Writing

Novel progress sidetracked by game inventing

I’m about 12K words into the writing of my novel. The next scene I write will introduce a new character who is gambling away some money on a game of Twenty Wizards. I definitely wanted to introduce him playing a game; gaming just goes with the personality of the character. And he’s gambling; he takes risks. Anyway, since my novel takes place in a fantasy world, I didn’t want him to be playing any game that would exist here on Earth, so I invented a pretty simple card game, calling it (for now) Twenty Wizards (of the 120 cards used in the game 20 are wizards, and they are the most powerful cards you can draw). I nerdishly printed out the cards on green construction paper and cut ’em up and somehow managed to get my sister to play so that we could test out different variations on the rules. Winning takes a combination of luck and strategy, but it’s simple enough that once you get used to it, you can play through each round quite quickly. I’ve only tried playing it one-on-one so far; I’d like to try it with three or more players at some point, but I think it will work for the purposes of my book.

My testing version is a card game, but in the novel the game will be played with game pieces, the size of chess pieces, on specialized tables. Should be fun to write. I’ll probably stay away from going into a detailed explanation of the game’s rules in the novel, but the info will exist somewhere for interested readers… if this thing ever gets finished and published.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Refusal of the call…

I’m 10K words into the writing of my fantasy novel, and I’m at the “refusal of the call” scene; the scene in which the hero is presented with the quest and refuses it. Or, as Blake Snyder calls it in Save The Cat!, it’s the debate beat, where the hero questions if he should set out to seek his goal or not.

Of course, not every story needs this, especially sequels, but I’d argue that most stories do. It helps frame the conflict of the story, and it makes it quite apparent that the character is struggling with something. If the main character just got what he wanted all the time, audiences wouldn’t be very interested in his plight. Because there’d be no plight, and thus no story. In fact, I’d say everything before the debate is the “set-up” and the debate is the true beginning of the story. In some stories, especially in movies, the debate can be very small and subtle; just a glance backwards or a hesitation. But it’s still an important moment, and tells us, the audience, that the character really does not want to have to do this, even if we, the audience, would, and even if we know what he’ll end up choosing. Just think about any movie and you’ll find that there’s almost always at least a small hesitation before the hero takes his journey.

Of course, it’s not like you have to know all this consciously to understand it or find it showing up naturally in your daydreams or stories. I think most writers will do it without thinking about it, just as most musicians use rhythm without thinking about it; it’s just natural.

That said, I don’t think it hurts to be conscious of it either, just as it doesn’t hurt a musician to be conscious of rhythm.

Anyway, for better or worse, the debate scene in my novel is more than just a glance backwards. And it’s not really an action scene; it’s an inward debate. It’s probably the hardest scene to write, equalled in difficulty only by the “dark night of the soul” scene which comes before the climax, and of course the climax itself. These are moments in which the audience knows what’s going to happen, but you still have to make it believable and relatable.

In Star Wars, Luke first refuses the call, to which Obi-Wan replies something like: “You must do what you think is right, of course.” And then Luke goes home to find it destroyed and his aunt and uncle murdered, forcing Luke to have no choice but to accept the call. That seems like a bit of a cheat to me, to force Luke into the journey like that, but I think that sort of thing is much easier to get away with in movies, where pacing and visuals are more important, and an inward debate is much harder to communicate.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Novel progress…

I’m about 8,600 words into my new middle-grade / YA fantasy novel, or novella, whatever. I have no idea what the final wordcount might be. But writing is remaining quite exciting. Following a brief outline (and years of daydreaming), I have yet to hit any walls or plot problems, which I usually do at this wordcount, even for short fiction. So that everything has been going so smoothly for 8,600 words I think is a good sign.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Working on yet another new book

I know, I have yet to finish writing a novel; I keep starting new stories instead of finishing old ones. But I don’t care; when the feeling of I-must-write-this is strong enough, I must obey.

I started writing a new fantasy book last week. I’m not going to call it a novel, because it will more likely be novella length, probably between 35,000 and 50,000 words. It’s a middle grade or YA book (the main character is currently twelve years old, though I’m not sure if that will change or not). The story is completely planned out, but rather simple compared to the previous story I was working on, Atarius Destory This World. The story is based on a bunch of elements from a bunch of other stories I’ve been plotting in the back of my mind for quite a few years. All the elements just sort of collapsed together in my mind, like gravity forming a star in a nebula. (What a great simile!)

The story is about the last sorcerer in the world, a twelve year old who hardly understands how to use his powers, who must save a kingdom from an ugly invasion. It will hopefully be the beginning of a series, which is thinly planned out.

