discovery writing – Page 2 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Tomorrow, tomorrow

So, I was going to finish Stars of Blood and Glory today…and then I went and spent some time with an old friend, had some dinner and spent the evening with the missionaries…long story short, I think it would be better just to wait until tomorrow than to do a rush job tonight.

I’ve only got two scenes and an epilogue left, which is very strange, because the novel isn’t even 75k words long yet. Something definitely seems to be missing, and it probably has to do with the storyline of the new characters I introduced. They’re the prince and princess of a futuristic Japanese culture (with a mix of Polynesian elements) that’s built on giant floating cities on a water world that never fell to the Hameji. I think I skipped a little too much on the research, so the culture doesn’t feel fleshed out enough at this point. Also, there’s a whole host of minor characters that I neglected to even give names; in the next draft, I’ll have to work out who they are and how they fit into things.

I’ll definitely finish this book tomorrow, though. There’s nothing stopping me, and I really need to get it done.

After that, the plan is to immerse myself in the world of Star Wanderers. I’ve got to be honest, I’m really looking forward to it. This story came to me like a love child: completely unexpected at a time when I was supposed to be working on other things. And yet, few other projects I’ve worked on have given me so much satisfaction. When I let my mind wander, I inevitably find myself daydreaming about it. And yet, it’s not a story I can force. I tried that once, and it was as if the characters just refused to cooperate; the answer, quite firmly, was “no.”

As for my next publishing project, I’m going to try to get the illustrated version of Journey to Jordan formatted and up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble before the end of the week. It’s a little intimidating, because I don’t yet know how to add pictures in html such that they turn out well in ebook format. However, I think it will be a good learning experience, once I climb the learning curve. Expect to see some news about that very soon.

And as for my New Year’s goal to read a book every week…I know, I know, I missed it last week. But I plan to make up for it with a couple of really good books in the next couple of days. Both of them are indie published, and they’re both really fun reads. The only reason I haven’t finished them is because I’ve been too busy working on my own projects.

So on that note, I think I’m going to retire for the evening with a good book while I wait with baited breath for Kris Rusch’s next Business Rusch post to go live. Have a good night!

Torn between projects and some new thoughts on the creative process

So I have a confession to make: a couple of days ago, when I was in something of a rough spot with my current novel, Stars of Blood and Glory, I had this overwhelming urge to go back and revisit Star Wanderers. In two days, I went through everything I’d written up to the point where I’d gotten stuck, and something just clicked. All of a sudden, I knew exactly where to take the story.

So today, I sat down and wrote the next scene…and man, it was hot! The words were flying, the characters were leaping off the page (and almost into the sack with each other–almost, but not quite)–it was awesome! The flame for this project has definitely been rekindled, and I’m really enthusiastic to get it rolling again.

Trouble is, I’m already working on Stars of Blood and Glory–and making some good progress on that one as well. In fact, I’m still quite excited about it. I’ve got all the twists planned out, the characters are really coming alive, and while the manuscript is still pretty rough, none of the problems are too serious to stop the creative process.

But sometimes…well, sometimes I feel like I’ve been writing so fast on this one, that the story hasn’t had time to really percolate. I’ll have the next few scenes planned out, but I just won’t want to write them–not because I’m lazy, I don’t think, but because it hasn’t really clicked yet in my mind.

This is something I’m slowly coming to grips with. The creative writing process isn’t something you can completely capture with metrics (like daily/weekly word counts, hours worked, writing rates etc). There’s a whole lot of mental-space work that, on the outside, looks a whole lot like procrastination or laziness–and can easily degenerate into that, if you aren’t careful. However, these mental activities are absolutely crucial, because they serve to refill the creative well. Without them, writing becomes painfully difficult, and the quality of the stuff you do manage to put out tends to suffer.

That’s what I’m starting to notice, in any case. I’ve found it somewhat helpful to go on a long walk each day, like maybe for an hour or more, but I wonder if it might also be helpful to have multiple projects to fall back on, so that even if I’ve got to refill the well for one of my projects, I can still be actively creating.

Because it’s more complicated than just outlining the next chapters. The best scenes to write are the ones that go off in their own direction, without any planning (or perhaps minimal planning) on my part. Discovery writing is definitely a part of my process. To make that happen, however, I have to get a real feel for what’s happened up to that point, and think through all the implications of their possible choices. If I do it right, something I haven’t considered comes to mind, and it helps the scene to come to life enough for me to write through it.

So yeah. For Star Wanderers, the ideas have been percolating since a conversation I had with my brother in law and former roommate over Christmas break. For Stars of Blood and Glory, I feel almost as if I’m going too fast to percolate–or that at least I need to take a little time off here or there. And the real trouble is that I’m probably going to be going overseas in a couple of weeks–which means that all the free time I enjoy right now is probably going to become extremely scarce in the near future.

So I’m going to do my best to finish Stars of Blood and Glory before the end of the month, but if I’m not getting enough prewriting in to do the story justice, I’m not going to push it. And when I’m not working on that one, I’ll work on Star Wanderers, since I’m really in love with this project (seriously, very much in love) and it’s not in my heart to put it off any longer. I just hope that it doesn’t get in the way…

Anyhow, if I’m going to pound out another 4k to 5k tomorrow, I’d better get to bed. I’ll leave you with this:

Man, I need to get this girl to do the soundtrack for my life. Either that, or my next book, which pretty much amounts to the same thing. 😛

G’night!

Climbing the 10k mountain

writingmetric — Many Bothans died to bring you this.

I recently read an amazing blog post by Rachel Aaron, in which she explains how she went from writing about 2k words per day (about what I’m doing) to routinely breaking 10k.

This is something I really want to do with my own writing. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I need to pick up the pace if I’m going to keep up with my professional goals. If I could go from 2k to 10k, and make 10k the standard…holy cow, that’s a 500% jump in productivity. Who wouldn’t want that?

From Rachel’s blog:

Drastically increasing your words per day is actually pretty easy, all it takes is a shift in perspective and the ability to be honest with yourself (which is the hardest part). Because I’m a giant nerd, I ended up creating a metric, a triangle with three core requirements: Knowledge, Time, and Enthusiasm. Any one of these can noticeably boost your daily output, but all three together can turn you into a word machine. I never start writing these days unless I can hit all three.

The point that I probably need to work on the most is time: I tend to start off the day slow, checking Facebook and blogs and other stuff before getting into the writing, then write for a little while before running off and doing some chore or allowing myself to get distracted again. Sometimes, I don’t really buckle down until a couple of hours before I should go to bed, and that’s bad.

But really, I think the main obstacle is just thinking that writing is difficult. If everything comes together in the right way, there really isn’t any reason why 5k or 6k or even 10k should be too difficult–and yet we naturally think that if 2k is hard, anything more should be that much harder.

I’m in a weird state of limbo right now between moving and preparing to go overseas, but I’m going to start a daily writing log so that I can figure out what time of day is most productive. You can’t wait for life to settle down before you get to work; you have to roll with what you’re given. Also, I’m going to put a lot more effort into outlining and planning, so that I don’t get hung up by research when I should be writing. Even discovery writers need a little bit of time to ponder things before putting words to the page.

Also, after considerable thought and effort, I’ve decided to put Star Wanderers on the back burner again. I finished the novelette last week and submitted it to Writers of the Future; I think it’s quite good, and stands a good chance of finding a home in one of the short markets. But the full length novel, for various reasons, just isn’t coming to me. I don’t know if it’s because I lack the life experience to write it, or because I’m too close to it to see what’s broken, but regardless of the reason, I need the break.

I’m not sure whether to do Edenfall or Stars of Blood and Glory next, but I’m leaning towards Stars of Blood and Glory. This is a novel set in the Gaia Nova universe, with characters from Desert Stars, Bringing Stella Home, and Heart of the Nebula. I’ve been itching to write it since this summer, but never got around to it because other projects got in the way. Well, hopefully now that will change.

