Bid Ye Welcome, Skyborn

So, I've recently started writing this novel. It is a fresh idea, and like all great things, had its genesis in a number of unusual, unsavory, or downright unexpected places. Metal lyrics, dreams, that sort of thing. The reason I want to talk about this particular story (and how it relates to others) is simple change.

See, I usually approach a story, long or short (and they're almost always long) with the same attitude I'd approach a poem, or a blog, or a critical lens essay for this high school kid I know that pays me forty dollars to write him critical lens essays because he thinks I'm a wizard. I just sit down with those ideas jetting around in my brain and I write. I've never done notes ahead of time. No maps. No real world-building. No character ideas. I free-write everything, and typically that works out. I won't put pen to paper for a poem or a blog until the idea has fully formed in my head. I won't work on a novel until I have at least a few of the major plot points worked out in my head.

But its ineffective. Working that way compromises continuity, compromises the integrity of the story. Three hundred pages in, I've forgotten what the protagonists' home looks like. Now I have to sift through three hundred pages to find it. This happens so often I start just winging it, going by memory, and that leads to trouble. I'm a drunk. I don't have a memory to go on.

So I started working on this new story and I elected to do things differently. I drew up a crude map, I played around with creation stories and government set-up. I split up different files for notes on everything from the factions of deities to the different naming traditions between countries. I created a timeline of the world from its creation until the novel's setting. I drafted up approximately 185 different gods and then whittled them down until I had a believable, solid pantheon of around 15-20.

Additionally, I set about working my characters out of the world. I had a small handful of ideas for central protagonists, but they were mostly vague and by devoting so much time to world-building I was able to discover these characters naturally as organic pieces of their world. This, I think, makes them more believable and more interesting. Their story and their world is fascinating, to me, but to convey that sense of wonder and excitement, that's my job. The great thing, is very little of it is difficult. See, these worlds appear without much actual work. Sure, I do a little research on geography, on world history, on  deities from various cultures, both factual and fictional, and when I have this rough draft of a world in mind, it becomes easy to soar through the cosmos until I find the one I want to explore. Then it becomes fleshed out on its own.

All I've done is switch up the process somewhat. So for the last two weeks I've been hammering out this world, working my forge by starlight to craft something wonderful and now that its done, I'm ready to start telling the story of the Skyborn.

My little bit of advice then is that, regardless of how sure you are about something, it pays to do a little bit of preparation beforehand. Put off the good bit until you have all your tools, all your components, and then tackle it wholeheartedly.

I hope you'll join me in this. I'm going to keep this blog as a sort of running blow-by-blow of my process, both with writing this novel and editing the others. I'll try to keep things separated by title so as to make it less confusing. I'm hoping it will help someone, somewhere coalesce their own ideas into something great and avoid some of the pitfalls that I've stumbled into. In return, I hope for some awesome feedback and, just maybe, some personal motivation to really drive me in finishing these projects and publishing them.

So join me.

Or die.

Yours,
-S.R.