Right now my wordcount is at around 5,500 words. Though I’m still a slow writer, I will say that this is so far the easiest story I’ve worked on, perhaps because so many of the elements have been floating around in my mind for so long. We’ll see how long it lasts… but for now it’s quite exciting.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Novel progress…

I’m about 5,200 words into my novel Atarius Destroy This World. Overall, it’s going well; the beginning always seems the most exciting. I’m coming up on the “catalyst” scene, the scene in which the main character walks out of his home to go on his adventure. It’s interesting to see the characters take shape in ways I didn’t plan in the outline. I actually changed one of the viewpoint characters from male to female; for some reason it just seems to make the character dynamics more interesting. It was originally going to be a guy named Riklorien, father of the main character Atarius, but now it is Rillorien, mother of Atarius. The plot will stay the same, just writing from Rillorien’s point of view seems more interesting, I guess because a mother figure will feel more nurturing or something. Another non-viewpoint character named Toller is turning into a sort of a comic-relief character (if you can call my corny humor comic-relief), which I didn’t quite expect, but it works. In the outline he seems more like a dark almost semi-evil character, but having him be more comical makes him more likeable. After all, he’s not supposed to be evil, he can just be a bit manipulative and determined at times. Anyway, all the characters are still taking shape, so I expect their personalities will continue to grow.

I’ve also got some query letters for film producers to send out regarding my screenplay The Melody Box, queries that mention my in-development melody composing software. I just want to create a little website showcasing some of the program’s output first so producers can take a listen if they have the time and actually read my letter before tossing it. I was going to work on the site yesterday, but lost track of time novel-writing.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Couple interesting blog posts on writing

I came across these two interesting blog posts the other day:

First there’s: The Dos and Don’ts of Your Online Presence. The post has some good advice, and summarizes at the end with:

DO:

– Have at least a rudimentary website
– Let people know a little bit about you
– Give people a way to contact you
– Blog about your life and interests

DON’T:

– Alienate your future editors and fans
– Create a digital monument to failure
– Be an unwelcome dinner guest on Twitter

I’m partly guilty of the “digital monument to failure” part. If you remember, I used to have a tally of rejections on the side of this blog, and on my wiki I kept track of who had rejected what. Fortunately I rethought this practice, though I doubt I’ve done enough for editors to really look for me. The reason I thought it was fun to track rejections was two-fold. Firstly, rejections are pretty useless otherwise; they don’t get you anywhere. If I could tally them, keep stats on them, at least I could get some use out of them, at least they’d have some effect. Secondly, I thought it might be interesting for readers of my blog to see, since we all know it happens, yet there’s not much info about how much it happens to more successful authors. I now do my submission and rejection tracking duotrope.com, which I’m sure is better. From an editor’s point of view, who wants to be reminded of a bunch of failure? Even if they can guess just about every author’s been rejected, it’s not great for your impression on a stranger, is it?

Second there’s: Pushing the Boulder: Making the leap from short story to novel. Hey, *gasp* that’s what I’m doing! As the post writer says:

I love short stories for many reasons. At a pace of roughly one story a month, I’ve been able to dabble in all sorts of different things, from fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and things that slip between the cracks. Feedback from beta readers comes faster, within days or weeks, providing encouragement and confidence for an inconsistent ego. Positive reinforcement, sooner, kept me going when I otherwise might have given up.

Like the mountain, novels are a different beast. Unless you’re sending work to faithful beta readers, chapter by chapter, it can be months or even years before your efforts are validated. It can seem insurmountable when observed from page 1, with no end in sight.

It takes a leap of faith in yourself to scale the mountain, especially for the first time. The journey will be long, uncertain and difficult, with treacherous passes and pitfalls never imagined. The risk is greater, but so is the reward.

While I sort of fear that my novel won’t be good enough when I’m finished, I’m also more afraid that I’ll just lose interest and stop writing, and it will turn into yet another failed attempt. I guess the trick is to not think about the whole novel all at once, or how long it’s going to take you. Just tackle it one little piece at a time. Really, really. Of course, easier said than done, eh?

I’ve been thinking about starting another podcast to chronicle this novel-writing attempt, mostly for my own benefit, as a way to try to keep myself on the novel-writing path. (It’s easier to blather in voice than to try to write out coherent blog posts, methinks… not that my blog posts are really all that coherent but you know what I mean chickens and ducks and stuff… oh, oops, excuse my noncoherency.) Does the world really need another writing podcast? Well, no. But it doesn’t really need another fantasy novel either, so who cares about need? Not sure if I’ll do it or not… we’ll see…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Stories and code and stuff and whatever

I hit a snag in my in-progress short story Through a Flame of Blue and Green. I realized one of my scenes is purely expositional. The information given in the scene is important for the story, but there’s no action, at least no action that’s important to the story. My natural response to this snag is to just stop writing the story until I can figure out a way to make the scene work. “But wait,” I say to myself, “just skip the scene! Come back to it later!” Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? “You just did!” I say to myself. Oh yeah! Both I and me are the same! So I’ll do that… later.

I’m still working on my Android melody generator program as well, but learning to program Android interfaces is boooooooooring, so progress is slow. However, a friend of mine recently gave me some extremely helpful feedback on the screenplay I wrote last year, The Melody Box, so I’ve been thinking about sending out another round of query letters, this time mentioning that a potential film could have the tie-in of software that does what the melody box in the screenplay does: generate melodies. Seems like both products would boost interest in each other. Not sure if that will truly interest anyone, but it’s worth a try, yes? Then I’ll get back to trying to learn how to program Android interfaces.

