Tag: fiction writing

#oneaday Day 430: Poisonous fantasy

So I picked up Blade of the Poisoner last night, as offensive as the Kindle version's cover is to me, and started to read it. As predicted, it is pleasantly easy to read, and the fact that each chapter is less than five minutes "long" at the speed I read means that I suspect I'm probably going to power right through this in short order. As noted yesterday, though, that's no bad thing; sometimes it's nice just to read something that stimulates the imagination a bit without challenging the more "technical" parts of your brain too much.

I'm actually surprised how much of Blade of the Poisoner I'm remembering — and I don't necessarily mean the details of the story, I mean certain little turns of phrase that have, for one reason or another, stuck in my mind for many years, even without having touched this book for probably several decades at this point. There were a few in the first chapter alone: protagonist Jarral's hesitant question "Can we go and … look at the village?" after his village has been burned to the ground by the evil Prince Mephtik, and the description of the character Archer falling to the ground, "sudden blood staining her brown curls" after being lamped over the head with the butt of a crossbow. Neither of these are particularly remarkable pieces of writing, but they are, for some reason, apparently lodged in my long-term memory, and I'm sure they won't be the only ones.

Thinking about it, despite a longstanding interest in and appreciation for the genre, one thing I don't think I've ever really tried my hand at writing myself is straight-up fantasy. I've done sci-fi, I've done "real world with fantastical elements", I've done "gritty realism", but one thing I don't think I've ever done is create-your-own-world-with-its-own-rules fantasy. And, dipping into Blade of the Poisoner for the first time in a long while last night, I feel like that's something which might be fun. I'm still yet to do anything with my "Scratch Pad" creative writing site that I've set up, largely because I haven't really been struck with any sort of "inspiration" just yet. But I think this might be it: it might be time for me to have a go at fantasy, and see what happens.

Fantasy is interesting because it has a whole different set of considerations to other types of writing. By its very nature, you don't have to follow the "rules" of reality, but you are then faced with the challenge of ensuring your world is internally consistent. How does magic work, if it is present at all? What species call that world home, and how are you going to ensure none of them accidentally end up as thinly veiled racial stereotypes? What social structures are in place? How do you strike a balance between giving the baddies threatening-sounding names and ensuring they don't end up sounding like medical terminology? Is there any connection between that world and ours? Is that world an "alternate Earth", or is it a completely different planet, perhaps with its own rules?

Lots of things to consider, and establishing a setting in this way can, at times, be a really fun part of writing. It is also an easy part to get very bogged down in, so one has to find a good balance between making notes on things that are important to the story you want to tell and the setting in which you want to convey that story, and not getting carried away writing what effectively amounts to a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook. Of course, there's also a certain amount of value in fleshing out your setting to a ridiculous degree, because that can lay the foundations for future stories you might want to tell in that setting, but one shouldn't lose sight of one's main goal. As with any type of creative project, particularly if one hasn't indulged in such things for a while, it pays to start small and see where things go from there.

So yes. I am thinking. Hard. I can't promise if and when anything will appear over on the Scratch Pad, but I'll be sure to link it here when something does. And in the meantime, perhaps just a chapter or two more of Blade of the Poisoner, you know, as inspiration…

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2219: Picking at the Scab of Creativity

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That's a horrible metaphor, I know, but the more I think about it, the more that it seems to make a certain amount of sense.

I've been picking at said scab for the last few days, as I said I was going to. I haven't been spending all day on it or anything, but an hour here and an hour there has meant that a story I've been wanting to finish since my teenage years is finally making some progress further beyond the point where it typically stalls any time I attempt to form it into some sort of… well, format.

I'm taking a different approach to what I usually do, and it feels like it's working. Those who have read my various month-long sort of NaNoWriMo projects and other creative pieces will know that I have something of a tendency to write in a fairly spontaneous manner — in other words, I don't really plan anything out in advance, and this usually serves me well but occasionally sees me writing myself into a bit of a dead end I'm not sure how to escape from. In contrast, then, said scab-picking has involved not just continuing on with what I've already written — which is a substantial number of words that I'm actually quite pleased with so far — but instead planning out a synopsis, chapter by chapter, of what's coming next.

Doing this has helped me get over the biggest creative block I've had with this work — a creative block that has lasted a good 15 years or so at last count. The trouble with this story is that I know how it begins and I know roughly how it ends, but I've never quite figured out what happens in the middle of it or the specifics of the ending. Now I'm planning each chapter out in general terms rather than trying to write meaningful scenes as I get to them, I feel like I'm developing a much stronger sense of the work's complete structure, and those middle bits are starting to fall into place naturally. It's that old thing where a huge job looks daunting if you look at the whole thing, but if you take it a single task at a time it suddenly seems a lot more manageable.

So picking a scab then — why? Well, because I've been picking at it for the last few days, and each time I do so, I feel my creativity loosen up a bit. It's surely — hopefully — only a matter of time before that scab comes off completely and creativity comes gushing forth from a newly reopened wound, splattering the walls and desk with… you know what? Maybe I didn't think this metaphor through as much as I thought I had.

Anyway. