revising – Page 10 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Quick update

Haven’t been writing as much in Ashes these past few days. With my new goal, I need to be doing about 2.5k per day in that work, but things have slowed down considerably. I need to rekindle some excitement for this project.

I will finish it–I’ve made the goal, set the deadline, and determined that this will be one of the big three projects to get ready in time for World Fantasy 2009–but I’m working on the hard parts now, the long and tedius middle. The emotional roller coaster has begun, but I’ll hang on and see this out to the end.

It will probably need another extensive rewrite, however, before World Fantasy. Don’t know when I’m going to slip that in.

But even though I only got about 1,838 words of writing in today, I finished reading through Genesis Earth 2.0 today and completed the 3.0 draft revision notes! I’m WAY excited to work on this project! My goal is to complete it within the next two weeks. It will be a very hard, very intensive rewrite, but I’m psyched up and ready to do it!

I love revising. Drafting is when you start from scratch, with nothing but your ideas to work from. The deeper you get into it, the more you find yourself saying “this is crap, this is crap, THIS IS CRAP AND I SUCK AS A WRITER!” Revising, on the other hand, is when you start with something on the page; something that needs a little (or a lot) of work, but at least you have something besides the story in your head to work with. The deeper you get into it, the more you find yourself saying “it’s so much better now, it’s so much better now, IT’S SO MUCH BETTER NOW AND I AM AN AWESOME WRITER!” That’s the way it works for me, at least.

So I am very excited to start Genesis Earth 3.0 tomorrow!

In other news, I’m starting a writing group with some serious/semi-serious writer friends here in the Provo area. Gosh, this deserves its own post. More on that later.

In still other news…I totally forgot. Blegh. Need sleep.

Oh, and here’s a cool song I found. I love anime…why didn’t I study Japanese?

Oh, and I remembered what I was going to write about! I talked with an academic advisor today, and I have enough credits to finish up my Poli Sci major and graduate in April by doing an internship in Washington DC or Scotland! More on that later, for sure.

Anyway, the LRC is closing and I have to go to bed. Gnight!

Goal shift for Ashes

These past few weeks, I’ve been killing myself trying to write Ashes of the Starry Sea. I’ve made some good progress, as you can see on the sidebar. Today I broke 200 pages. Not too bad.

However, the pace has just been killing me. 4k words per day is something I can do…but 4k words per day on the same project? It’s burning me out.

What’s more, to keep up the pace, I’ll have to put all my other projects completely on hold for the month of July. That, or write MORE than 4k per day, which would be excruciatingly painful.

So I looked at my calendar tonight and figured that if I pushed back my self-imposed deadline for Ashes to the weekend before school starts, I can cut my daily wordcount in that book in half. 2k per day in Ashes–not bad. That I can do.

What’s more, with the other 2k, I’ll have enough room to work on my other projects, Genesis Earth 3.0 and Bringing Stella Home 2.0. I’m starting to get really excited for those, very motivated. For Bringing Stella Home, I’m practically chomping at the bit. I want to make that story shine!

Inshallah, juggling two projects at a time will be helpful, not harmful. During the school year, when I was juggling work, school, and writing, it didn’t work. Now, however, with writing the only major obligation, I’m hoping that two projects will help keep my creative mind fresh, if that makes sense. When I get burned out on Ashes at 2pm, I can switch to Genesis Earth and work on something that excites me. When I get burned out on that at 9pm, I’ll be excited about Ashes again. Etc etc.

Besides, if I want to be a professional writer, project juggling is an important skill I’ll need to learn. Inshallah, I’ll get it to work this time.

Wow! If all goes according to plan, I’ll have all three novels finished and polished before school starts at the end of August! July to write Genesis Earth 3.0, August to write Bringing Stella Home 2.0, and both months to finish Ashes of the Stary Sea 2.1. Yeah!

