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BMAS Brogress Bost
🕑 Added 2024-11-13 06:13:10 +0000 UTCI can't really call this another Dark Place Progress Post since I've been working on my book again, Between Music And Silence. (I still wish I could think of a better name.)
I've dived into making major revisions to the story structure and character arcs, and I made a couple tweets & bluesky posts about my experience so far. First of all, working on this book is so fulfilling that I've felt physically livened up over the past week. And that's happened about every time I came back to this book. It is like the exact opposite experience from working on Welcome To The Dark Place in a lot of ways. Game development has sustained me, but this book has rejuvenated me. It's the first book I've written (although I tried to write another a while back), so there's always something to learn and improve.
Investigating the best parts of this story--how did they happen?
The other post I made on Bluesky was about how I do plot better than characters. And I hate world-building more than either of them.
Writing good characters and dialogue makes me feel like I'm trying to start a fire with sticks. I get sparks, but there have been a seldom few times where I caught a flame--those are my most prized possessions, and I have no idea how they happened. I do have some observations, though.
There are two particular moments where I think my story was writing itself. The first was when my main character was confronted with an evil of the world that had been hidden from him, and he demanded answers which I had to figure out. This was a moment where my story could have died, because I had no idea what came next. But I ended up writing the genesis of my fantasy world, and this lore drop propelled the rest of the story into places I had never conceived. Reading it now, I can still feel how the story has hit a growth spurt.
The next moment where my story felt like it was "writing itself" was when my side character (Thrin) was weighed down by some kind of guilt and fear, and she needed to spill the beans. I wrote it all in her voice; in the original version of the story, she told her entire backstory in dialogue. This monologue felt totally forced, and I hated writing it. Then I had the idea to present her backstory as a flashback chapter. It became two chapters, and the second of those is now the best chapter in the book; I think I was in a flow state while writing this chapter, and I still believe it's my best character writing. It's good all on its own as an isolated story. What!
The main observation I will state is that these shining moments came from back-breaking work that made me cringe out of my mind; the work was answering questions I really didn't care about, because the story demanded it. Both these chapters resulted from exposition-dumping which I turned into story-telling. I think one lesson is that just because something feels forced or isn't fun to write doesn't mean it's not good, honest work.
Why did it feel so hard? And why do I hate, hate, hate world-building? It could even be that forcing myself to answer hard questions about my story makes me cringe because it's a form of emotional vulnerability. Maybe I don't want to face the fact that I don't know my story and characters all that well. I don't want to break my belief in the story any more than I want to break the reader's belief. And maybe I secretly believe the world of my story and characters is paper-thin and won't hold up when I question it (like when a game designer avoids playing their game in a way that will break it.) But every time I've tested it--really brought it to the edge--my story soared.
So now what
I don't want to get into specifics of what I'm changing now, because it's still in brainstorming. I am making major changes to the second half of the plot to fit the characters. The new version of the Prelude chapters is probably done, and it's even more intense than before. I've workshopped it so hard up to this point, I think it's probably good enough. You can see it here and give me feedback on it. The Prelude chapters have always been very unique from the rest of the book, but I think that's okay, since they give little hints that the story is going to change.
Comments
BlakeBrown
"But every time I've tested it--really brought it to the edge--my story soared." Exactly. It's always a good rule of thumb for the writer to ask questions about his story, just to make sure it holds up well. Readers will constantly be inquisitive, interested, and curious about how the world works, so they too will also ask questions. Not asking questions about the story to save writing face will not mean that readers won't ask questions. And yes, doing it for the sake of improving the story will make you feel emotionally vulnerable, but it's worth it in the long run. Plot holes are, in a way, completely unanswered questions about a story. Asking any random person to read it, and then them giving their honest opinions on it helps a lot, too. I suggest doing that multiple times (individually and separately from each other) just to really see where any issues lie. Death of the Author is a helpful idea, but not a rule that you have to impose onto yourself constantly.
reamnos
If itβs any consolation the worlds you have built have been really fun to get immersed into
RainingLamppost
Wow yeah I feel you with the worrying about writing not making sense or feeling overly thin and contrived, I find thinking about how I approach media I enjoy helps a bit - I want to be entertained and see where it goes, and unless it's a glaring problem, I assume something that doesn't quite make sense is a detail I didn't pick up on being hinted at previously Best of luck with it and glad it's helping you feel better π
