A novel approach to novels
I have been considering attempting to partake in this NaNoWriMo business this year, although knowing how quickly a month passes with all the stuff I'm usually trying to cram into my time I have an uncanny feeling that it won't manifest much more than starting to work on something. The problem is that unless I take the time to plan and ponder the shape of the story I am rather good at painting myself into a corner. I've got to referring to these kinds of events as "magic boxes" from one of the predicaments I found myself in during the writing of "Kodran's Saga" when I decided that it was dramatically appropriate to add some kind of mysterious magic box into the story but had absolutely no idea what it did. What the hell is this for? Why did he have it on him when they found him? Will it utterly destroy my story? What the hell was I thinking!? But by then it's just too good an idea to drop and I managed to build a lot around it in the end. However, sometimes these "magic boxes" can lead to near story-crippling dead ends. I'd managed to get into a situation that took me something upward of three months to figure out how to continue the story without everyone doing what seemed most logical which was immediately start killing each other right there on the spot and thereby ending the entire saga somewhat prematurely or taking it in completely the wrong direction.
So, in short, it is my tendency towards these kinds of complications that makes me doubt that I am capable of writing a (half-way decent) novel in just four short weeks (made shorter by the fact that I will have lots of other things to concentrate on, also).
Nonetheless, I've had an idea knocking around my head for a little while for a book with which I could attempt to take a more standard approach to writing it. The thinking here is that with "Kodran's Saga" being a difficult sell, I'm looking to write something that's more "first book" material (whatever that means). The problem here, however, is that when I try to write something conventional I often get bored very quickly. The projects that capture my interest are the strange little unconventional things. For example, at one point I wanted to write a fantasy novel in the style of a historical document from that world recounting the events that unfolded, but the details were obtained through a type of magic that historians use [in my fantasy setting] so they are able to emote the events accurately. In other words, they didn't so much see the events in their mind's eye, but feel them and thereby interpret the events. An insane idea and one that quite possible is too strange to sell (let alone whether it's possible for me to actually have the patience to write something like that with the emphasis and style that I imagine in my mind).
Now, conventional writing does not mean it needs to be a boring, Rizler-thin plot, but while I can happily read conventionally written books, I have little desire to write it. Actually, no, that's wrong. I have a desire to write it because it would make things much easier, but I either get bored or complicate matters.
I started writing a humourous "fantasy" book once. The most obscure thing here wasn't the writing, but the setting. The "magic box" back then was that I started so many story threads that I suddenly had no idea where I would go with them, but the real killer was the fact that one of the story-threads digressed into a comic-book. So I was trying to write a novel in which the story of one of the characters would be told (for much of the central part of the novel) in comic-book format. The problem here was learning how to write comic-books as well as finding someone to illustrate them and whether a conventional publisher would just go "What the hell!? We don't do comics!" and a comic-book company would go "What the hell!? We don't do novels!" It's not entirely true that I didn't know where to go with the threads, since I knew where the entire novel was ultimately going, it's just that I got so carried away introducing new characters that I suddenly realised I had no idea what their journeys would be, how they would cross over, etc, and it occurred to me that there were potentially more characters than a reader could comfortably follow. Most writers won't tackle more than two or three story-threads (this may or may not include dropping in on the villain from time to time). However, I think I had at least five story threads with at least seven characters.
It's a book I'd like to finish at some point. Every now and again I dig it up and read through it and it has some great writing in it. Of course, the question is whether or not I can ever recapture that frame of mind that I was in when I started writing it something like 11 years ago. Now that I think about it the whole thing was very deconstructionist post-modernism with the characters openly acknowledging narrative tropes and aware that they are living within a narrative format... Wow - and this was actually before I did my crazy Performance Writing degree.
My current idea revisits the fantasy world that I started creating when I was 14. The world continued to evolve for years but nearly all of my best material on it was lost to The Computer Virus(tm) eight years ago, and my backups have mysteriously vanished. So many great stories just waiting to be written and all the work I did for it is lost. As it happens, I'm probably going to take a completely fresh approach to it now as I don't think I took the world far enough to be truly original and I think I can do that now, so it's time for the world to be reborn like a phoenix (except we call it something else now that works just like a phoenix, but isn't a phoenix, because this is an original fantasy world and we don't want to use terms like phoenix and elf because that ties it to the mythologies and folklore of our own world and it's really tired now so, no, really, it's born from the ashes like the, um, Guoranix bird; um, yup, yup, let's go with that, or, no, wait, the Ja'kwalaxiz bird - hell yeah! Now that's fantasy, sonny!)