In other news, Charlie finished Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson and reviewed it on her blog. I was also reading Warbreaker, but about 200 pages in found that it just wasn’t working for me. I’ll probably finish it someday, but for now, it’s on hold.

I hate to say anything bad about it, since Brandon has been something of a mentor to me (and his Mistborn books are some of the best fantasy that I’ve read!), but I shared many of Charlie’s complaints with the book.

The biggest thing, however, was the way he fell into long, frequent info dumps about the world. Every time, I felt that it stopped the action and jolted me out of the story, like reading a college textbook. The world was okay, but the way he presented it just didn’t work for me.

That, and the way the characters acted. When Siri got carted off near the beginning to be the wife of the God king, the fact that she hardly showed any fear or anxiety about have sex with the guy just threw me out. She was just like “oh, well,” and was nervous about everything else EXCEPT for the sex part. From then on, I had believability issues with her character.

Finally, let me just say that when I write my steampunk flower novel, I want to make one of the characters a Circassian janissary. I just think it would be really cool to put a Circassian in the book, as either a good guy or a bad guy (or, more likely, a grey-area guy). If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, check out the video below:

Movin’ along

I submitted a story to the Writers of the Future contest today. Basically, I took the scene from Genesis Earth that won the Mayhew Contest this year, slapped just enough of an ending on it to make it feel like a coherent story (inshallah), changed a couple of universe details, and sent it out. Time will tell if anything will come of it.

On Sunday, I home taught this girl who just graduated in astronomy! She told me all about her capstone project, studying the variance in luminosity of a distant star getting its insides sucked out by a black hole / neutron star / something ridiculously cool. We geeked out on stars more than on the scriptures!

Now I need to make friends with someone who works at the BYU observatory and hang out with them at their work. With my next door neighbor the president of the BYU Astronomy club (no joke!) that might be a possibility. And then we can order heavenly pizza and chill out reading The Leading Edge </inside joke>.

Ashes is coming along. Did my 4k today, but it feels…like it isn’t going the way I want it to. I’m at 30% right now, provided the finished draft is under 150k, which might be difficult to pull off. Lots and lots of sludging for the next month–I’m in the middle of the blue collar work of writing. Middles are not my forte, but I think I’ll learn.

Dude, why didn’t I study astronomy in college? I’m sorely tempted to change my major and go through another three years as an undergrad, just so that after I get my masters I can live at a place like this:

Dragging behind a bit

My writing slowed down significantly during the Writing and Illustratin for Young Readers conference a week ago, and it hasn’t really picked up at all since then. For my seven day totals, I’ve only been averaging between 17k and 14k–that means, on average, I’m doing about half what I want to be doing. Blah.

While I haven’t been writing a whole lot, however, I have been doing a lot of outlining. It looks like I’m going to be throwing out a ton of scenes, putting other scenes in different chapters, and adding whole new scenes in places where I previously didn’t have any. Yikes.

In other words, I’m in the process of completely reconceptualizing the structure of this novel–taking a few steps back and looking at the entire project as a whole. It’s taking up a heck of a lot of time right now, but hopefully it will help the rewriting process to be more successful. After all, if I try to stumble through without a clear idea of what I want this story to be, it’s just going to be a waste of time.

But if I’m going to finish this draft before August 1st, I need to pick up the pace. If this draft runs up to 150k as expected (and at the current rate, it could easily go over), I need to do just under 22k per week. That means, if I do anything less than 3k per day over the next six weeks, I’m going to fall behind this deadline.

The deadline is entirely arbitrary and artificial, but still, I want to keep it. Keeping deadlines is a writing skill I want to train myself to do, and I think it will help me out tremendously down the road.

So the goal this week is to pick up the pace again and get the seven day totals back up to 24k by next Sunday. It’s going to be something of a psychological struggle to get the momentum up again, but it’s something I know I can do. Inshallah.

In the meantime, I’ve been putting together some awesome ideas for a steampunk novel. Things are starting to gel for my next big project, and I’m getting REALLY excited. I still have an enormous amount of research to do before I can begin (like, tons of research), so I won’t get started just yet, but man! The ideas in my head are hot, I can feel it!

I know I’m speaking in vagaries…but to make up for it, I’ll leave you with a link to this wicked awesome steampunk picture I found the other day. Seriously–how cool would it be to be this guy??

Steampunk Airship Pilot by ~homarusrex on deviant ART

something

So…I figure it’s been a week and I should probably post something on this blog.

Wow.

Well, work is underway on Ashes of the Starry Sea, and I’m starting to have a love-hate relationship with it. Most writers say you first novel isn’t that good, and you just need to get it out of your system so you can write the real stuff.

Well, this is my first finished novel…but it’s not my first novel attempt. My first novel attempt was in 8th grade, and I am happy to report that it no longer exists. Anywhere. No, seriously, I lost (or destroyed) it after my mission, and I am perfectly happy with that.

My second novel attempt was in ninth grade, and I still have a copy of it, though I haven’t looked at it in a while. Somewhere around page one hundred (single spaced) I realized that the story wasn’t going anywhere, and I got all angsty and depressed about it. Then, midway through tenth grade, I realized that the problems were fixable, and stopped being angsty and depressed.

And then I got bored and moved onto other things.

For the next two years, I started all sorts of projects but never really got anywhere with them. This was when I came up with my “great golden idea” that I wanted to hide from the world until I had the skill to turn it into my masterpiece.

I’ll tell you what the idea was right now: a high school kid learns how to control his dreams and realizes that the dream world is just as “real” as the waking world. An amazonian dream mage named Lachoneus takes him on as his apprentice and he saves the world from demons while struggling to turn his dream-world relationship with his hs crush into a reality in the waking world.

It’s got potential, but if this is the best idea I ever come up with, I’m going to be very disappointed. Fortunately, I kept writing through this phase.

My next project that got past page ten happened my senior year. I created an island fantasy world with a Greek aesthetic and started what I thought was a character study on my sister. If she ever read it, she probably wouldn’t see any similarities between Sareli and herself, but she was kind of distant from all of us in those years.

Then my mission happened. Not much time for writing there, but even so, I had this one idea that was so good that I spent a handful of p-days in my second area writing it out longhand. It was supposed to be this incredbly poignant allegory based around Lehi’s dream. I got about two chapters in it before things got too busy for me.

When I came home, I picked up a story that I’d started before the mission and got pretty far with it…word-wise, at least. The pre-mission version was based on this game I used to play with my Zaks building blocks. When I got back, I renamed it Planet New America and envisioned it as Jesus’ second coming as experienced by American colonists on another planet, under Chinese occupation.

Sound pretty bad? Yeah…about 60k words in I realized it had no plot and put it on the “back burner.” I haven’t picked it up since.

Sophomore year went by, and I wrote a short story and an undeveloped novel that I thought was a short story. Decision LZ150207 was the short story, and it’s getting published!!! in The Leading Edge. I signed the contract yesterday (woot!). The Clearest Vision was the undersized novel, and…it was pretty bad. Cheesy, sentimental, poorly written–but some of the ideas were cool. Too bad it probably isn’t marketable.

Then, in the summer of 2007, I decided I was going to start another novel! This one was going to be…<drumroll please> a Final Fantasy 6 fanfic (huh?!). Thankfully, I had a much more original idea in gestation, and Aneeka convinced me to run with it.

Thus began the rough draft version of Ashes of the Starry Sea, my first finished novel and my current primary project.

So, yeah, they say to throw out your first novel…but I wrote at least five significant partial drafts before I got to Ashes. I think that’s enough to justify my assessment that this story’s going potential. I still worry about it, though…I’m only in chapter 4 and I’m already struggling with the same angsty doubts that don’t usually hit until about halfway through.

