Boarders Writing a Novel Thread 3

[Gabriele]

The old one has reached 400 posts, so here we go again. :)

[TheEvilKing]

I got to a chapter that I was looking forward to, expecting it to kick ass and 'write itself'. I've been trudging through it for weeks now, and I'm only like half way through the damn thing. :tantrum:

[Gabriele]

I feel your pain. I have that sort of chapters as well.

Writing is definitely not easy. :)

[kuenjato]

Just finished a chapter yesterday. Currently closing in on the halfway point on the 2nd volume (of four), and the shit is really starting to hit the fan. I wish that meant the writing is getting easier, but really it is just the opposite.

Military battles are just so, so difficult to write, and I've four more to compose before this book is done. It's exhausting just thinking about it.

[Ouroboros]

I hate my internet! It's so slow!!!!

Responding to Eloisa. I should have put more detail into my first post, so I see where the misunderstanding was. The reason the character has no name is quite simple, I suck at names, I only have codenames down for two of a potentially twelve member team. (Five active, the rest support) Names for superheroes in particular is tricky, codenames, real names, I've been living in fantasy land for so long normal names are becoming difficult to think up. Any unfortunate implications were unintended. Half the problem with exchanging ideas over the internet is trying tofigure out what needs to be said to properly convey the idea with out wasting time on pointless detail. Its one thing to read a description of a character, another to actually see the full, realized idea.

Although I have thought of a name for her, Zhen Mei. Buggered if I can think of a codename.

Also it isn't even really sex she has a problem with, just love.

The other character that I've got down is like Forge from the X-Men, with the ability to builds things. He's technically part of the support crew, but since he has the ability to 'read things' (instinctively understand the construction of technology) he sees a lot of field work, especially against villains with mecha or robots. He's a third generation Australian-Sikh who cops a fair bit of grief back in India for having a white mother. He's also flamboyantly gay, but only off the clock. At work its strict professionalism. Zero fighting skills that are worth anything these days, he practiced foil fencing in high school, but Two-Shot is teaching him a few moves.

He's very torn up over his identity, be it national, sexual, even religious.

The last fighter is on loan from the British army. She got her powers through being involved in the Tunguska incident back in yeah dickety whenever. She was born five years from now. Growing up in the twenty-first millennium before being forcefully sucked into the early nineteen hundreds, she saw action in World War One, World War Two, Korea, every theater of war that Britain fought in from around the time she was sucked back in time to now. Theory has it she exists partially outside time, and like Brick doesn't age. She still looks like a young woman in her twenties despite being over a hundred years old. She was friends with Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstien, but didn't care for Eddison. During world war two she had a 'relationship' with Otto Skorzeny while working for Allied Intelligence.

She'd be the mentor of the group, but she's starting to go through a massive burn out and just cannot commit herself to dealing with the problems of people she sees as immature children. Half the reason she was sent to Australia was to give her some down time from 'real' super hero business, so getting caught up in this new upswing of super crime is like suddenly being handed important assignments while on vacation.

She went from being called Ms Time, to Lady Lightning, to Captain Lightning, now she prefers being called Major Yolanda Weirs.

Showing her through various periods of time would show the different attitudes towards female heroes, in how media treated her at least. She's been glamorized, demonized, ostracized, now she's just accepted for who she is.

Her major predicament is over changing time, should she change things, and risk killing herself by doing as such? She knew about 9/11 and did nothing, knew about Pearl Harbour and a lot of other things and did nothing. At least by doing nothing she can still plan for what the world will be like later.

Her status as being from the future is a classified secret of course, which will only come up much later when her birth starts approaching.

Those are the five main characters, they all still need a lot of work, but they're coming along. By the time it's on paper odds are they'll be very different beasts then they are now.

[Jerec]

I was thinking of a Power Rangers type story, where teenagers are chosen and are given powers and stuff, but it's not just about fighting the monster of the week and doing good things for the community. The teenagers in Power Rangers (especially in the Mighty Morphin era, which I watched as a kid), were overly nice, helpful, and the responsibility of being a Power Ranger never really had that much effect on their lives, apart from interrupting whatever they were doing at the start. There was no angst, no using powers for personal gain (though it would've got them kicked out). They didn't snap under the pressure.

