It's time to start talking about the next project. I've been gearing myself up for it for a few months as I'm sure you can tell from some of the previous blogs. I haven't quite worked out the details on what the book will entail, but it should be fun. I'm considering this my self thrown pep rally. It's time to get worked up, excited, and inspired for the next marathon round of pouring myself into this lifestyle we call writing. This manuscript will be something new, quite a bit different, and definately more intense than any of my previous efforts. It's time to open some new doors in my mind.
I still have a good amount of research to do. I don't now quite enough about some of the ideas this book will include to be convincing. I've good work to do there. There are some ideas however that could be considered new, at least as far as fiction is concerned, so those I will just have to research in my own mind. That's a little bit more fun than the other type of research. The fabrication, at least for me, is one of the most enjoyable parts of writing.
Ah, the characters. Those wiley, self-destructive, selfish, ill-tempered, and almost always stubborn creations of mine will be the death of me. How do you create something or someone with a mind of their own and then convince them to do the things that you need them to do? I'm sure this is a common problem. They get away from me, they fight me, and sometimes they just take a flying leap off a cliff that I didn't even know was there. The worst part is that those are always the most interesting characters. It's the boring ones, the flat ones, that ones that just won't do anything that stick around. They just sit there all useless, staring at a wall, taking up space, eating all my food and refusing to perform. I just can't seem to inspire the dull ones and I can't control the exciting ones. Secretly I love every minute of it.
Then there's always the new map, or the new world itself if I'm extra ambitious. The map of this new land is going to be a major factor in the way the story itself plays out. If I'm going to make it a whole world then it's that much more complicated. It's akin to taking the compication of creation a person with all the intricacies that entails and multiply that by some unfathomably huge number. There's all the features of the land itself that will control borders, battles, travel, culture, and conflict just to name a few. Then you have to create languages, economies, politics, heirarchies, histories, intrigues, and put all of that together to create an epic story. It really helps to appreciate minds like Tolkein and George R. R. Martin doesn't it? As long as I'm dropping names of heroes lets add a few others. There's David Eddings before the Elder Gods series, Robert Jordan if he ever finishes, C. S. Lewis should have been at the top as well as Anne McKaffrey. Ursula K. LeGuin was a childhood favorite. I liked Nix and Phillip Pullman. My new hero of the past 5 years or so has been J. K. Rowling. There's a brilliant mind for you.
Anyway, to read a story by any of those authors is to feel a seemingly effortless flow of coherent thoughts all coming together over a tapestry of incredible complication. They do this through research, planning, and a talent for fabricating and keeping track of thousands of different ideas all at once. It takes an incredible amount of effort and thought. It takes years of effort. It takes a commitment to an idea that may or may not pan out to be what you thought it would but that commitment must hold true to the end regardless. It takes all of this and, in the end, a little bit of luck in that maybe that one agent somewhere will see something in your work that you saw all along and decides to take a chance on you. It sounds like an incredible task. It sounds, to me, like an enormous amount of fun. Imagine being one of the lucky ones and making a living at it. In a nutshell, there's my dream.
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2 comments:
There is absolutely nothing like the beginning of a book, the research, getting to know the characters, creating a world of your own. I have to say the research part is one of my favorites. As for characters, I can't say I've ever had much of a problem with them...but that's most because I let them take the lead, and act more like a director. Usually they tend to know the script, and even with a few impros, the final product usually doesn't stray far from my original idea. That was until I met my current "creation"...I can completely understand your dilema with that! Good luck writing!
There is no doubt in my mind that, for someone as interested as you are in literature, finding a niche in the writing community will be no problem with practice.
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