The other day, though, I sent out my first three chapters to Charlie, who read them at work and gave me her assessment. I thought that the main character, Ian, was weak and boring, that the first chapter didn’t have enough of a hook, that it took too long to get into the action, etc. To my surprise, this is what she said:

Charlie: “Charlie is the coolest person I know”
say it.
me: charlie is the coolest person I know
Charlie: thank you.
me: because she read my first three chapters
Charlie: I just sent them to you
me: oh, nice
Charlie: 😀
me: they kick my other characters’ trash?
Charlie: yes
me: really?
how so?
Charlie: I like them
I can see their dinstinct characteristics very well
they’re developed subtly and efficiently
me: yeah?
Ian isn’t boring?
Charlie: no
I like him more than michael
me: ???
how?
Charlie: because he has definite character
me: he does?
Charlie: I totally understand how he thinks and his motivations after three chapters
yeah. He’s a passive weenie of a guy, but I like him
me: he’s a passive weenie and he isn’t boring?
Charlie: nope
I like him
me: you like him even though he’s a pansy?
Charlie: yeah
I like him because he’s a pansy
me: really?
huh
I don’t understand
Charlie: I’m sorry?
I like that you don’t have a complacent protagonist
me: Ian isn’t complicated?
sorry for all the questions
I’m just trying to understand
Charlie: no
me: so you like him because you get him
Charlie: that’s part of it, yeah
me: but if he’s weak and doesn’t start being proactive for very long, you’re going to stop liking him
is that right?
Charlie: I am expecting him to grow, yes
me: ah, so it’s the potential for growth that hooks you
Charlie: yeah

Like any first novel, Ashes of the Starry Sea has some serious plot issues, against which I’m currently banging my head. However, despite the voices inside and outside of my head, it’s probably got potential. Now I just need to convince myself of that. Hopefully, as the story progresses, the story itself will do the convincing. And you know what? If I shut up and listen to it, it just might do that.

Some updates

Just a few quick updates before I go to bed:

My short story, Decision LZ150207, is getting published in The Leading Edge! Hooray! This will be my first publication credit. It certainly won’t be my last!

As you can see from the progress bar to the right, I’ve started work on draft 2.2 of Ashes of the Starry Sea, the novel that I finished back in April of 2008 (my first “finished” novel–and the project that spawned this blog). My goal is to finish this draft by August 1st, 2009.

It is a beast of a novel–I’m predicting it will be at least 150,000 words. The draft is currently at 158,000 words, but I’m going to have to add several scenes as well as vigorously trim out the bad writing.

And boy, is there a lot of bad writing in this draft! I knew, when I wrote it, that I wasn’t that good, but holy cow! Way too much introspection, way too much “tell”-iness, not nearly enough concrete details. Too many adverbs, too much wordiness, especially in the scenes with the action. This is going to be a deep revision.

BYU’s writing conference was a blast! I’ll try to post more about it in the near future, hopefully tomorrow if I can get around to it. The three editors who attended are open to submissions from the conference, and one of them prefers full manuscripts to partials, so on Saturday I printed up the full 2.0 draft of Genesis Earth.

Holding the full manuscript in my hands was surreal. It’s one thing to write it out digitally and see it on your screen, but it is something else entirely to hold the tangible, physical thing in your hands. I just…keep wanting to hold it. It feels so real.

But yeah, I’m kind of uneasy sending the full manuscript off to this editor, especially since she hasn’t asked me for it specifically (she just told all the conference-goers that she prefers full manuscripts). I don’t want to get in trouble sending my full ms out to multiple places, so my game plan is to send this to her ASAP so it can get rejected within the next 1-4 months (what she claimed was her turnaround time).

Because of that, I’m sending her a draft which could be more polished, but oh well. Anything could be more polished–eventually, you just have to send your stuff out. Besides, as pessimistic as this might sound, I do think that my mss has a fighting chance. We’ll see what comes of this.

On your mark, get set…

This post will be really quick, since it’s after midnight and I want to get up at seven tomorrow.

I’ve decided to work on The Phoenix of Nova Terra for my next project. Except…I’m renaming it (yet again!) to…

<drumroll, please>

Ashes of the Starry Sea.

I like this title much more than the previous one. I think that just about everyone, when they first start out, comes up with a somewhat cliche title having something to do with a phoenix.

Even though this is the first novel I ever wrote and finished, I think it has a lot of potential. People always say that your first novel is never publishable, but this one wasn’t my first attempt at writing a novel (it’s something like my sixth or seventh). Besides, when judging these things, you need to look at the work itself, not on these general rules that everyone always throws around.

The story itself is pretty decent, I think. The main things to improve are 1) the worldbuilding/research aspect, and 2) the nuts and bolts writing. To help out with that, I’ve decided to follow some of David Louis Edelmen’s revision advice and completely transcribe every word of this revision draft in a new word document. Hopefully, that level of focus will help me to improve things on the word, sentence, and paragraph levels.

At the same time, I need a very clear macro-level view of this project–after all, it’s been over a year since I finished the rough draft. To do that, I started a wikidpad file that will become the story bible for the new draft. I’ll use it to do the things I mentioned in my previous post, “Outlining for discovery writers.”

I’ll also spend the next week or so reading the most recent draft from start to finish, figuring out my revision notes. This will be hard, since I stopped ennumerating the chapters towards the beginning, but I’ll figure it out.

Gah, everything is so disorganized for this project! I’ve got revision notes for the 2.0 and 2.1 versions, files scattered everywhere, feedback from a friend of mine from the FLSR that I haven’t even looked at yet…just too much. The draft needs a TON of work, too.

If I can polish this draft to a satisfactory, presentable second draft in the next month, I’ll be happy. That’s prettymuch my goal. 140,000 words in five weeks…let’s go!

Bringing Stella Home 1.1 is finished

A few minutes ago, I finished the rough draft of Bringing Stella Home. This is my third completed novel. Huzzah!

It needs a ton of work, too…there’s no way I’m going to let this thing see the light of day, not until I finish the second draft.

In fact, I should probably set down tomorrow and start listing all the plot holes that need to be fixed in the revision, before I forget them all. It feels like there are dozens and dozens of holes. Not a good feeling.

Still, IT’S DONE!!! All that worrying and fretting and gtalk rants at Charlie along the lines of “GAH!! THIS NOVEL SUCKS!!!” have paid off, and I’ve got a draft I can work with! Inshallah, it should be downhill from here.

I remember when I wrote Genesis Earth, how all throughout the process of writing the rough draft, I felt that the work was terrible. And it’s true–the rough draft needed a lot of work. However, I think revising comes easier to me than drafting, and the process of writing the second draft was much, much smoother and more enjoyable than the first one.

So, what I have now is a hunk of rock roughly in the shape of a face. I can’t quite tell if it’s th face of a man, a woman, or a monkey, but it’s a face nonetheless. That’s better than an unworked block of stone, at least. Maybe someday it will be a decent work of art, if my hands don’t slip and I shave the nose off by accident.

I’ll let this draft sit for a few weeks, maybe a month, then pick it up again for the revision. In the meantime, on to other things.

And really, as rough as this draft may be, it feels awesome to finally have it finished. Reality sets in tomorrow, when once again I find myself staring at a blank page.

Bringing Stella Home 1.1

mss pages: 416
words: 118,596
file size: 791 KB
chapters: 21
start date: 6 May 2009
end date: 10 June 2009

POSTSCRIPT: Hahaha! MS Word just popped up a dialogue box saying “there are too many spelling and grammar errors to underline them all” or something like that! HILARIOUS.

Outlining for a discovery writer

I’m almost finished with the rough draft of Bringing Stella Home, but I can’t shake the feeling that this draft really sucks and is full of holes.