I know from emails and other correspondence that some of you are really looking forward to Edenfall, but don’t worry, I’ll get around to it soon. In order to do it justice, I feel I need to reread Genesis Earth and immerse myself in some Carl Sagan, but right now I’m still running on a sci fi adventure trip. If I can implement some of these metrics and push my daily word count upwards of 10k, it shouldn’t be long before Edenfall gets my attention again. My goal is to finish it before the end of the year, so there’s a very good chance it’ll be published sometime in late 2012.

As for Star Wanderers, I’ll shop the novelette around after I hear back from Writers of the Future. I think it has a good chance at winning the quarter, but of course I can’t count on it. At this point in my career, I should probably be playing both the traditional markets as well as the indie field.

That’s just about it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to write…

Managing excitement and an idea for an epic fantasy novel

After getting about 40% through Star Wanderers 1.0, I hit a wall and decided to put the project on the back burner for now. The beginning part, which I’m hoping to shop around as a novelette, has some issues with it and those are keeping me from making any real progress in the rest of the story.

I wish I could just wave my hand and pretend as if I’ve already fixed those problems, but my creative process just doesn’t work like that. I guess I’m more of a discovery writer in that way, because I can only build on stuff that I’ve already written. I have to figure out my characters as I write, otherwise they just fall flat.

It’s discouraging, because I feel like I don’t have enough control or discipline over my creative process. Other writers seem to be able to pick up a project and finish it, even when that project is commissioned by someone else (editors, franchise owners, etc). But with me, if I can’t get excited about a project, I can’t finish it.

Fortunately, even if I can’t always control which project I’m excited about, I always seem to be excited about something. After finishing the last revision for Desert Stars, I felt this unusually strong urge to work on Into the Nebulous Deep (which, after the last post, I’ve tentatively decided to rename Heart of the Nebula). I totally didn’t see that coming, but I’m glad that it did, because that project is getting due for its first major revision. It’ll probably be a quick one, just to fix some major known issues before sending it off to first readers.

As for new projects, I’m not quite sure what to pick up next. I’ve got a feeling I could give Edenfall another shot, though it’s dubious at this point, and I still have a bit of lingering excitement over the untitled Gaia Nova novel that involves Roman, Danica, Rina, and Stella’s son.

At the same time, though, I have a really cool idea for a fantasy novel involving magic swords. The idea is that the swords are actual characters, with the ability to think, feel, remember, and communicate with those who wield them. They can only be wielded by those whose minds have been melded to them, however, kind of like the Dragonriders of Pern.

As the swords get passed down from generation to generation, they pass on their skills and memories, so that those who wield them become legendary warriors. However, all but one of the swords goes insane, turning their wielders to evil. The one sword that remains has refused to take on a new master, even though war and destruction sweeps the land. A prophecy states that the one who wields this sword will eventually defeat the evil of the others, but when the good sword finally does take on a new owner, it ends up being a farmgirl / tavern wench (I haven’t really decided).

I don’t have a lot of experience writing fantasy, but this story is starting to really excite me. If I can combine it with a few other ideas and read some good fantasy novels to get into that mood, I think I can make some good progress on it.

So yeah–I have plenty of projects to work on, so things aren’t that bad. I just need to find one that I can really get into for the next couple of months; if I keep bouncing around from project to project without finishing any of them, that’ll be bad.

“What was your purpose in writing this?”

Yesterday I heard back from one of my first readers for Star Wanderers, and the feedback she gave me was awesome. You know you’ve got a good first reader when their comments make you go “aha!” and you find yourself with a host of new ideas for the story.

Anyway, at one point, she asked me: “what was your purpose in writing this?” To which I answered “I don’t know; I was supposed to be working on something else, and all of a sudden I found that I’d written this story!”

Her eyes widened a little, and she kind of got this look on her face that said: “how could you possibly write something like this and not put a ton of thought into it?” Which struck me as amusing, because she’s an editor who writes on the side, and I’m a writer who edits on the side.

This is the thing about discovery writing: it’s not about how much sweat and tears you put into your work, but how much energy you get out of it. If a project just totally drains you, chances are it’s not going to be as good as something so exciting that you can’t not write it. And once you improve your craft to the point where you’re no longer committing all the stupid new writer mistakes, if you’re having fun, chances are that the readers are going to enjoy it too.

Ah, the joys of spontaneous creativity. Would that it was always this much fun.

🙂

Just following my bliss

They say the way you know you’re a writer is if you can’t not write. Well, last week I had the gratification of experiencing that again firsthand.

For all of August, I was more or less betwen projects and not writing a lot of new material. I’d just epublished Bringing Stella Home and was busy getting Sholpan ready for epublication. Then Worldcon happened, and my writing dropped off precipitously. I tried to get back in a groove, but found it difficult to choose between projects, none of which seemed to fit my writing schedule.

And then the creative half of my brain said “screw it” and ran off on an idea that came from practically out of nowhere.

It all started when I was taking a power nap after a long day at work. For some reason, my mind wandered to Jeremiah Johnson, an old Western with an awesome love story.

In the movie, Robert Redford unkowingly insults an indian chief by giving him several captured scalps. The chief must return with a gift of equal or greater value, and so gives Redford his daughter, who doesn’t speak a word of English. At first, things are hilariously awkward, but over time they grow into a beautiful and touching relationship.

Well, as I lay there thinking about the movie, I wondered: what if the same basic storyline were set in space? Instead of a mountain man, the protagonist would be a space explorer / interstellar merchanter. Instead of an indian chief’s daughter, the female protagonist would be the daughter of a station master whose colony is facing severe famine and widespread starvation. When the merchanter boy unwittingly shows up at the doomed colony, the station master coerces him into taking his daughter to save her life. And so, for the next two months, the boy finds himself crammed into a tiny little ship with a girl who doesn’t speak his language. Hilarity ensues.

At first, I thought I’d keep it as a short story, but…yeah, that didn’t last long. The more I run with it, the more ideas keep coming to me–ideas that I haven’t played with in a couple of years. The story is set in the same universe as Gaia Nova and Bringing Stella Home, but about a thousand years earlier, back when things were, shall we say, more primitive. I still don’t know where this story is going to take me, but I can tell it’s going to be a lot of fun.

The best part is that even if I expand this into a full length novel, the first part stands on its own so well that I could probably submit it to Writers of the Future. That never happens! It’s been years since I submitted to the contest; I always wanted to send something, but all I could ever write was novels with long, complex beginnings that couldn’t be cut off at the 17,000 word mark.

Anyhow, the working title of the novel is Star Wanderer (I can’t believe it’s not already taken), and it’s probably going to end up around 80k words or so. I only have a vague idea at this point, but it’s much more intimate and personal than epic in scope, so I don’t expect it to go much longer. I’ll probably finish the first part sometime next week and start looking for some first readers. I’d like to finish the rough draft before I start the Desert Stars revision in October, but we’ll see whether that works out.

As for Edenfall, don’t worry, I’m still working on that project too. One of the advantages of writing longhand is that it’s much easier to pick up and just go; instead of having to stop and think about what needs to happen next, the physical act of writing is slow enough that the ideas come much more organically. I might not finish it before October, but if I can juggle it with Star Wanderer, I can probably juggle it with Desert Stars. In any case, it’ll be good to work on new material and keep my writing sharp while I’m doing the revision. We’ll see how it turns out.

So that’s what I’ve been up to in the last week. I only wish I were doing this full time, so that I could spend all day working on these stories. Soon, inshallah.

Edenfall update

So I haven’t exactly gotten into a good writing routine yet, but Edenfall is coming along pretty well. I’m just about finished with the first chapter, and the dominoes are already starting to fall.

It’s fun to revisit the world of Genesis Earth, but I’m not going to get too bogged down in recapping the events of the first book or setting things up. I hate it when sequels do that. Fortunately, since the majority of this story is going to be from a new character’s point of view (Michael and Terra’s oldest daughter), I don’t really have to do that, except to lampshade some of the worldbuilding.

One thing I need to do is get more in the mood of the first book, which was a lot more introspective and big-picture than my other science fiction. To do that, I found an excellent collection of videos called The Sagan Series. Here is my favorite:

Man, I get shivers every time I watch that. “Sailors on a becalmed sea…”

Another good video is this one from The Piano Guys:

I know it says “Southern Utah,” but you could substitute that for “Icaria” and it wouldn’t be that far off. In particular, the night clip from the bottom of the slot canyon at 2:05 looks like something straight out of Genesis Earth. Throw in some primitive natives, a few giant lizards and various avians and insectoids, and you’re pretty much there.

I’m still adjusting to writing in longhand, but so far I think it’s going to work out well. Because the writing process itself is much slower, it’s much more time intensive but surprisingly easy to jump in and get started. Once I’ve got some momentum going, I think the story will practically write itself.

I do have a confession to make, though. A couple days ago, I had an idea for another science fiction story that was just so awesome I decided to run with it. At first, I thought I could keep it down to a short story, or perhaps a novella at most, but…well, I think it’s going to be a bit longer than that.

Don’t worry: Edenfall is still my primary project, and if juggling them both becomes too difficult (which it probably will), I’ll put this new one on the back burner until Edenfall is finished. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure anyways, a sci-fi romance that draws heavily on tropes from old westerns (Jeremiah Johnson in particular). I have no idea where it’s going to go (well, nothing more than a vague idea about the twist at the end), but that just makes it all the more exciting to write.

So anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to these last few days. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to writing. See you around!

Q2 roundup

For those of you who don’t know, I keep a spreadsheet with my daily writing word count and use that to help set personal deadlines for various projects. In order to keep myself honest, I do a report every quarter on how I kept up with my writing goals in the past three months.

So, without further ado, here are last quarter’s numbers:

The red line represents daily word counts, the blue line is simply a running total of the past 7 days. Because I’m a discovery writer who often does the heavy work of shaping the story in the revision process, I include revision notes and second / third / fourth drafts in these counts. I do not include proofreading, though, or sentence / paragraph level revisions for basic errors.

In April, I was plugging through the middle of the first draft of Into the Nebulous Deep and working a temp job full-time doing data entry. I had just indie published my first three short stories and was still trying to figure out how the system works. Despite this, I was able to keep up a pretty consistent word count for most of the month, though 10k per week is lower than I would have liked.

Endings are probably the hardest thing for me to write, so at the end of the month things came to a head and my word count dropped significantly. This was also the week before my youngest sister got married, so that threw a kink in the works. The job also caught up to me, so in the last week of April my productivity took a real hit.

In May, however, I took time off from the job to “pursue a freelance project” (aka epublish Genesis Earth). My boss had told me he’d like to have me back once the freelance project was finished, so I felt pretty good about taking the month off.

It took a while for my editor and cover artist to get back with the final product, though, so I spent most of May working on Desert Stars. This was the third draft, so I was WAY stoked to work on it. Outlined my revision notes for the first half in a matter of days, which led to the huge peak around the 19th, and launched right into the project full steam ahead. It was glorious.

When my editor and cover artist got back to me at the end of the month, however, I put Desert Stars on the back burner for about a week to go over the copy edits for Genesis Earth and give it one final proofread. That’s why things dropped off again toward the end of the month.

In June, I went back to the temp job to save up for Worldcon. Fortunately, I was able to strike a pretty good balance between writing and work that lasted for the rest of the quarter. If I didn’t have to juggle a full time job with my full time writing, I probably would have written more, but at 15k per week I was able to keep up pretty well with my personal deadlines.

So yeah, it was a pretty routine quarter. Nothing too spectacular, though there were some ups and downs. If you count Bringing Stella Home, I’m on track to complete two polished books this year once I finish Desert Stars. The latest draft is pretty good, but I think it will need at least one more run through with first readers to make sure the changes to the story are good (and I’ve made a LOT of changes to the story). Still, I’m averaging about two months per draft per book, so I’m optimistic about getting it out in time for Christmas.

