Man, I was reading Mistborn tonight, and it was freaking amazing! I’m about 500 pages in, right up close to the end, at the part where the house war finally begins. And MAN!!!! That chapter was so awesome! The fight that Vin gets into…(dangit, can’t give away spoilers!), it just felt so GOOD! Just how Vin finally says to herself that she loves him, that was just AWESOME! (I assure you, my creative writing is of a much better quality than the language I use to express myself on this blog) And right as soon as that happened, I couldn’t put it down! I mean, I was going to go to bed before 1am, but here I am, 2am, and it took me a lot of effort just to pull myself away from that book!
This, I think, is one thing that really makes for good sci fi and fantasy–how you are really drawn into the story and it becomes something really close to you, to the point where you can’t stop reading it, you’re so into it! I guess not every story has to be that way to be good–I read The Left Hand of Darkness recently, and it was good, but I never got sucked into it like I’m getting sucked into Mistborn now. But man, all of the REALLY good books seem to do this to me–The Neverending Story, Ender’s Game, Second Foundation, The Chronicles of Prydain, A Wrinkle in Time, and now Mistborn.
But you know, as an aspiring writer, it can actually be pretty intimidating too. I mean, there is something really powerful about these books which sets them apart from the others. How can you expect to create that yourself when you’re just a beginner? Wouldn’t it be a little pretentious to think that you’re that good? How do you get to be that good?
When I came back from my mission, I got the writing bug again almost a week after I was released. I guess something had really been pent up for those two years, because over the course of the next 8 months, I wrote 69,000 words in that novel alone (not to mention that I started–and, about 4 months later, finished–two short stories). But after I got 69,000 words into this novel, I realized that some of the premises were flawed, things weren’t working out, and that most of those 69,000 words were as boring as heck. If I cut all the fat out, I would probably be reduced to about 30,000 words or less. There were no hard feelings, no shattered hopes and dreams, no crushed self esteem–I figured that it could still work, it would just need a major overhaul, and that it was better to leave it for a little while and come back. It’s been about 15 months now, and I’m not sure when or if I’m coming back, but there are no hard feelings about it.
It’s just…that story didn’t have the same magic to it that these really great sci fi / fantasy books have. Maybe I just needed the practice to do better on the next one. I don’t know. But man, I would really like the novel I’m writing now to have this kind of power to it! This kind of overwhelming significance!
I figure that if I really want to do that, I need to spend more time with my characters–figure out who they are, what is driving them, what their struggles are, what their desires are, and how they grow over the course of this novel. I think I’m more idea driven and story driven than character driven–which isn’t bad, Asimov was much more idea driven than character driven–but I want the characters in this story to be personal and compelling, like they are in Mistborn and the others.
So, I’ll probably spend some time blogging on these characters, throwing out what ideas I have for them so far, and where those ideas came from. Hopefully, by doing that, I’ll be able to think more about them and know what I want to show of them as I continue writing. And I’m open to suggestions, if you guys want to share them.
PS: man, I think my blogging word count exceeded my creative writing word count today! I need to repent of THAT!
Tag!
Every member a missionary.