Category Archives: My Writing

Self Doubt

My writing decision making session yesterday was not as successful as I had hoped. I struggled. Why does that surprise me so much? This is the step I keep avoiding, of course it will be hard. I expected it to be easier somehow just because I am devoting more time to it.

I brainstormed on setting and a magic system filling roughly 20 notebook pages with ideas but as the day wore on I kept circling around the key decision I had to make – choosing the main character.  As the flow of ideas petered out, I returned to the book “The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing” hoping for some advice to keep me going. It quickly became clear that I had to get that character figured out to move forward. How can I choose an appropriate crisis, if I don’t know who is experiencing it?

I want my protagonist to be Dakota St. Clair the space pilot because she’s cool, but I can’t figure out exactly who she is or how she fits into the world I have started. How does a 17 year old girl end up piloting a space ship? Shouldn’t she be in school? How could she ever afford a ship, let alone earn the respect to use it commercially or in any other fashion? Is she a magic user or a blank or something in between? I felt like I had accomplished nothing, and wondered if I was going in the wrong direction all together.

I started questioning all the decisions I had made up until this point. Should I include magic in a science fiction story at all? Shouldn’t I just remove the space ships and focus on the fantasy elements instead? Maybe it would work better if it wasn’t a young adult novel and Dakota could be older. Is she even the right protagonist? This sounds very familiar. I have to get out of this habit of reaching a challenging point and scrapping everything to start over.

Despite the fact that I did not come up with a premise and my efforts yesterday felt unsatisfying, it is unfair to call it a failure. I just haven’t succeeded yet. I think persistence is key here. I will sit down again today to keep going. I will hang onto the bits that are working and then keep building from there.

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Preparation

I am starting to work on my first novel. As I mentioned in my introductory post, I have been writing for over ten years, but I kept getting hung up at the stage of defining a plot with a cohesive set of characters. I also refused to commit to a single genre and setting. I didn’t suffer from writer’s block or a lack of ideas; it was just the opposite. I had way too many ideas for a single story. Spaceships kept cropping up in my heroic fantasy and I kept wanting my protagonist to be a magic user and a blank (non-magic user) at the same time.

I knew the problem was my aversion to making decisions but I persisted. It is absurd to let something that could be as simple as a week’s worth of effort keep me from my lifelong goal. Fortunately, I am not willing to leave this on the back burner any longer. I started by deciding to decide.

This past week I watched a series of lectures from fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson. They are posted online for free by his former student Scott Ashton: Brandon Sanderson Creative Writing 2012. Thank you Scott and Brandon for sharing this invaluable information! Brandon’s lectures gave me a concrete plan on how to get started along with an intense craving to create, write, revise and eat gummy bears. Brandon’s insights into his personal writing processes, the writing industry and the nuances of fantasy and science fiction were practical and inspiring.

Yesterday I decided that my first project will be a young adult science fiction novel. Specifically, I chose space opera. This genre can be described as adventures in space of the Star Wars and Star Trek variety. While it includes weapons and speculative science, it doesn’t need to be as detailed or accurate as military or hard science fiction. So far I know there will be magic and a spaceship pilot; her name is Dakota St. Clair. The rest, well, I have more decision making to do. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Hello world!

“Hello World!” was the default title of this post. It’s perfect. It speaks to my computer programmer sensibilities and is a fitting name for the post that commemorates the first day of my post-procrastination writing career.

I daydreamed about writing novels for over 10 years. I brainstormed and wrote ideas in notebooks, but I didn’t have the guts to make the decisions necessary to write one particular story.

The buck stops here. I scheduled a week away from work to sit down and focus on defining a story. Step one was to choose an audience and genre. Creating the tagline of this blog helped accomplish that (along with a healthy dose of research and soul-searching). Next comes more decision making about world building, characters and plot; then the outline.

I learned from my one and a half forays into National Novel Writing Month that discovery writing is not for me. I should have known right from the beginning that the more structured techniques of an architect writer would appeal to me. I am obsessively organized and I like knowing what’s going to happen in advance. Hello, outline? It was a bit of a “duh” moment for me, but at least I had the powerful and therapeutic experience of getting 50,000 less than stellar words down on paper. I instinctively started revising and loved the process of making the words tastier and more efficient. My writing fire is stoked, I just need to keep going.

Every journey starts with the first step. My writing journey starts now. I hope you enjoy the ride with me.

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