My next project after Desert Stars will probably be the sequel to Into the Nebulous Deep. I’ll work as hard on that until it stalls, then spend a couple of weeks to put together Sholpan, a novella with the events of Bringing Stella Home told entirely from Stella’s point of view. I’ll probably put that one up for $.99 or so to generate interest in Bringing Stella Home.

So yeah, that’s what things look like for the immediate future. Still working, still saving for Worldcon, but the writing is coming along and I should be publishing a few more ebooks in the near future. So stay tuned!

Deciding on the next project

First, you know how I said I’d raise the price of Genesis Earth as an experiment? Well, after thinking it through a little more, I figured that it’s more important at this point to build a following, and to do that I should probably have at least one novel at the $2.99 price point. Since Genesis Earth is the only novel I have out right now, I decided to drop the price, where it will probably stay for a while. Flakey, I know, but so be it.

More importantly, I’m coming up on the end of the third draft of Desert Stars. It’s going to be a push, but I hope to finish it by the end of the week. It’s an awesome book and I’m way excited with it, but it leaves me wondering: what next?

I’m currently torn between two projects. The first one, Edenfall, is the sequel to Genesis Earth, and the second in the trilogy. It’s been kicking around in my mind for a long time, and I’ve already got it all outlined and ready to go.

But…the flashier, more exciting project to me right now is the next book in the Gaia Nova series, an indirect sequel to both Desert Stars and Bringing Stella Home, which I hope to epublish later this month. Even though I have a ton of ideas for it, I have absolutely NO outline whatsoever. Nothing. All I know is that it’s basically the Battle of Ain Jalut in space, with Rina from Desert Stars and Danica, Roman, and the other mercenaries from Bringing Stella Home. Oh, and Stella and Qasar’s son, a Hameji prince who makes an appearance in Into the Nebulous Deep. That’s it.

And yet…I am sooo excited to work on it. You have no idea.

So…should I go with the safe, reliable project? Or the sexy, mysterious one? There are good reasons to go with either. Edenfall should be fairly straightforward, taking no more than two months. With the first in the series already out and selling, I should probably write it sooner rather than later. However, the Gaia Nova series is much more expansive, and since I’m already immersed in that universe from working on Desert Stars, it would be much easier to jump right into it.

Right now, I’m leaning more toward the second project, but knowing my personal writing process, I’ll probably get stuck somewhere in the middle and switch to Edenfall. But hey, if it works, it works. That’s how I’ve written all of my other books so far: start the rough draft with a frenzied burst of creative energy, then let it sit for a while and move on to other projects before coming back and finishing the first.

Either way, I’m not going to pull a Rothfuss or a Martin. My goal is to finish my next project in 8 weeks or less, which will be tough with my current job, but not impossible. Which reminds me of yet another reason why I never want to be salaried (unless I’m the one running the business). Not that I plan on ever being pregnant…

Thoughts on outlining

I’m on track to finish my fifth novel in a couple days, and surprisingly, the writing has been going very smoothly.

Usually by this point, my eyes are bleeding and I feel as if I have a hundred caltrops in my pants. Finishing a rough draft is still the hardest part for me, since by the end everything seems to suck and I just want to trash the whole project.

I still feel a little bit of that with Into the Nebulous Deep, but not nearly as much as with my previous stuff. Part of that is probably because I feel confident that I can fix whatever I screw up, but the other part probably has to do with the way I’ve learned to outline. In one short sentence, here’s what I’ve learned:

An outline is simply the story you tell yourself to help you tell the story.

I don’t think there’s any mortal writer on this planet who can keep a whole novel in their head at one time. Scenes, yes; chapters, maybe; novels, absolutely not.

