Adventures of an Amateur Novelist

[Silver Guard]

Time passes fast in the mind of a novelist, too fast perhaps. You begin your project in January, and by the time you've dragged round to a first chapter its march already.
I've started off many the novel in my time. A too active imagination perhaps? Or is this simply the way for the average teenage geek? Never mind, whats important is not a single one is even near completion. The closest I've ever come to completion was a massive 50 pages of A5, size 10 on word. This is not much. The average novel of this size is about 300-500 pages.

When I came back and saw this, I was amazed. 50 pages, though not nearing novel size, is quite a sizable introduction (so far I'd only just gotten the main characters out of their home town). What shocked me, was just how badly written it was.
When you write, you write what comes to mind, how it comes. You may read it over afterwards, but as the thought is still fresh in your mind, you'll never see the major mistakes. For that you really need some exterior input. I avoided the shame of proving my geekiness to my peers and strove on. This was a mistake, on epic proportions.
Imagine a child doing a painting, say 3-4 years of age. It will mostly be blobs of colour and swirls. This is because this is what the child sees, and as it paints it understands what they are. You ask the child what he/she has painted, and they can tell you exactly what each thing is, even if its just a blob. Ask the child again as a teenager, and they won't have a clue.
This is the same with writing, unexperienced writers know what they are doing, they just don't know how to make others see the same thing. This is perfected in something known as "show don't tell". This cannot be overused. Any writing site you go to, this phrase will appear over and over till you are sick of it, but it is important.

I abandoned the story, it was unsalvageable. The plot was good, the telling was not. I could not show the reader what I wanted them to. The story was too vague, too fast paced and without any good dramatic devises. Quite simply, to produce a good story, I would have to re-write 50 pages of work. No small task.

So here I am again, same place, same time, four years later. I'm using a far different map then I was the first time, though the names live on (I am using a map called Etheldan, in the first version of the first novel's map, Etheldan was a region of waring states in the south-west, with many of the same states). I'll speak of the setting in a different post.

Updates will follow
Happy reading!
Eclipse.

[Silver Guard]

For every story the setting is the most essential part, forget the story itself, until you start writing you can forget about it. What you need is a setting. For conventional and historical writers all this needs is a little research, for some only a few hours work, perhaps a "work holiday" to a certain place on the globe. For fantasy its far more difficult.

Some of you may be familiar with my mod, Etheldan: Land of Steel. Truth be told, this is not the original materialization of my setting. The original looked like Europe, inspired by the book "The Siege of Arrandin", this was six years ago.
I say this was my first map of the setting, as its the first to have any names in similar with the present. Yes, I have a copy of every map ive drawn between now and ten years ago. The first nation of the present setting to exist was Cathagia, in essentially the same form.
My first ever map was essentially a carbon copy of that from the works of Raymond E Feist, which I read almost eight years ago, which was the same shape with different names. I can be forgiven as being only nine at the time, and having no other knowledge of the fantasy genre, I had a long way to go.

The "Arrandin" copy map was later replaced by a "Greyhawk" copy map, which was essentially the same map, reversed and with an extra evil desert empire. It would be this map which lasted the longest, and in the most forms. This would change from a map of Europe backwards, to this:

I would spend four years wit this map, I produced an entire map-history of the tri-continent, including extensions. It was a complete and utter waste of time. I wrote 20 pages of my first story (that referenced in my first thread) in this time, all of which would then be re-written.

I moved onto another map after four years of work on the old one, concluding that it was unworkable for the story, no matter how hard I tried to make it work. I eventualy got new inspiration from the Drenai series by David Gemmel, and decided to start afresh, with completely new nations. This was a bad idea. As Seneca said, a successful writer never throws away an idea. So I went back to the old map, and transferred the nations.
If you look at the old map you'll notice a concentration of nations in the bottom-right hand corner, near the end of the continent. In a later form of the map (based 100 years on) this area was conquered by a nation called Etheldan. I eventually scrapped the future-based map, but kept the name, calling the region by the name of this never-to-exist superpower.

As most of the nations from the new map were drawn from this area, it would be this which would come to be the name of the new continent, Etheldan, the land of steel, as seen below:


It wasn't long before I began to experiment, doing the same as I had done with the previous maps, tracing back the nations through history, their rise and falls, for four hundred years. The final map, seen above, was set prior to the Vlothian Wars. The map I would use for my first story. Finding it difficult to use I eventually changed the setting to one hundred years prior to this, during the Trade wars. This decision still troubles me, as the good vs evil struggle was lost for a more conventional medieval war, which produces my next dillema.