And the town never seemed to have a problem with being half destroyed every episode. I dunno if I'd actually write this, but it seems like an interesting idea to deconstruct. Like, if you were secretly the red ranger, would you ALWAYS wear red? I like wearing red, but I don't wear it every day.

[Prince Who Was Promised]

I'm curious...how exstensive is everyone's worldbuilding? I'm still working on geography...

[sologdin]

exstensive is everyone's worldbuilding? I'm still working on geography

nice.

i penciled in a map one time, just so i could keep consistent. but i reckon it's a waste of time to be very precise. not sure if no map is the right way to go, but it's better than a borgesian map, which is so detailed that it is the same size as the teritory that it purports to represent.

world-building probably ends with cartography--icing on cake--rather than begins with it. i prefer to design linguistics, law, and literary tradition of the setting first.

[TheEvilKing]

For the novel I'm currently working on, worldbuilding is intentionally light so I can be flexible. Pretty much building it as I go.

[West]

This is my first time in this thread, and my first time trying to write something serious.

So far I have the basic structure of my book. It's fantasy with a prologue, 5 "parts", and an epilogue.

I have a prologue written, but it's shite and needs to be completely redone. I have also written 4 chapters of part one. Those I like... but they are only in first draft (and very rough) form.

I have found world building to be pretty easy, and my magic system has kind of fallen into place.

BUT! I am totally out of my element when it comes to weapons and how they are used. I have kind of glossed over it for now, but I know I'll have to put some research into it when the time comes.

In the overall scheme of things, I don't have much done, but it has been enjoyable to work on.

[kuenjato]

I'm curious...how exstensive is everyone's worldbuilding? I'm still working on geography...

Fairly extensive. The main geographic continent for my world is 8,000 miles in width. There are approx. 40 major regions of substantial habitation and many many more nation/ethnic subdivisions, cities, etc. Over the years I've slowly outlined the major migratory patterns/trade routes, religions and cultures, and the natural resources to those regions. The history extends back some 20,000 years - well, further, but that is human history from the tail end of a neolithic period. I've a very rough timeline 25 pages in length; when I eventually finish filling it out, it'll probably reach 100+ pages.

Worldbuilding is, of course, an ongoing process, and I'll only use maybe 5-10% in the narrative (four book series, followed by a bunch of short stories and novellas, and a projected five or six book series after - 3 million words, estimated). Still, it's nice to have the background information to access -- to know why, say, this group of people worship this god or gods; why copper or sandstone or teak wood is an aspect to their art and architecture; how the technology of one area has slowly informed and influenced another, etc. etc.

As for maps, I finally finished an acceptable world-map this spring, after 7-8 years of slow expansion from one small map onward. I have probably 3 dozen or so maps. I tend to sketch one out, scan it into photoshop, make corrections (generally coastlines and details), and then paint in geographical details (forests, deserts, mountains).

[Prince Who Was Promised]

i penciled in a map one time, just so i could keep consistent. but i reckon it's a waste of time to be very precise. not sure if no map is the right way to go, but it's better than a borgesian map, which is so detailed that it is the same size as the teritory that it purports to represent.

world-building probably ends with cartography--icing on cake--rather than begins with it. i prefer to design linguistics, law, and literary tradition of the setting first.

I see. For me, I guess I like to have a rough outline of the shape of the land, so when I develop stuff like laws and literary tradition and so on (I don't do linguistics; I get confused).

Right now I'm still figuring out whether the Kingdom that's so important should be large/continent spanning empire, or an Aquilonia-type kingdom.

Fairly extensive. The main geographic continent for my world is 8,000 miles in width. There are approx. 40 major regions of substantial habitation and many many more nation/ethnic subdivisions, cities, etc. Over the years I've slowly outlined the major migratory patterns/trade routes, religions and cultures, and the natural resources to those regions. The history extends back some 20,000 years - well, further, but that is human history from the tail end of a neolithic period. I've a very rough timeline 25 pages in length; when I eventually finish filling it out, it'll probably reach 100+ pages.

