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The Importance of World Building

May 8, 2011 by meredithmansfield

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, in part because of what I’m reading, not what I’m writing. (No, I’m not going to say what that is. The policy of this blog is not to name other writers or books unless I can do so in a positive way.)

When you write any type of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, or horror), even if it’s urban fantasy or near-future science fiction, the writer is responsible for creating at least some aspects of the world in which the story takes place. If you write an urban fantasy about werewolves and vampires, it’s up to you to set up and then adhere to the rules by which those creatures operate. In second-world fantasy, of course, there’s a lot more world building–maps, political systems, history, all the details of daily life.

The important things are:

  1. You have to create a system that holds together. It has to make sense. People living on a plain devoid of trees can’t build wood houses and probably don’t eat fish on Fridays–or any other days.
  2. And you have to stick to the rules you create. You can’t go around making exceptions. (Now, that doesn’t mean that things can’t seem to be exceptions if your characters have an imperfect understanding of the rules. But somehow or other you’re going to have to let readers know that.)

These things are important to keep the readers immersed in the story. You, as a writer, have asked them to suspend disbelief. It then becomes your job to make sure you never make them sit back in their chairs and say “What?! That doesn’t make any sense.”

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Skipping Around

May 4, 2011 by meredithmansfield

One of the advantages to working on a second draft is you don’t have to go in any particular order. I know some people write first drafts out of order, working on whatever is most exciting first. Since I’m about two-thirds discovery writer, it really works best for me to tackle the first draft from beginning to end.

On the second draft, though, I already know the story. I’ve got some notes in it for things I want to change, add, build up, etc. And now I can take them in any order. I still usually try to work from beginning to end, but if I find myself getting stuck anywhere, I can easily just skip to another chapter.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing on SEVEN STARS. I got a little stuck on exactly how I want to handle something with my first point-of-view character, so I skipped to the other. (This story has two point-of-view characters.)

In some ways, at least for me, second drafts are almost as much fun as first drafts. And they are first drafts, at least in part, because the manuscript usually grows by about a third.

Later revisions, not so much.

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Procrastination

May 1, 2011 by meredithmansfield

Borrowed from a fellow writer’s Facebook page (Thanks Melanie):

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
– Paul Rudnick

It’s not quite as ugly as that for me, but I have to admit there is a fair amount of procrastination involved. I’ve always blamed that on genetics, ’til now. (If procrastination were an Olympic event, my father would have had a whole case full of gold medals.)

Turns out, it’s really just part of being a writer after all.

Of course, being me, my procrastinations are different and mostly involve the internet: reading my email, checking my online writers’ groups, reading blogs agents or other writers, doing a few online puzzles, even checking Facebook. And I don’t even like Facebook.

So, what do you do to procrastinate?

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Transitions

April 27, 2011 by meredithmansfield

I’m in that transition phase. I finished up the revision on BLOOD WILL TELL, at least until I can get a reader or two. I’m ready to start the second draft of SEVEN STARS. The problem is, it just takes me a couple of days to get my head out of one story and into the other.

So, during the transition, I’ve been working a little on  polishing up the start of SEVEN STARS, but I’ve also been working on a few other things.

  1. I polished up “Heart of Oak”, cut about 300 words (not as many as I wanted to, but as many as I felt I could) and sent it out again. It had been sitting on my hard drive for almost a month. Not going to find a home that way. At 9500 words, there aren’t that many appropriate markets for this one. It may turn out to be my first e-published story later this year.
  2. I’ve worked on my query for MAGE STORM. This is actually going to work out well, since it appears one of my writer’s forums will have a query challenge next month. I’m not actually planning on sending out any more queries until the middle of May. That’s when I go to my second-ever writer’s event. Agents Day, hosted by the local chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. I’ll be getting a critique of the beginning of MAGE STORM there. Might as well wait and see what I can polish up before the next round of queries.
  3. I’m looking over another short story, “The Bard’s Gift” to see if I can polish it up a little before sending it back out again. It’s been sitting on my hard drive almost as long as “Heart of Oak”.

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The End Is in Sight

April 24, 2011 by meredithmansfield

I have only three chapters to go to complete this revision of BLOOD WILL TELL.  Woo Hoo!  I have to say, I’m ready to finish it. This revision turned into a more extensive near-rewrite than I had originally planned. I think the story is stronger. At least, I certainly hope so.

I will definitely need to recruit a reader or two with no previous knowledge of the story to go over it and make sure it still makes sense.

Among other things, I deleted almost all of the scenes/chapters from the point of view of the antagonist. I decided that knowing so much about what he was attempting was making him seem more bumbling than threatening. Because, of course, I couldn’t let him succeed in killing off the main characters. That would have brought the story to a rather abrupt and premature end. Besides, I’m a sucker for HEA (Happily Ever After). 

I also added some scenes late in the story to give a previously insipid character a chance to shine. It comes late, she’s still pretty wishy-washy at the beginning of the story, but that’s deliberate. She needs some things to happen to her before she can really start to shine.  If and when I get to the sequel (and that story has been rising in my mind, lately), she’ll get a bigger part.

And I redid the climax so that there’s a reversal (which should have been there all along, of course). A character who didn’t die before, does now. (Don’t worry, I didn’t mess up the HEA ending.) That, hopefully, adds more tension and suspense to the ending. It really shouldn’t feel like a foregone conclusion that the heroes will win.

All that and a host of small corrections and improvements along the way.

So now to finish up those last three chapters and get ready to start on the second draft of SEVEN STARS. I’m starting to get an itch to get back to that story.

