective (he/she) whereby the point of view is limited to one character. Thus the reader is only aware of what that one character experiences. Alternatively 3rd person omniscient allows the point of view to be ‘all-knowing’ so the reader can experience events (and thoughts etc.) from anyone and everyone’s perspective.

My main reasons for choosing a limited perspective was that it allows me to hold information back from the reader by having events occur or knowledge fall outside of their perspective until such time as I want to reveal them. Also to be blunt, the omniscient narrative has very much fallen out of favour and is not currently a popular device.

Now, I have erred on the side of caution when writing so far, but I must admit I have often found myself wondering (and no doubt overthinking!) just how limited I am supposed to keep things! 

The obvious stuff is easy: if my character is in a soundproof room, I cannot describe the conversation between the two assassins outside the door, no matter how exciting I think it might be for my reader to know something my character does not (and that for me is where the frustration lies I think!). Nor can I have my character discuss their favourite ice cream with someone,  for them to agree that Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food had got to be in the top 5, only to tell my reader that the other person is secretly lying, hates ice cream and is therefore some kind of sick demon. I can say my character suspects they might be lying, by the odd way their eyes wince whenever the gooey caramel and marshmallow are mentioned, or the eerie whispered screams they hear from within the strangely heavy overcoat they are wearing in mid July, but they can’t know it and so neither can the reader.

But where I sometimes struggle and get worried I’m doing it all wrong is the sort of in between stuff. The adjectives, adverbs etc. I might use in my dialogue for example:

‘Who would have thought we’d end up in a blog post!’ MC said to the stranger by his side.

‘Who indeed.’ Replied the stranger with a knowing smile.

Can I say that? Would anyone really recognise a knowing smile? Or is it enough that, because my character is present, I can add that sort of detail that they may not be explicitly aware of? That’s the sort of thing I get confused about! Can my reader know that the smile is knowing without my character being able to tell? Maybe my character wasn’t even looking at the stranger at that moment and missed the smile anyway, in which case do I remove all visual descriptions?! I’ve struggled to find any ‘rules’ that go into this level of detail and frankly I’m beginning to worry that the more I obsess over it the more it will negatively impact my writing.

So, dear reader, if you have any thoughts or experiences on the matter I would very much like to hear them!

Prologue

thestuartsadler

So the first thing you might be wondering is: What kind of author am I?

Well there are a number of single word answers to that: Amateur, Noob, Unpublished, to name a few, but seeing as all authors start out that way I decided I should probably go with ‘Fantasy’.

I’ve been a fan of fantasy, science fiction, and to a lesser extent, horror, for as long as I can remember and every time I would put pen to paper, it would be a fantasy world that came knocking first, begging to be let out. Rather than fight against my own instincts, for fear of besmirching the genre that is home to some of the greatest stories every told, by even attempting to join some small corner of its land, I decided to just go with it and try to carve out my own little plot.

So here I am! I’m currently about 45,000 words into my first draft which has already had its ups and downs (more about that later of course!), but now that I’ve started in earnest I decided to create this blog as an outlet for my all my thoughts on the process, to note down all the aspects of writing a novel that I find interesting, fun, or I’m sure will be common, difficult and of course as a platform for myself as an aspiring author.

I hope anyone reading this joins me, and enjoys reading about my journey.

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