Worldbuilding is, of course, an ongoing process, and I'll only use maybe 5-10% in the narrative (four book series, followed by a bunch of short stories and novellas, and a projected five or six book series after - 3 million words, estimated). Still, it's nice to have the background information to access -- to know why, say, this group of people worship this god or gods; why copper or sandstone or teak wood is an aspect to their art and architecture; how the technology of one area has slowly informed and influenced another, etc. etc.

As for maps, I finally finished an acceptable world-map this spring, after 7-8 years of slow expansion from one small map onward. I have probably 3 dozen or so maps. I tend to sketch one out, scan it into photoshop, make corrections (generally coastlines and details), and then paint in geographical details (forests, deserts, mountains).

Now I'm curious what your story is about.

Once, during this Shakespere camp I went to last year, I started to make a map (on computer paper, on which I still pencil my maps). At first, it was for a story that I described as "a mix of King Arthur and LOTR". I made only one map, and eventually wondered,"what's beyond those mountains...do the people know? Does it matter?"

So I made what was beyond the mountains, and my curiosity forced me to pencil out two pages of the northern landscape. By then, the story was a lot different. I was telling my friend about it, and he started wondering about other continents, so I drew those. The World Map(s) grew to be 12 pages.

But then I ditched it.

[Prince Who Was Promised]

In the overall scheme of things, I don't have much done, but it has been enjoyable to work on.

I know what you mean. I spent a whole year in that position, once.

[Datepalm]

i penciled in a map one time, just so i could keep consistent. but i reckon it's a waste of time to be very precise.

This happened to me too. I had a reasonably nice map, with no rivers flowing uphill and no huge cities with no agriculture around, but the more idea I have of the plot, the more it interferes, so now the map is scrapped and coming last (ie, at this rate, never) save for a very general "country X lies north of empire Y, and city B is a port."

[kuenjato]

I see. For me, I guess I like to have a rough outline of the shape of the land, so when I develop stuff like laws and literary tradition and so on (I don't do linguistics; I get confused).

Right now I'm still figuring out whether the Kingdom that's so important should be large/continent spanning empire, or an Aquilonia-type kingdom.

Now I'm curious what your story is about.

Once, during this Shakespere camp I went to last year, I started to make a map (on computer paper, on which I still pencil my maps). At first, it was for a story that I described as "a mix of King Arthur and LOTR". I made only one map, and eventually wondered,"what's beyond those mountains...do the people know? Does it matter?"

So I made what was beyond the mountains, and my curiosity forced me to pencil out two pages of the northern landscape. By then, the story was a lot different. I was telling my friend about it, and he started wondering about other continents, so I drew those. The World Map(s) grew to be 12 pages.

But then I ditched it.

Generally, epic fantasy in a post-apocalyptic world, long recovered from the original crisis. The first set of books is a cross between standard genre fare, somewhat-experimental, and fairly in-depth worldbuilding - I consider it my Simarillion and LotR in one. There are deliberate Asian influences to balance out the predominate western civ. setting. Dunno if it'll ever sell, but I'm enjoying the hell out of writing it (thankfully, as it's going to close in on a million words before I'm done...). The biggest plus is that I'll arrive to the second series very well-versed in the world particulars, which was sort of my goal to begin with.

As a youngin' I was always fascinated by those blank or ambiguous areas on the margins of maps, (like Rhun or Harad) thus my eventual development of a full fleshed-out world.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

Ouroboros--I went back and read your first post on the comic book idea, and though I'm not going to get into the details of the female character's sexual hangups, I do want to say I'm not sure that the nickname Princess Date Rape is all bad.

It seems like your story arc (with a racist hillbilly leader) will center on humor that dances on the edge. I just get the sense that the shit Brick pulls won't be edited down, but pretty racy. So I can see the nickname working. Of course it will offend a number of people, but hey the guys of South Park have made a huge living on offending people.

Just my two cents. I'm not much of a comic guy, but I like the idea of this story.

