…Continued from Part 1
A Bit of Backstory about Backstory
Summer was a busy time for me. In addition to a new job in a new city, my family finally caught up with me and we moved into a new house. I got less and less writing done. But when autumn arrived there were more days when I felt like parking myself in my armchair and tossing around ideas in my head. I doubt I was even 500 words into it, but Caphedra was back on my mind, and I decided I would start expanding the backstory.
In my mind, it took twenty years for Ramis to subjugate his kingdom, to marry, and have children old enough to be heirs without lengthy periods of minority. I didn’t have the full plot outline in mind when I opened up a spreadsheet and began making up units and creating an order of battle for the Caphedran army.
I decided my novel would take place in the 300th year of his family’s reign, so I began my first column at year 280 and began filling it in, working my way forward. I started small on purpose, much more suggestive of the peacetime army Ramis inherited. I noted the events of each year– then I added units, reinforced others, transferred some into brigades, and walked the bunch of them through important battles in my head. By the time I had sandboxed twenty years of military history, there were upward of fifteen brigades, hosting fifteen times the troop count I’d begun with, all packed into garrisons, under unique commanders, with their own sigils and arms.
For my military characters, I assigned them each to a unit. Olen was from the Westriver Company, while Denn was a cavalryman with the 12th Mounted Infantry out of Falbeth. Crucially, I also doled out similar backgrounds for the four strangers and others.
By this time, it was Christmas, and I had some time to dust off the story and pick it up where I left it, in Fal Ghreeg. Armed with this extra knowledge, I was astonished at how fast ideas flowed to me. Suddenly, I had an intimate knowledge of my characters, their relationships, and even how age-old grudges built into their histories would affect their motivations as I typed out page after page.
I learned through my effort that I was not a “pantser” when it came to writing. I still give myself the freedom to develop some scenes on the fly, but they were always held in place by a consistent, constructed reality which I meticulously maintain in databases and spreadsheets, or mapped out on slides as if I were about to present them at a business luncheon.
Early to Bed and Early to Rise
Taking a structured approach to the creative process was certainly important, but it would be amiss to neglect something else which made a heap of difference: a lifestyle change.
As natural as being a nighthawk always was for me, it was impractical for my life. I also have a day job, and when I was taking public transit to work, my morning commute saw me having to wake up at 5 am.
I decided to double down on being an early bird by not sleeping in on weekends. Just as I woke up at 5 am on weekdays, I kept my alarm clock set to buzz on Saturday and Sunday as well. Those became my writing mornings, and I could sometimes put in a full seven- or eight-hour session before my family woke up and I broke for lunch. (A side benefit was that it removed the weekly yo-yo effect from my circadian rhythm and helped my sleep patterns.)
I kept a record of my progress and I managed to average over 500 words a day then– but only because I was writing three or four thousand words over the weekend. It was in this way, that I had a first draft completed by the end of 2019.
First Critiques
With the first draft in hand, I felt quite confident to start finally letting people have eyes on my work, though I didn’t want to expose my work to strangers just yet. I sent out some feelers and got responses back from enthusiastic friends, but I was most fortunate when a best friend recommended the person who would become my developmental editor and beta reader. Be it issues with pacing, stagecraft, or clarity, she pointed out all the faults and I ended up incorporating a lot of her input into guiding my own inner voice. Anything I didn’t think she’d let me get away with was purged from my pages without remorse. It led me to undertake some substantial rewrites and my plot evolved drastically.
Go Big or Go Home
My developmental editor focused a lot on the mechanics of my story, but another little bit of guidance always remained in the back of my mind. I had posted a small blurb, like an elevator pitch, to social media while my novel was a work-in-progress. It was received well but one responder added the advice: “Go big.” As I rearranged my novel, that simple tip stuck with me, and I ended up repeating it to myself like a mantra.
Throughout 2020 my story got bigger– both in scope and corresponding wordcount. The first draft had come in under 140,000 words. I lopped off a third of that, then continued to write and rewrite. The final word count would be 220,000 words. The antagonists had become stronger, the stakes higher, and the final conflicts that much more dire.
At Christmas 2020, I sent off my manuscript again, this time to a proofreader. Even then, I continued to re-work some key scenes, sending updates, chapter by chapter. (At this point, I was already deep into a sequel, and I needed to ensure my continuity would hold up as my concept continued growing into the next volume.)
The holiday season, 2021, will be rolling around again in about three weeks from the time I write this. I am very please to say that my novel, Crown of Caphedra, has been independently published and I’ve seen readers pick it up all over the world, from the UK and US to Australia, Vietnam, and Korea. My home country of Canada has generated quite a few sales, too. It’s a grand culmination of finally getting the discipline and clear-headedness to put words on the page, with effectiveness. I’ll spend this Christmas with a glass of eggnog and a sequel already on the go, sure to leave updates on this blog as it too progresses.