Anyway, fantasy: I've only got a vague idea of the premise of the story, but I don't know how I'm going to handle the story. In the spirit of NaNoWriMo (and mostly because I've got no time at the moment), I'm not going to attempt preparing anything before 1st November. Come that date I'll consider whether or not to attempt it. If nothing else at least I will have made a start on a second novel. Maybe.
So, in short, it is my tendency towards these kinds of complications that makes me doubt that I am capable of writing a (half-way decent) novel in just four short weeks (made shorter by the fact that I will have lots of other things to concentrate on, also).
Nonetheless, I've had an idea knocking around my head for a little while for a book with which I could attempt to take a more standard approach to writing it. The thinking here is that with "Kodran's Saga" being a difficult sell, I'm looking to write something that's more "first book" material (whatever that means). The problem here, however, is that when I try to write something conventional I often get bored very quickly. The projects that capture my interest are the strange little unconventional things. For example, at one point I wanted to write a fantasy novel in the style of a historical document from that world recounting the events that unfolded, but the details were obtained through a type of magic that historians use [in my fantasy setting] so they are able to emote the events accurately. In other words, they didn't so much see the events in their mind's eye, but feel them and thereby interpret the events. An insane idea and one that quite possible is too strange to sell (let alone whether it's possible for me to actually have the patience to write something like that with the emphasis and style that I imagine in my mind).
Now, conventional writing does not mean it needs to be a boring, Rizler-thin plot, but while I can happily read conventionally written books, I have little desire to write it. Actually, no, that's wrong. I have a desire to write it because it would make things much easier, but I either get bored or complicate matters.
I started writing a humourous "fantasy" book once. The most obscure thing here wasn't the writing, but the setting. The "magic box" back then was that I started so many story threads that I suddenly had no idea where I would go with them, but the real killer was the fact that one of the story-threads digressed into a comic-book. So I was trying to write a novel in which the story of one of the characters would be told (for much of the central part of the novel) in comic-book format. The problem here was learning how to write comic-books as well as finding someone to illustrate them and whether a conventional publisher would just go "What the hell!? We don't do comics!" and a comic-book company would go "What the hell!? We don't do novels!" It's not entirely true that I didn't know where to go with the threads, since I knew where the entire novel was ultimately going, it's just that I got so carried away introducing new characters that I suddenly realised I had no idea what their journeys would be, how they would cross over, etc, and it occurred to me that there were potentially more characters than a reader could comfortably follow. Most writers won't tackle more than two or three story-threads (this may or may not include dropping in on the villain from time to time). However, I think I had at least five story threads with at least seven characters.
It's a book I'd like to finish at some point. Every now and again I dig it up and read through it and it has some great writing in it. Of course, the question is whether or not I can ever recapture that frame of mind that I was in when I started writing it something like 11 years ago. Now that I think about it the whole thing was very deconstructionist post-modernism with the characters openly acknowledging narrative tropes and aware that they are living within a narrative format... Wow - and this was actually before I did my crazy Performance Writing degree.
My current idea revisits the fantasy world that I started creating when I was 14. The world continued to evolve for years but nearly all of my best material on it was lost to The Computer Virus(tm) eight years ago, and my backups have mysteriously vanished. So many great stories just waiting to be written and all the work I did for it is lost. As it happens, I'm probably going to take a completely fresh approach to it now as I don't think I took the world far enough to be truly original and I think I can do that now, so it's time for the world to be reborn like a phoenix (except we call it something else now that works just like a phoenix, but isn't a phoenix, because this is an original fantasy world and we don't want to use terms like phoenix and elf because that ties it to the mythologies and folklore of our own world and it's really tired now so, no, really, it's born from the ashes like the, um, Guoranix bird; um, yup, yup, let's go with that, or, no, wait, the Ja'kwalaxiz bird - hell yeah! Now that's fantasy, sonny!)
Anyway, fantasy: I've only got a vague idea of the premise of the story, but I don't know how I'm going to handle the story. In the spirit of NaNoWriMo (and mostly because I've got no time at the moment), I'm not going to attempt preparing anything before 1st November. Come that date I'll consider whether or not to attempt it. If nothing else at least I will have made a start on a second novel. Maybe.