Tag Archives: writing

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Fantasy book research #1

I have notes everywhere. Some are on note cards, some scribbled in completely unreadable handwriting in one of a dozen or so spiral notebooks, plus two three-ringed binders. Not to mention the fancy journal, drawing pad, and odd bits of sticky notes and what not scattered about. Of course, I also have piles of digital notes which are about as organized. Today, I decided to flip through some of my digital notes and came across this little gem:

A trade-ship (Here based upon the east India men) averages 4-5 knots in favorable wind, providing 120 miles/day. (http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~vaucher/Genealogy/Documents/Asia/asiaShips.html) OR formula of hull speed = 1.34 * SQRT(waterline length)(http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/12911/middle-age-transportation-by-river-questions) Rowing is likely to make no more than 3-4 mph. Barges of goods are pulled along the shoreline by use of oxen, and transport of persons or important goods will be done by ‘narrow boats’ which are rowed by 10-20 oarsmen, depending upon the size of the boat.

There was a lot of other stuff along with it, but this little excerpt points out something that is a rather large part of my writing process. Research. Now, I don’t even bother trying to research to the point where I might speak intelligently on the topic, though in most hobbies that’s where I go. However, I do try to get to the point where I can develop details that are, if nothing else, consistent with reality, or at very least can nose past a BS test. Sometimes I totally miss the mark, but I do try.

I think one of the most difficult thing about researching for a book is that when you’re looking into a topic, most of the stuff you might find on the internet is specific to ‘not-pretend’ applications, meaning that you get a lot of ‘it depends’ sorts of answers, which are less than helpful. Sometimes, I really just want information that would give me the bounds on reality. So, in the example above, which took a bit of searching, I could reasonably claim a 300 mile trip might take between 2.5 and 5 days. Now I have something that at least scrapes the realm of plausibility.

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Problems with my main character

As I work through the first few chapters of my current story yet again, one of the main issues I’m trying to address is a weak protagonist. For the last re-write of these chapters I intentionally focused on him having a lack of confidence. I thought this would be a good way to show the character grow as he regained that trait and took charge of his particular situation. Turns out this wasn’t a good idea. The entire story was written so that a protagonist without confidence simply isn’t believable. Damn. Now what?

Another aspect of this character is that he has been born with a special gift of magic. It’s a gift he doesn’t trust, and if anyone knew of it, he’d be ostracized. Not only that, it’s a gift he’d never been taught to fully exploit. There are some other twists to it, but this is the gist. By the end of the story, he will have learned the trick of commanding the better part of his real power, and use it to win the day. At first glance, it’s a pretty subtle bit of character development, but when I look back at what he goes through, it’s not really subtle. In fact, it’s the key change he undergoes through the story. From that perspective, it makes perfect sense that I should focus on his magic as the dynamic element, especially since most of the story revolves around his learning of magic. The next step is to go through each chapter and re-write to make him confident, perhaps to a fault, and instead focus on magic as the key aspect of character development. With luck, this change will make the story more interesting, believable and engaging. If not, well, I’ll just revise again.

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Starting in the right place

I’ve been struggling with the first chapter of my story for some time, not the prologue, but the first-chapter proper. Part of the reason for this is that it was a breakthrough chapter for me when I wrote it, although it took me a long time to realize that. It had initially been a part of a different character’s back-story, and when I made it the starting point for my story, a lot of stuff started clicking into place. As a result, I was rather married to the first iteration of it. Then, I asked some friends to read it, they all said the same thing: It really doesn’t work with the rest of the story. It wasn’t that it didn’t fit the plot, it was the tone and direction that first chapter seemed to set out that wasn’t working. So, I revised it. The feedback I got on that was better, more along the lines of, this works way better, but it needs a lot of polishing. That felt better in terms of review and ego, but the chapter still doesn’t, in fact, work with the rest of the story. There are a lot of reasons for this, it still has vestigial bits and pieces from the original chapter so it has an uneven tone. The main character is still also not defined well enough, of course this causes other problems moving forward, there’s also a bit of that plausibility issue as well. So, I’ve decided to make another crack at it. This is largely because having that chapter so rough bothers me. I want it to be the best chapter of the book. It really needs to be if I expect anyone to actually pick it up.

I spent a lot of time today avoiding writing, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was letting this problem stew in my mind. Finally, I spent an hour working on the first couple of paragraphs (this is almost always a bad sign for me, unless there’s another real distraction in the room). After re-reading what I’d puked out, my conclusion: It’s worse than what I started with, hardly fixes the original plausibility problems, and really doesn’t even read well. So what am I going to do?

I have come to the conclusion the story starts in the wrong place. I’m actually not far, I think, I just need to step back to events fifteen minutes before the original start. At the beginning, I’ve got my character running through the woods, which I think is a really good idea, but it makes life difficult for establishing the setting properly, because I’m neck deep in action. I mean, this can be done, but I’m not quite skilled enough to pull it off. What this is going to do is give me a couple of sentences for setting, which is relevant to the larger story, though quite subtle, and then launch into the action more naturally. It will also stretch the action out a little so that when the main character has to give up the chase, it’ll feel less jarring. I’m super-optimistic about this change, so hopefully it’s what I need to help me launch chapter 1 so it’s every bit as great as I expect it to be.