The Organic Plot.

"I think people who create and write, it actually does flow - just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down.  It's simple."  --Paul McCartney

If only everything was that simple.  Or rather, if only it was that simple all the time.

So as I talked about in my last two entries, I'm hard at work on a new plot, a new story for Shiloh and Alexi.  Funny thing: it's been going ridiculously well.  Bizarrely so, in fact.  I keep waiting to sit down and have no idea what should happen next, or to look it all over and want to delete not only the entire file but everything I've ever written as well as the word processor I wrote it on.

But no.  I sit down, I pick up where I left off in the ever-growing planning document, and I keep going like I never stopped.  Most of the time, I know exactly what's going to happen next, and when I stop knowing that, I stop for the night and pick it up the next day, and boom, the same thing happens. Just tonight, I finished plotting the endgame, and I started off not knowing how it was all going to play out.  I went and lay down for less than a minute, and suddenly knew just what needed to happen to make everything work.

I'm not bragging, I swear.  I'm honestly not used to things going this easily.  It's like watching a tree grow over the space of minutes instead of years, being able to see where every single leaf and branch is going to sprout just a moment before it does, all while knowing exactly what the tree will look like once it's done.  And it boggles my mind that all this is coming out of my head.

It's a weird and wonderful thing, to feel like the story is just using me to see that it's told, like I'm just channeling this thing and along for the ride.  If this keeps happening when I actually sit down to write this book, I'll be grateful beyond words.

Side note to all this: the current plot is the second one I've come up with since ending work on Skyborne.  The first one I had also flowed well, and I loved it, but then I talked about it with Rena and she pointed out something important.  Apparently, having a main character seek out her real father is a plot better suited for middle grade, not YA.  (Have I mentioned that I'm really starting to loathe categories?  That's another entry.)  So based on that, I scrapped what I had and came up with something quite different.  This new plot is worlds better for everyone involved, myself included.

It's something I've long believed, but something I also have to be reminded of from time to time: never be afraid to make massive changes to your work.  It might turn out to be the best thing you could have done.

Alternate title for this entry: "Oh Crap This Story Is Pulling Itself Kicking And Screaming Out Of My Head"

Bringing up Old Stuff

I write everything down, and I never delete any of it.

Okay, that's not completely true.  But most ideas I have, I keep around, even if they've faded into that ambiguous slush of things I no longer want to write.  I never know when I'm going to need something I thought up weeks, months, or years ago.

And over the past few days, I've been digging up quite a bit.

As I talked about in my last entry, I'm moving on from Skyborne, but I'm still set on telling Shiloh and Alexi's story.  As I also talked about in my last entry, I've been telling stories with these two for a long time, so I have more plot notes about them than anyone else.  In search of this new plot, I started looking through older stuff, and found a few very useful things.

For instance, I found that the 'new' idea I had a few weeks ago was actually something I thought up back in 2009 and had forgotten about.  Go figure.  I've heard it's bad to rip yourself off, but hey, I don't think it counts as re-using an idea if I never actually wrote that book.  ^_^  I also found a ton of character notes, some of which are invalid for the new incarnations of the characters and some of which is still very, very valid and will make them more interesting when I start writing them.

It's weird to admit it to myself, but character matters so much in making a book worth reading, and Skyborne's lack of interesting history for the main characters left them as more blank slates than I realized when I was writing it.  I will fix that.

Also on my list of older stuff to reread?  An entire book, one I finished back in 2005, the last book I thought was worthy of being published.  Odds are good I'll go through it and cringe a lot.  But I realized last month that I can go back to it, turn it inside out, and rework it, make it the tale told by one of the villains.  I want to really delve into this person's head and see what it's like to serve a spirit who affects the world in warped attempts at change and blood-bound symbiotes.  And I want this would-be villain to be the one who breaks the world's one great pattern.

This year, I would like to write these two books.  Nine months is plenty of time for that, yeah?

oh gods what am I getting myself into

Reconsiderization.

My supervisor can't seem to pronounce the word "reconsideration". He has an interesting command of the English language to begin with, but no matter how many times I try to correct him, he always pronounces it "reconsiderization."

I bring this up only because I've been doing some reconsidering of my own.  Simply put, I'm wondering if I should be trying to get Skyborne published.  ...and that's quite possibly the hardest thing I've ever had to write in this blog.

I don't love the story any less.  I don't love the world any less.  And ye gods, I don't love the characters any less. Shiloh and Alexi are pretty much my Eternal Champions; I've written them in five different books, across different worlds and different times and different names, and it always ends with them together.