HAPPY EASTER

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Other Things to Enter On-Line

April 20, 2011 by meredithmansfield

So here are a couple of other interesting things to enter in the blogosphere:

Workshop Wednesday at Bookends, LLC http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2011/04/workshop-wednesday.html

And First Page Shooter at Confessions from Suite 500

http://confessionsofawanderingheart.blogspot.com/2011/04/first-page-shooter.html

Here’s another at YATopia:

http://yatopia.blogspot.com/2011/04/easter-egg-hunt-with-critique-prizes.html

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Pitch Contest

April 20, 2011 by meredithmansfield

If you follow the blogs of other writers, agents, and others in the publishing business, you’ll inevitably find out about contests and on-line workshops. Many agents are very generous about helping those of us trying to break in, both on their own blogs and through these contests.

One contest that’s running now is a Pitch Contest, judged by agent Natalie Fischer:

http://yatopia.blogspot.com/2011/04/pitch-contest-with-natalie-fischer.html#comments

You can’t beat that. A chance to have a real agent judge your pitch–and maybe even request more from you.

There are other opportunities out there, too, that I’ll probably blog about in the near future.

As a side benefit, I often discover some really good blogs by following these links.  That’s a hint, folks.

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Plot Holes

April 17, 2011 by meredithmansfield

One of the things that will happen as you work your way through a revision like the one I’m doing on BLOOD WILL TELL is that you’ll find a plot hole or two. That happened to me in Chapter 25.

Well, let’s not call it a hole, exactly, but the weave is definitely a bit looser there. Only one reader called me on it, but even one reader thrown out of the story because something seems unbelievable or too much of a coincidence is one too many.  So, I’ve spent the last day or so brainstorming how else to get my characters from one point to the next.

I think I’ve come up with a solution that will work at least as well, if not better. And doesn’t cause as many questions. That’s a good feeling.

So many things have been moved, deleted, or changed in this revision that I am definitely going to need a reader or two, somebody unfamiliar with the story, to make sure that it all still makes sense. I know all the plot turns, so I can’t do it.

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Working on Multiple Projects

April 13, 2011 by meredithmansfield

My primary writing task right now is the revision to BLOOD WILL TELL. That’s been going very well–nine chapters in just the last four days. But I’m a believer in Kevin J. Anderson’s Tip #4 for Writing Productivity (among others), so I’m rarely working on just one thing.

Tip #4 is to have multiple projects in different phases. The different kinds of effort don’t conflict because you’re using different parts of your brain and being able to switch off when you hit a sticking point or just get tired of one thing keeps you working on your writing, not surfing the internet.

So, my main task is this revision, but at the same time, I’m:

  1. Brainstorming and doing some research on the next story (THE BARD’S GIFT).
  2. Getting ready to start the second draft of SEVEN STARS.
  3. Working on selling the last completed story (MAGE STORM). Right now, that means reworking the query and synopsis for another round of submissions.
  4. Making various revisions to three short stories.
  5. Making decisions about what to do with an older story (DREAMER’S ROSE).
  6. Preparing for the Agents Day event next month.
  7. And doing a number of critiques. In fact, I expect the number of critiques to begin picking up dramatically next week when the first round of exchanges for the Hatrack River Writers Workshop WotF Critique Group starts up.

Sometimes these things dovetail in unexpected ways. For the Agents Day, I had to reduce my one-and-a-half page synopsis for MAGE STORM to a single page. That was in interestng exercise in itself and not one I probably would have forced myself to do otherwise. But, like writing elevator pitches, it forces you to concentrate on what’s really important and what’s a distraction 0r at best a subplot.

And the elevator pitch for MAGE STORM has made me concentrate more on what’s key in that story. I think I carried the last query pitch too far into the story, so that gives me ideas on what to change in the next round.

Gotta love synergy.

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Update to Elevator Pitches

April 11, 2011 by meredithmansfield

Unscheduled extra post this week to update the elevator pitches.

  1. BLOOD WILL TELL : A half-werewolf and a dragon in disguise join forces to rescue an innocent woman from an unknown attacker. Without knowing who or why, each tries to solve the mystery in their own way. But a decades-old crime and the dragon’s true identity may destroy their collaboration just when their enemy has found their hide out.
  2. MAGE STORM : All Rell knows of magic is the damage it caused in the Great Mage War when all the magic users destroyed each other and parts of their world, like the Blighted Forest just beyond Rell’s home. People believe that the magic died with the mages until Rell develops an unexpected ability he can’t restrain. With every strong emotion sparking uncontrolled magic, Rell has to find someone who can help him learn to control this gift for his own safety and everyone else’s.
  3. SEVEN STARS : Because she bears the berserker curse, Casora has been raised to be a warrior from birth. After releasing the berserker in battle, Casora has two goals: to fight the enemy that overran her home and to find a cure for her curse. She might accomplish both with the help of Tiaran, a young prince whose gullibility and desire to prove himself strand him on the wrong side of the marauding army.
  4. THE BARD’S GIFT: Whether she wants it or not, Dorata has the Bard’s Gift. Along with the ability to tell a compelling story, sometimes the ancient gods give her the story she must tell. A believer in the new god, Dorata struggles against this gift until she realizes how it can help her people as they face the challenges of wresting a new home from the wilderness, dragons, and malevolent neighbors.

Hmm. It’s amazing what reducing a story to a couple of sentences will do. It’s been pointed out that several of my stories seem to revolve around unwanted magic.  Of course, it’s really a little early to be writing this kind of pitch for THE BARD’S GIFT. That one’s still in development and anything except the basic premise of her gift could–and likely will–change before I actually start writing it.

In other news, I’m making very good progress on the revision to BLOOD WILL TELL over the last couple of days. I officially passed the half-way point this morning.

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