[Prince Who Was Promised]

Generally, epic fantasy in a post-apocalyptic world, long recovered from the original crisis. The first set of books is a cross between standard genre fare, somewhat-experimental, and fairly in-depth worldbuilding - I consider it my Simarillion and LotR in one. There are deliberate Asian influences to balance out the predominate western civ. setting. Dunno if it'll ever sell, but I'm enjoying the hell out of writing it (thankfully, as it's going to close in on a million words before I'm done...). The biggest plus is that I'll arrive to the second series very well-versed in the world particulars, which was sort of my goal to begin with.

As a youngin' I was always fascinated by those blank or ambiguous areas on the margins of maps, (like Rhun or Harad) thus my eventual development of a full fleshed-out world.

Interesting. I was flirting with the idea of doing a post-apocolyptic story (somewhere down the road) in which the mutants (created by radioactivity from a nucleur war years back) are monsters, not those Dwarfs and Gnomes from Brooks. I've never seen any mutations "for the better" (such as those in X-Men, Spider Man, and other superheroes), so I kept it "for the worse".

The bad guy (a computer/robot who started the nucluer war and Terminator-like robot takeover) went into "sleep mode", being put into a satellite and launched into space, returns. Via satellite crashing to Earth. The satellite was shot out of the sky in perfect organized timing so that it'd crash into a huge city ;).

His return awakens the robot army hidden in the corners of the World, and they began anew their hostile takeover.

I'm still deciding whether to have the Bad Guy just a robot/computer, or a man who put his "essence" (personality 'nd stuff) into a computer chip (what he saw as an artificial immortality). The chip would be put into a "king robot", and basically act like him.

-----

But, for the time being, I think I'll stick with the whole Magic war idea.

[Myrddin]

I can't believe we've reached a third thread. :)

I'll throw out a challenge: is your word count on your books more, equal, or less than your posts in the "Boarders writing a Novel Thread"? If your answer is equal or less, go write. ;) (I'm probably closer to "equal" than I want to admit...)

As for my personal progress on the manuscript edit/revision, it's been ok. Not great in terms of speed to product, but I'm happy with the quality of the results. I rewrote chapter one from scratch with a completely different scene to better introduce the characters, dynamics, and coming conflicts. The original chapter one started with a battle. Too broad. For a movie, it'd be cool, but this new scene focuses more on the characters. Chapter two is also being rewritten from scratch (and not done yet...). BUT I've finished inputting my edits/revisions through chapter 10, with my print out marked up through chapter 20. And I finally wrote a short scene with a one-off POV from a bad guy, that I decided to add years ago, but was waiting for the revision stage to actually to it. It came out really well (something I usually don't say right after writing something).

I'm curious...how exstensive is everyone's worldbuilding? I'm still working on geography...

I started with broadstrokes and then go down to a detailed level as needed. I know there's an empire, but haven't detailed all of the provinces (just the three where POV characters go to). I know there's a confederation of princedoms in the south, a few "exotic" civilizations across the desert to the east, a sub-continent to the south east, and nomadic horsemen to the north. All my worldbuilding for this book is centric to the empire and to a smaller neighboring kingdom where the main character is from.

For me, story came first. Then I created the parts of the world the story needed, with a hint here and there of far off places. I only create detail when it is needed. (Need to reference an island? Make it up on the spot.) If you're spending all of your time building an encyclopedia of your world, then you are limiting yourself and your story.

Let the story drive your world. Let it expand organically.

I actually left a lot of worldbuilding detail until the revision stage. For instance, I completely overhauled the religions while writing the last ten chapters (out of fifty). Now, I'm adding that detail in the rewrite as "flavor." Another thing I overhauled after the fact was military ranks/structure. On first draft, I used terms like general, captain, and lieutenant, but in a legion structure. I've now made it closer to the Roman republic legion structure and rearranged the ranks of the characters to better serve the story.

Again, I knew the broad strokes --the stage the story played out on--, but I was more concerned with the actors on that stage, not the scenery.

Just the way I approached it. Personal process, not the only or even the best way.

[Zoë Sumra]

As for my personal progress on the manuscript edit/revision, it's been ok. Not great in terms of speed to product, but I'm happy with the quality of the results.