However, since everyone’s creative mind works a little differently, everyone has to find the process that works for them. Brandon Sanderson, for example, writes story bibles that are almost 100k words long. If I were to try to do that, I’d get bored halfway through and spend the rest of the day dorking around on youtube. Other people prefer to fly by the seat of their pants, and while there’s something to say about trusting your subconscious, I need a little structure to keep from getting totally lost.

It took me a while to figure out the process that best works for me, but based on how ITND has been going, I think I’ve hit my stride. Breaking it down into plot, setting, and character, here’s how I basically do it:

Plot

For me, the basic plot of the story comes in a flash of creative insight once all the ideas in my head have reached a critical mass. It’s like watching a fissure shoot across a smashed window pane, or lightning arcing from the ground to the sky.

If I don’t have time to start the project right away, I’ll let the plot mull around in my head for a couple days, then open up notepad and free write the basic structure of the story in an unedited stream of consciousness. When I do start the project, I’ll look back to the free write to refresh my memory, but otherwise work out of what’s in my head (which may have changed).

While the project is ongoing, I’ll divide the whole novel into parts, chapters, and scenes. For the chapter I’m currently working on, I’ll have the various scenes listed in bold with their corresponding point of view character (eg: “1.1: James“), followed by a brief one or two line description of the action and plot significance. If I introduce a new character in that scene, I’ll write their name in ALL CAPS (I believe that’s a screenwriting convention I picked up from my old college roommate).

For chapters I haven’t written yet, I just write a few lines of description for what I envision happening in them. When I first start out, I usually have a clear idea where I want the story to end, but I don’t bother outlining all the stuff in the middle since that usually changes based on stuff that comes before. I only keep my outline a few chapters ahead of where I currently am, and may change things completely if something new comes up.

This process works very well for me. I use it for every draft, and refer to it often.

Character

I’ve found that I need to do a lot more outlining to figure out my characters than I do with my plot. However, it’s like Tracy Hickman said with the marbles: don’t hold onto your outline too tight, or all the marbles will slip out between your fingers.

The things I absolutely need to know about my characters are:

back story
motivations
first impressions
flaws & handicaps
strengths & advantages
why the reader should care about / sympathize with them

For some odd reason, I find it most helpful to write this out longhand, usually while taking a walk. For additional help, sometimes I’ll take a personality test on behalf of my character and get a handle on them through their personality type; for that, I prefer the Meyers-Briggs typology.

But once I feel I have a solid handle on a character, I’ll throw everything out if it feels instinctively right for a character to do something completely different. Thing is, I need the outline (especially the motivations and back story) to get to the point where I know the character well enough to let them take over.

And for some reason, all my main characters feel too…generic. I’m not sure why, but that’s something I’ve got to work on.

Setting

Setting, for me, is all about discovery writing. I’ve tried using wikidpad to worldbuild my universe before I start, but that’s never worked. Instead, I daydream a lot and trust my subconscious to give me what I need when I need it.

That’s not to say I don’t do research–just that most of my research is on the fly. If I only stay on wikipedia and the footnotes and references, no problem; if I get sidetracked on facebook, however…

Often, when I’m doing setting descriptions, I’ll run a quick google image search to pull up pictures to give me a better visual idea of what I’m describing. I especially use this for clothing; that’s why, if you check my search history (please don’t), you’ll find all these weird, girly terms like “ottoman dress,” “jumpsuit,” “leather jerkin,” and ~~“full frontal snogging”~~ (whoops, where did THAT come from??).

The big problem is when I figure something at the beginning of the book and then forget about it halfway through. For that reason, I should probably invest in a good copy editor when I start to publish. I should also take the time to draw out a starmap, since it’s getting REALLY hard for me to remember where the Belarian system is in relation to Tajjur and Karduna Prime…hmm…

I should probably figure out a better system to keep track of my settings, but as far as outlining them goes, the less the better. I love waving my hand and creating stuff–it’s one of the main reasons why I’m a science fiction writer.

So anyways, that’s more or less the outlining system I currently use. I might end up outgrowing certain aspects of it, or finding a better system, but this is what works best for me now.

Of course, I still have a lot to learn.