Now that the first novel of my series has been released, this is probably the best time to unpackage some of the behind-the-scenes aspects and register some lessons learned. In that regard. At the end of the day, these aren’t award-winning tips, or guaranteed steps to a bestseller. They did manage to get me through the writing of my first novel, however, an achievement which eluded me for the better part of my life– until I made a few changes in how I did things. If you’re in the same straits, there might be something here for you.
I recently held a Question-and-Answer session with readers and fellow writers. A lot of questions posed to me revolved around my process. How do I deal with writer’s block? What inspires me? What parts of the process do I enjoy, or hate most?
I plan to write a series of posts on this blog to discuss my take on the craft, but I’m going to hit the wavetops here and introduce a few points of note. Take them for what they’re worth. I am still developing as a fiction writer and learning all the time. It took a few years to complete my novel and for me to be satisfied with it, but I mapped out the journey and look forward to all the return trips I have in store.
Setting Boundaries
When I write science fiction, I find my characters come first, but when I write fantasy it begins with setting. That was the case with Crown of Caphedra. The interconnection of the places I had in my head predated any of the writing. One of my first hand-drawn maps of the greater kingdom, which I would go on to christen “Almahria”, shows a signature dated to 2017, and already incorporated the basic set up I created.
Almahria was shaped by the boundaries I imposed on myself. I was always aware that too ambitious a project would be destined for the “unfinished” pile. It’d be abandoned along with the countless other opening paragraphs and plot outlines I discarded over decades, since first professing a desire to be a novelist. So, I made Almahria into an island, and to artificially differentiate my capital of Caphedra, I extended this concept of conscious limitation to its neighbouring cities. I incorporated geographical hurdles between them and engineered a land where all roads led to Caphedra. By doing so, I could justify why Caphedra was integral to holding power over the land, as well as supporting a greater rationale as to how each city, in a comparatively small land mass, could still to develop their own diverse cultures.
So now I had a playground with a dominant city in the middle. I began to consider how I would upend this position of peace, prosperity, and complacent comfort, and create my plot by changing the equilibrium. I decided that this would the story of how one king, motivated more toward war than his progenitors had been, would use Caphedra’s great fortune to reforge the status quo and aspire not just to wealth but unrivalled dominion over the other cities. Then, assuming success, what would happen when he died?
Defining the Plot
Even then, I was still a bit timid about getting to work on the manuscript. I had already ordained the first key points of a backstory, but I still wanted a simple, manageable plot that would force me to stay on track and (hopefully) end up with a completed story.
I could not afford to let my mind wander too far, for that was the cause of death for many a failed tale sitting in my hard drive. I decided to go with something like “American Graffiti” and fix the plot around events that fed into one particular night. I knew which factions I wanted to bring in, and I knew that they would be forced to confront each other. I decided that everything in this novel would spiral downward until reaching that final battle and underpin that important Promise-Progress-Payoff cycle of which Brandon Sanderson speaks.
It also set me up with an established endpoint to work toward. What I needed next were my characters.
Populating with Personalities
I had the earliest inklings of my main trio bouncing around in my head, so I started to sketch out their character arcs. I established their motivations, at least so much as what formed them as people, and what they valued on account of their different experiences. I found a huge benefit in reading the article on Plot Appreciations in Storyminds’s repository of writer resources. It encourages a writer to look equally upon the consequences of your character’s failure to achieve their goal, and not just the conditions of their success.
There was still bit of a hitch, however. I planned to have more down-to-earth characters but ran into the problem that my overall plot was driven by the most powerful cornerstones of Caphedran society. Why would my characters even matter in the bigger scheme of things? I needed ways to draw them in, to make them commit themselves, to prove their worth.
On my page, Olen was keeping watch in the marshland of Fal Ghreeg. What would be the event to set things in motion?
Strangers arriving.
But I didn’t get around to describing the visitors, however. Instead, I got distracted again. I redirected my efforts off into a couple of short stories I was working on. I toyed with a spreadsheet full of plot appreciations for characters I could insert into a science fiction setting. Perhaps I could market them to a few magazines or assemble an anthology…
It seems fitting to pause this account here, since that’s exactly what I did with my work on the manuscript over virtually all that summer. It took a few months before I started to play around with Caphedra again, and then the muse hit. I’ll cover that in the next post.
To be continued…