This is good. Go you. :)

For me, story came first. Then I created the parts of the world the story needed, with a hint here and there of far off places. I only create detail when it is needed. (Need to reference an island? Make it up on the spot.) If you're spending all of your time building an encyclopedia of your world, then you are limiting yourself and your story.

Let the story drive your world. Let it expand organically.

Kind of the way I did it too. I started with the characters, worked out the rough details of what they were doing and created a vague stage on which they could do it Then as I got a more detailed picture of the plot, the world depth improved to go with what was (a) required by the plot and (b) logically consistent with other details that the plot requires. (E.g. a population comprising 75%+ magicians who can all read each other's minds has a taboo about lying. Cue diplomatic incidents.)

The down side from my angle was that that approach meant a lot of revisions to ensure everything I wrote earlier was made consistent with setting details I invented later. Certainly, though, I feel that when trying to get a book going, it's better to wait till later to fix the setting issues and just get the story down on page first.

[Lann_Boys'Girl]

(big inhale)

Okay so, my friend and I came up with one central idea about two years ago that we thought would make an interesting, innovative premise for a book. We were really excited about it, and immediately started inventing things around it: characters, plot, the world.

First we were planning on making it 3rd-person POV-style, much like ASOIAF. We narrated it in a kind of typical fantasy tone. We decided not to let the characters use contractions, and since they didn't talk like we did, it was difficult to write them. I started taking a fiction seminar at uni to get feedback, and because if I had to write it for homework, it would actually get written. Every time, I felt that the submission I produced was better than the previous one, but each time the feedback was really good, yet it usually served to render the material unusable as it was. So we have an extensive knowledge of things that we've done wrong, and outlines for what to do next, but little written material that actually makes up the manuscript.

Most recently, we have made some really sweeping changes. We first decided to try a more traditional 3rd person narrator approach, without each chapter making up one POV (more like the random dispersement of WOT POVs within a single chapter). We decided to cut out an entire character and storyline when we decided that it existed mainly for shock value and a cool twist, but would be too difficult to incorporate into the other characters' storylines, which all merge in some way or other. But even though I think that our book is evolving and maturing and getting much, much better conceptually, writing it this way, I still felt like it was dragging - it was too hard to evenly dole out character info, plot progression, and background about the world. And I felt that the omniscient narrator was too disaffected; I don't know if that makes sense, but it just seemed harder for me, if I were a reader, to get invested in the characters when the narrator was so impersonal.

Last night I decided to try a random experiment and write this fantasy, rewriting the opening scene after the prologue for maybe the 10th time. The experiment was to narrate it more as myself: a 21 year old recent college grad. I would describe the tone as "conversational fantasy," as if it's just me, telling this story. One thing that I randomly started doing was to put important background info into footnotes. For some reason, I feel as though it helps keep the flow of the present events going without disrupting it with random lessons in the world's history, how one culture differs from another, or what a [insert made up word] is. The footnotes aren't just straight up definitions of the sort you'd find in an Encyclopedia Brittanica; if anything, they're even more informal than the narrative. It's cool, though, because if one goes back to reread the chapter later, they can just read the quick-paced scene, having already learned all necessary info the previous time around and not getting bogged down in background explanations. (I think the beginning is pretty hard, because you have to set up a world quickly but without overwhelming the reader; finding that balance between holding the reader's hand by defining everything and total immersion, where you just throw around new terms and hope that the reader will figure out what they mean later). We did a lot of triage in order to figure out what information about the world needed to go right upfront, but it was still hard to introduce it organically. For some reason I think the footnotes were really helpful in this regard.

Something about this experiment reminded me a little of the portions of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin where the sci-fi portion of the story would be invented on the fly by one of the nameless lovers. And I'm not positive that we'll continue with the "conversational fantasy" tone, or the footnotes, but I found the combination of them kind of liberating. The narrator can have a personality, can be speaking from the POV of a contemporary young adult. Does anyone have any examples, off the top of their head, of similar works? "conversational fantasy" or footnoting the more worldbuilding-y moments? (I think of Heinlein when I think of offbeat voices, where the narrator has a distinct personality...and sometimes Gaiman.) But anything else?