But through the query process, I've started to realize things about Skyborne.  The story is very hard to explain in brief, which makes querying difficult.  While the story itself is self-contained, it's also not the best way to introduce an entire world with the hopes of telling a long story series on that world. Reading about tiny pieces of the world called Abraxas which aren't really the world called Abraxas and they all go away in the end as the real Abraxas gets put back together... see what I mean?  And besides, when the story ends with the world getting put back together after being destroyed, really, what do I do for a second act?

So, last Tuesday night, I asked myself, is there another story to tell for Shiloh and Alexi, another way to do things for them.  I spent all day Wednesday having ideas I didn't want, which was bizarre.  But I wrote them all down.  A week later, 5000 words of plots and plans later, I've got a new story.  And y'know what?  I really, really like this thing.

It's strange to consider setting Skyborne aside.  This is the first book I've had enough faith in to try to get published since 2005.  But after spending a week with this new story, I'm seeing Skyborne's flaws quite clearly.  And I can accept that it just might not work.

Rena showed me this a while back: The Book of My Heart.  I found it again on Sunday, after reading a blog entry from Juliana Haygert that linked to On Writing the Book After the Book of Your Heart. And all of this put together helped me realize I was doing the right thing.  I'll write this new story.  I'll give it my all.  And for crying out loud, I'll write it slower than my last efforts.  If it works out, excellent.  If it doesn't, I'll write something else. Far better to keep casting out new hopes instead of clinging to one even after it starts to sink.

And hey, this means I can work on the project I mentioned in my last entry, the one that was too close to Skyborne's supposed sequel. And that means I can write someone attacking the Big Bad by air-dropping herself from a flying motorcycle. And that will be fun.

I've Done this Already.

Music for this entry comes to us from U2, because I'm trying to light my own way and it's frustrating as hell.  Or rather, I'm trying to find light several ways at once and just realized I'm using the same torch and... and the metaphor is breaking down.

I do a lot of plotting.  I did that entry about being a plotter vs. a pantser a while back, so that's not new news, and it's nothing new at all for me to have three or four different plots at various points between "shiny new idea" and "make this a book now".  And like most (if not all) writers, I have ideas and themes and stuff that I keep going back to because I find them fascinating.

The problem that came up a week or two ago was when I realized I was ripping myself off.

I've been plotting the sequel to Skyborne, currently titled Heartfire.  ...even if I still think that one sounds a little too much like a romance novel.  The word's important to the plot, I swear.  Anyway, the basic plot of Heartfire involves travels to gather items to help a deity.  I'd also been plotting something that, in my mind, would span an epic and warped trilogy that dealt with order vs. chaos and traveled across dozens of worlds and all the space between, only to realize that the entire plot of the first book could be summed up in one phrase:

"Travel to gather items to help a deity."

Not only was I repeating myself, I was working on two books with the exact same basic plot.  I know that some say there are only five or six (or seven, the number varies) actual plots, but that's another discussion.  This was crushing.  This was the death of a book I was really, really looking forward to writing, one that I knew I couldn't do anymore because it was too much like another one.

In the time since then, I've chalked it up to just another part of the writing process, but now I'm thinking about this sort of thing too much.  In tonight's plotting, trying to hash out an idea that I'm far from sure about but it's worth looking into, I couldn't help wondering if it was too close to Skyborne, in essence if not in execution.  I quickly closed it off with a note to myself to "FIND THE FUCKING STORY" and moved on to another plot.

Yes, I swear at myself in my story notes.  It's nothing new.

So, as it stands now, I've got two things to work on that are going well and the usual half-dozen things that might or might not work out.  And then there's the one plot that I don't truly want to write because it hits way too close to home and yet it might have the best shot at actually getting published out of everything I've worked on.

Too much to think about.  Too many questions.  And I don't remember the last time I was this frustrated with what I love to do.  Enough about this for now.  Grr.  Arg.

World-Building: Too Much, Not Enough, or Just Right?

So, in the ongoing agent search, I found several agents who mentioned the same thing: books that started off telling everything about the world, instead of advancing the story.  Apparently, a lot of people who submit their first five (or ten, or twenty) pages have a habit of getting the story started and then laying on the backstory and history with a trowel.  Possibly with a shovel.  And this got me thinking:

I write fantasy.  It's about the only thing I've ever wanted to write, and recent attempts at novels have taught me I just don't belong in the real world.  ...writing in the real world, I mean.  But since writing fantasy means working in a world that doesn't exist, there's always the issue of making sure the world you're working in is defined enough.  You don't want the reader to be lost, or feel like it's all happening on an empty stage with a few cardboard trees and a dragon made of duct tape hanging from a length of twine in the background.