Part of that is probably that I wrote the whole thing out of the top of my head. The only part that I really took the time to outline was the back histories of the mercenaries–and that gave me material to make the story a LOT stronger. This probably means that I need to do more outlining in the future.

I think I know now what to do and not to do. Here’s my list of do’s and don’ts for someone like me who is more of a “discovery writer”:

Do’s:

Keep a list of brief explanations for setting elements (history, cultures, traditions, technologies, magics, etc). These do not need to be full length articles, but they should have enough information to trigger your knowledge and/or record the things that you are likely to forget.
Keep profiles of all the major/viewpoint characters. These should:
–Briefly explain their backstory, including parents/family/origin, childhood, education/training, major formative events, etc. This part should be fairly extensive, and will help you discover even more things about your character as you write your story;
–Explain, in some detail, their motivations–not just their desires, but the basis behind their desires. These usually grow out of the backstory;
–List some basic stats: age, height, distinctive physical characteristics–basically, the stuff someone is going to get on a first impression;
–List their important strengths. This part can be sparse, but you should at least be aware of the things in which they are competent;
–List their important flaws/handicaps. This part can also be sparse, but it should be extensive enough to at least make you aware of and/or get you to think about the potential conflicts that will arise;
–Explain why this character is sympathetic–why the reader is going to like this character. You MUST make a conscious effort to think this out. As the writer, you will love your characters simply because you created them, but the reader will not share in this euphoria. Write this section like a pitch, as if you’re addressing the reader (I haven’t tried that yet, but it sounds like a good idea and I’m going to try it on my next project).
Keep an ongoing list of all the major plot conflicts, with a checklist for each one of things that must/should happen in order to make the conflict as juicy and story-rich as possible. These lists should be sparse: one sentence to explain the conflict (character vs. character), and each point of the checklist should also be one line. You will flesh out each of these points as you go along, and you may even add new conflicts and get rid of old ones as your story takes shape.

Tip: None of these sections needs to be extensive. Sometimes, it will work better if you simply cut and past excerpts from your novel in the appropriate places in your outline. This may be especially helpful for setting elements and minor characters.

Tip: Not all of your outlining has to be done before you start writing. The outline should be an organic document that expands and changes with your draft, and your best ideas will come as you write the story, not as you write the outline. The outline exists to serve the story, not the other way around.

Don’ts:

Don’t feel that you have to write encyclopedia-style articles on all of your setting/worldbuilding elements. You are the only one who will see these, so you don’t have to extensively edit or proofread these sections.
Don’t try to explain every detail of your characters’ personalities. When you have a clear backstory, these will come out naturally. To write believable characters, figure out the basics and then GET OUT OF THE WAY and let them take over.
Don’t outline the plot; outline the major plot conficts with their necessary events, but expect these to change as you write. This should be the most flexible part of your outline.
NEVER feel that you have to fit your story to the outline. The outline exists to serve the draft, not the other way around. Use it as a reference and a set of guidelines, not a set of rules. You will discover your story as you write and daydream about it, not as you write your outline.
Don’t worry if your outline is spotty and full of holes. You’re not writing this to an uninformed audience; you’re writing this to your future self, who can fill in the holes quite well. In fact, your outline only exists to fill in the holes in your future self’s head and point him in a clear direction.
Don’t worry if your story gets ahead of your outline on the rough draft. For discover writers, outlines are more of an after-the-fact thing anyway, and your outline will continue to grow and expand in the rewrite. In fact, you may find it more productive to write the rough draft in a burst of frenzied creative energy, leaving 90% of your outlining for the rewrite.

These are a few of the things that work for me, as a discovery writer. I haven’t tried out everything on the do’s list, but looking back, I can see that they would have helped tremendously if I’d done them while writing Bringing Stella Home.

Just because you’re a discovery writer, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep an outline. It just means that you need to keep a different kind of outline, one that will enhance your discovery writing process rather than constrain it.