Other than that, I’ve been endlessly tweaking my outlines for Atarius Destroy This World. There are some tricky little issues here and there. But I’ll probably start writing on Saturday or next week. I’m kind of scared to start. I’ll have to keep saying to myself: “It’s just a rough draft. It’s allowed to be awful. Just get something down.”

By S P Hannifin, ago

Novel plotting almost done…

I’m almost done plotting my next novel attempt. I’d consider it mostly fantasy, though there are some sci-fi elements to it. It might be considered YA fantasy, since the three of the four main characters are under 18, but I hope it will be an interesting story for any age. (I’m not aiming specifically for the YA fantasy market.) I was calling it The Designers, but I am retitling it Atarius Destroy This World. I’m not sure if that will be the final title or not, but I think it has a nice ring to it… should make people wonder what it’s about.

I’m not completely done the plotting; I still want to go back over all my notes and make sure everything is consistent from the POV of each character. My current outlines call for 42 chapters, though some are very short, so I might end up combining them, and some are a bit long, so I might end up splitting them. The book will probably have an appendix that serves as a book within a book; a guide to the story’s magic system that the characters refer to near the beginning of the story.

If I succeed in actually writing this, I hope it will be the first of a long series, as I think the world holds countless story possibilities, though I probably won’t stay with the same characters. But who knows…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Skip the boring parts

I got some awesome writing advice last week: skip the boring parts. I’ve been always trying to write in a mostly completely linear fashion. But so often I get stuck or bored, and end up starting a new story. I’ve known there were people out there who wrote their stories out of order, but that didn’t seem like a good idea to me; seemed like it would be too easy to create discontinuities if you end up changing your mind about plot details. But I missed the main advantage of skipping: staying interested and excited in your own work. After all, when I think about writing a story, my mind jumps to the climactic arguments or the more interesting decisions the characters make. Makes more sense to write those scenes first and get them out of your head while they still excite you, and then building up to them can be easier and more interesting. You can edit them later if you need to. And it’s not like you have to skip huge important chunks. (If there are huge important chunks that have no interesting parts worth writing, then maybe they shouldn’t be in the story anyway?) Just skipping a couple introductory paragraphs can be enough to get the mind interested.

So a few days ago I finally finished another short story rough draft called The Final Dream of Samuel Shadows, and skipping around helped a lot. I’m looking forward to trying it with some of my other partly-written short stories, and eventually my novel, which I hope I can start in a month or two, whenever I can finish the plotting and planning of it…

Oh, and if you don’t mind some blatant self-promotion, I also got a little mention for my first published short story on this blog post reviewing December 2010 DSF stories… ego stroke…

A new moon in the sky marks the coming of a new Wizard King in “Maker of the Twenty-First Moon” by Sean Patrick Hannifin (debut 12/15). The wizard kings of the past were all tyrants. Jonlen and Slip have suspected Torkwill of wanting to be the next. A legend speaks of a wizard king’s only moment of vulnerability, on the night they make a moon.

“Maker” is a story with two sides. Torkwill wants to make the world a better place and shares the event with his son. Jonlen and Slip wish to take no chances, breaking into the wizard’s home to drag him into the forest. They refuse to heed the wizard’s warnings, Jonlen sure they are nothing but a bluff. He wants to make sure history is not repeated, even if he is the catalyst for past mistakes.

This story is rather good. It had an outcome I predicted but it was never obvious. Torkwill is convincing as a man trying to save his own life with Jonlen’s perspective. Not too bad.

By S P Hannifin, ago

A poem! Woohoo!

Here’s a poem I wrote a few days ago as I thought about the coming Singularity… I call it:

Post-Singularity

Remember us, the nameless ones,
Who used to have a face.
Who built and worked and wondered
And then left without a trace.

Remember us, the troddened ones,
Who suffered pain and fear,
And questioned all existence
For the sake of one child’s tear.

Remember us, the stupid ones,
Who thought of nothing new
Because just living was a chore
That took all day to do.

Remember us, the ugly ones,
Who were not bred the gene.
Who dreamt the feel of symmetry
And dreamt of being seen.

Remember us, the wrinkled ones,
Who so young met death.
Whose love and faith could never fade
As could our needed breath.

Remember us in sun and moon,
And see us in the stars.
We never thought the world was yours,
We thought that it was ours.

——————–

Oh, and here’s another short one from a couple years ago… still a few words I’m not sure about, but whatever… ’twas written for a fantasy story I’ll never write…

Wake

You can’t imagine what they imagine,
Can’t see the things they see.
Your worlds are both too far apart,
There’s too much in between.

But someday you will know, my son,
You’ll learn to tread the wall.
There are things you cannot dream
And you will see them all.

By S P Hannifin, ago