Two books I read last month took very different tacks on this whole world-building thing, and the sheer contrast makes me think of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

The first book had Not Enough background info.  It was a fantasy novel in which some people had a distinct connection to the land and there was some kind of council of them whose job it was to make sure things didn't get horribly screwed up and the land didn't rebel against them.  If this sounds vague, it was - I don't even know how many people were on the council or what their roles were, as most were very ill-defined, and the book focused on only two or three of them.  While the book itself was worth reading, I found myself constantly wondering who these people were and why they were important.  When the lack of background detail and explanation means the story's events fail to have the intended impact, something is wrong.

The book that got it Just Right drip-fed a steady stream of background info as it came up.  The story was based around a military and its operations, so whenever they went to a new place, or dealt with new people (for various definitions of 'people'), we learned a little more.  By the time the book ended, I had a great picture of how the army operated and the worlds it worked on.  All without resorting to an eighty-page infodump.  The fact that the narrator was old and cynical but still amazed at all the stuff he was getting into helped a great deal.

As for a book with Too Much background and world-building... Well, there's only one thing I can say, and I say it with the utmost respect: Tolkien.  Moving on.

While I doubt I'll ever write military-based sci-fi, I know I'll keep that book in mind as I work.  Most of my plots involve significant world development and backstory, so I'll look for a way to get it to the reader as it's necessary, pace it out same as I would the plot. As I say about everything I write, hopefully it'll work.

Next entry: what do you do when you realize you're ripping yourself off?

One Small Part.

There's always one more thing.

I just finished adding a bit to a scene in Skyborne, something I realized a week or two ago needed to be there.  (Why did it take so long?  Getting my head back together and on writing after the last book has been difficult.  Hence why I haven't written here for almost three weeks.)  I know that, at this stage, I should be thinking more about taking words out than adding them, as the word count's still a bit high.  But I knew this was necessary.

The added part is a small thing, a quiet realization that sets up the book's entire romance subplot.  And I think it's a little sad, because wanting to stay with someone and knowing your path will tear you away from them is never a good feeling.  Yet it's exactly what the story needed right then, and that's what matters most.

I've struggled with the romance aspects of Skyborne before, blogged about it here at least once.  But with this small addition, I think I've finally got that whole thing the way it needs to be.  Which pretty much means the whole book is finally the way it needs to be.

What I can't help now is thinking of that old phrase, "When the student is ready, the master will appear," and wondering if it applies to literary agents.  ^_^

I'll have an entry with more substance sometime soon; I have some thoughts to get down about story and/vs. world building after the last two books I've read.  But for now, something much more important: sleep.

Understanding.

So, last night, I finished the book I'd been working on.  Even at the end, I was filled with ambivalence.  I lost my passion for this thing somewhere along the way, only got it back at a few brief times, and was mostly cranking through it to get it done so I could move on to something else.  I wasn't sure if I'd ever go back and see it if was worth polishing.  And then, earlier today, something strange happened: I was telling a co-worker that I'd finished it, and she said she wanted to read it.

Just that.  Just knowing someone actually wants to read this thing changed how I feel about it.  I went from being pretty damn sure it wasn't worth going back to, sure I was going to leave behind writing in the real world because everything I've written there has gone poorly, to going through ideas in my head of how to fix the stupid thing.  Just because someone said they wanted to read it.

Granted, this co-worker mostly wants to read it because I've told her quite a bit about the character who can exist as three of herself and goes around with six arms, but still.

Right now, it's really hard for me to say what will or won't happen with this book.  I've learned that I can't speed through the writing process.  I averaged 3200 words a night, and that made the whole thing come out in an unfortunate rush.  Why I was writing so fast, I don't know; maybe just because I could.  Of the past five books I've written, Skyborne is the only one I wrote at a more sedate pace and it's the only one I've stuck with.  Trying to go that fast, there's no time to pause and reflect, no time to really focus on what's important.  There's only moving to the next line, the next paragraph, the next scene.  And I can't write like that anymore.  I wish it hadn't taken me this long to understand that, but at least now I know for sure.

The changes I'd like to make will mean rewriting a great deal of the book, if not the whole thing.  There's a character to remove, another character's power to change, a third character to have appear much earlier, a fourth character's personality to alter, my country's five-hundredth anniversary to plan, my wife to murder, and Guilder to blame for it, and so on.  I don't yet know if I want to do this, or if it would be better to just let the story settle and leave it behind.  I'll find out in six to eight weeks, when I look at it again.

But I'd forgotten how much it mattered, how good it felt, just to have someone who wants to read the story.  Not that I don't have friends who read my stuff, it's just different when someone asks to read it instead of the other way around.  ^_^  And it has me thinking:

Someday, if all goes well, I'll make it as a writer.  I'll have people eagerly looking forward to my next book.  And that, more than anything, will make it easier to keep going.  Not money, not fame, not recognition.  Just people who want to read what I write.  After years of writing things that hardly anyone ever reads, it's hard to ask for more.