Genesis Earth pitch and other assorted thoughts on writing

Today I got together with Charlie after her work and discussed how to pitch my novel Genesis Earth. We did it in the following way: I took a few minutes to explain what the book was about, while she wrote down the words that stood out and excited her. Later, I took the words and worked out a thirty second pitch for it.

It was HARD! I spent nearly two hours after meeting with her just to write out a stupid four or five sentence blurb! Selling your work is totally different from producing it. Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Michael has never set foot on Earth, but it haunts him as much as the legacy of his parents. So when his parents build the first artificial, traversable wormhole, he sets out with his mission partner, Terra, to explore the Earthlike planet on the other side. They arrive only to discover an empty, abandoned world and an unresponsive ghost ship advancing towards them. When Terra’s schizoid tendencies threaten her mental stability, they both must learn to trust each other in order to confront the mysteries of the new universe–and the personal insecurities that keep them from what they truly desire.

I have that down to 29.6 seconds. I should probably cut it shorter, but as it is it only has about half of the words that Charlie wrote down. If I cut it any more, I’m afraid it just won’t make sense.

It’s a start, though, and talking with Charlie helped me out tremendously. I realized that when I’m selling this stuff, I need to focus on the characters. Sure, all the worldbuilding stuff is interesting, but it’s not what hooks the reader. If all you’ve got is thirty seconds, don’t cut to the chase–and don’t give a synopsis! Synopsis =/= pitch!

Charlie was exhausted, so as we talked, she started ranting in a way that can be described as bluntly honest. Interestingly enough, most of what she said was actually quite helpful, not only for Genesis Earth, but also for my other projects.

The most helpful thing she mentioned was that when you’re writing characters, you often have to pick out their distinctive character traits and consciously overemphasize them. If you don’t, the reader might not pick up on it and find your characters stale and boring. While I hate melodrama and try to keep my novels free of it, I also need to keep my characters interesting. It’s a fine line to walk, but one that you can’t avoid.

She also said that it’s very easy for protagonists to be more boring than the main characters. I think this is probably because we rely on formulas and cliches when we’re starting out, since that’s much less risky than breaking the rules we don’t yet fully understand. The protagonist is the character closest to the trope, while the side characters can do what they want without threatening the integrity of the story.

Charlie said that because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of a boring protagonist, you need to consciously choose the traits that are interesting about that character and work them into the story as much as possible. I realized, as she said that, that my main protagonist for Hero in Exile is, indeed, a boring character. I need to pick out the things that make him interesting and consciously work those into his character.

This got me to think about planning. I’ve found that if I try to outline a novel when I set out to write the rough draft, I end up telling a completely different story. However, if I try to write a second draft without an outline, I have a hard time keeping things straight and fixing all the stuff I missed while discovery writing the first draft.

(I’m really upset now, because I was going to mention something that I need to foreshadow in the next revision of Genesis Earth, but…I totally forgot what it was! GAH!!! That’s what I get for not outlining!)

Charlie then started to rant about some of our writing friends, and how she would never listen to criticism on her writing from someone she considered to be an inferior writer to herself.

That part was…interesting. While I agree 110% that arguing with criticism is a sign of a poor writer, I don’t think it’s especially useful to rank writers in terms of “good” or “bad.” I would like to believe that I can learn something from everybody, and not just what not to do. Perhaps that’s optimistic, but I think it’s also practical–I’ve found that a bloated ego can shoot you in the foot six ways to Sunday before you even know what’s going on. I’ve found that not just through one unfortunate experience, but through several.

Brandon Sanderson said something very interesting in the last email he sent out to his English 318 class: he said that in New York, editors and agents don’t rank manuscripts by “good” and “bad,” they rank them by how much work they think it needs to be publishable. There is a distinction between the two, just as there’s a distinction between recognizing something that works really well and something that follows the rules.

That’s about all I have the time for now. I’ve got to get to bed. Late night internet == bad idea.