words are hard. also worlds.
Jul. 3rd, 2015 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishIt turns out that writing a novel from scratch is hard. Who knew? I mean, other than everyone who's ever tried.
I've had this setting-image of a drowned city next to a foreign-occupied port kicking around in my head for a couple of years. No idea what I'd do with it but it was clearly bigger than a short story. Last month I started writing and I found a couple of characters to go with it. Not great characters, not yet, but characters.
What I don't have is a plot arc. Or really, very much of a setting beyond that initial image and some vague ideas. I had thought this would be enough to sustain me. It works for shorter pieces: I lay down the worldbuilding track as the prose train pulls up to it. I'm given to understand that the late Roger Zelazny worked in much this fashion. In a shocking turn of events, I am no Zelazny.
I blame role-playing. If I'm running a game (of a certain type, a type that I specialised in for years) then all I really need is a vague setting and an inciting incident. The players take care of the character development and even the plot to some extent. They react to the inciting incident, I shape the overarching plot in response to their actions. Symbiosis.
When I did Nanowrimo the one year I did that, the "novel" I wrote was more or less fanfic for the Lacuna RPG. It's my favorite kind of setting: barely sketched-in details so I can make up interesting stuff in the gaps, but with a clear thematic arc to it. That took care of some amount of the heavy lifting in terms of plotting: I was constrained as to where I could go by the thematic and conceptual pillars of the setting. That seems to have been doing a lot more work than I had given it credit for.
If I'm writing a novel from scratch, all that work is on me. That's a newish experience and I'm not sure how fond of it I am.
So at this point I have several thousand words, most of which will need to be expanded and heavily rewritten. I keep writing a scene and realising that stuff from earlier needs to change, and rather than going back and fixing it every time I'm leaving notes for myself. Means I'll have to write the whole thing twice in a row but I figure that's better than endlessly revising the opening. (I am also no William Gibson, I do not reread everything and rewrite it all when I sit down to write in the morning.)
I have a setting, sort of, and characters, more or less, and plot-like things happening for my characters to react to. I know what the next couple of scenes are going to be, and that takes me through the nominal 'first act' to the point where Things Get Bad and even a little beyond. After that... who knows.
So far I'm having fun getting there, though.
I've had this setting-image of a drowned city next to a foreign-occupied port kicking around in my head for a couple of years. No idea what I'd do with it but it was clearly bigger than a short story. Last month I started writing and I found a couple of characters to go with it. Not great characters, not yet, but characters.
What I don't have is a plot arc. Or really, very much of a setting beyond that initial image and some vague ideas. I had thought this would be enough to sustain me. It works for shorter pieces: I lay down the worldbuilding track as the prose train pulls up to it. I'm given to understand that the late Roger Zelazny worked in much this fashion. In a shocking turn of events, I am no Zelazny.
I blame role-playing. If I'm running a game (of a certain type, a type that I specialised in for years) then all I really need is a vague setting and an inciting incident. The players take care of the character development and even the plot to some extent. They react to the inciting incident, I shape the overarching plot in response to their actions. Symbiosis.
When I did Nanowrimo the one year I did that, the "novel" I wrote was more or less fanfic for the Lacuna RPG. It's my favorite kind of setting: barely sketched-in details so I can make up interesting stuff in the gaps, but with a clear thematic arc to it. That took care of some amount of the heavy lifting in terms of plotting: I was constrained as to where I could go by the thematic and conceptual pillars of the setting. That seems to have been doing a lot more work than I had given it credit for.
If I'm writing a novel from scratch, all that work is on me. That's a newish experience and I'm not sure how fond of it I am.
So at this point I have several thousand words, most of which will need to be expanded and heavily rewritten. I keep writing a scene and realising that stuff from earlier needs to change, and rather than going back and fixing it every time I'm leaving notes for myself. Means I'll have to write the whole thing twice in a row but I figure that's better than endlessly revising the opening. (I am also no William Gibson, I do not reread everything and rewrite it all when I sit down to write in the morning.)
I have a setting, sort of, and characters, more or less, and plot-like things happening for my characters to react to. I know what the next couple of scenes are going to be, and that takes me through the nominal 'first act' to the point where Things Get Bad and even a little beyond. After that... who knows.
So far I'm having fun getting there, though.
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Date: 2015-07-04 01:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
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