The new setting produced a problem which comes to all fantasy writers, just how fantastic is your fantasy? Do you delve into the realms of D&D? Where everyone has magic of some kind and magic creatures are common. Or do you make it ultra-realistic, with magic only in fairy tales, an alternate setting of real history if you will, much like my Etheldan mod.
This was especially troubling for me. I wasn't sure how much magic and divinity I wanted in my world. On the one hand it gave me more room to "play God" as all writers do to some extent, on the other it may detach the reader from the setting, as I found myself doing in the books too surreal for my tastes.

But this would not influence my setting. As I was using nations I'd worked with for almost six years, I was very familiar with their cultures and peoples. But my constantly changing maps had left me something lacking, detail. This was to be remedied in the last few months. I set to work adding every city, no matter how minor, to my map. The result is a huge file, bordering on the very limits of my photodraw space available. Its sheer size prevents me from posting it here, but to give a guideline, it looks set to have over one hundred settlements.

Its this detail which makes any story real for a reader, and so it is the most important thing to have ready before you start writing. Without you, you are writing on a void, with it you have every tool you need. I have already laid out the major cities in my head, if not on paper, I have in mind major historical figures and events, if not in a book. It will be this which will give me the drive to produce a novel, and this which I'll rely on.

[Silver Guard]

The power to shock is a powerful one, and one I decided to use as my opening. To be honest it's not something I'm proud of, but its a start, and it set me on my journey of my new novel. I'll post it here, as the first of many "clips" which will be revealed.

Starting a novel is perhaps the most important step for any writer, not because its starting, but because the first step is the hardest. You have to take one step forwards before you can walk. It can be compared to a fat person on a sitee not wanting to get up, but one he has done he'll move far more happily.
But thats not all, its also the most important part of any book. I know many books I've read the first few pages of and then put down in despair, these first few define the story, and are the most important part to draw a reader in.

A brilliant example of this is the wheel of time series. Its an awful series, when you come across a series of ten books you know there's something wrong, and the endings do not betray you, every single one is anticlimactic, just leading up to make you read the next... and the next... and the next.
But its the beginnings which sell the books, the beginnings are works of art, and should not be criticized, once you've read the first chapter you're hooked, and you can't let go until you realise, five books in, that the story never actually gets any better.

ON that sour note, I leave you with this:

I - The beginning of an End

The brown leaves fell like stained teardrops from a weeping willow as the screams echoed around its limbs. They flew, untouched even by the presence of death amongst them, drifting, gliding down to the ground. Only to land on sightless, open eyes. The tree mirrored their sightlessness, unable to see, hear or feel death as they had done. Softly swaying, its drooping branches felt not the fire that burned nearby, nor the blood spilled on its feeding ground. The willow that had stood and watched for generations watched calmly the slaughter of those who had tended it for so long.
Men stirred the branches as they rushed by, caring not for its fragile limbs and aging trunk. At their hips, empty scabbards; upon their backs, strung bows. They bore shields bearing a great tree and hill, yet upon tree and hill they marched, and before them blood flowed.
The men moved swiftly and silently, caring not for the bodies of the fallen, winged horses upon their chests, who had once born spear and shield against those still alive. Their misted eyes saw uncaring, the horror of their demise etched on deathly pallor.
The mailed men dragged women from their homes, striking them down, slitting their throats and marking with blood the doors of their homes. A dark slash on the smooth oak. The swords in their hands drew blood just as the bows upon their backs so recently plunged those black arrows into the flesh of the men who had sallied forth around the tree; their now limp bodies staining the ground around it, as the leaves fell like a morbid veil upon their faces.
It watched the thatched roofs burn as children rushed out to be slaughtered as lambs, their bodies hurled back into the furnace to feed the flames. The trees of the orchards caught like torchlights to light the slaughter and tainted metal as it rose and fell amongst the people. The smoke wrapped about the red mist like the cloak of death come to claim his own. Screams pierced the air like arrowheads through men, as kinfolk joined their families beyond the need for caring.
The war of others had come to plague the lives of this people, and like a disease it took their souls. Death swept amongst the village, and the white of age crept up the bark of a forgotten tree, alone amongst the ash and dead.

As I have already said, critique is always useful, so fire away. Re-reading is also useful, as I have noticed I have far too many smilies, this will be remedied soon.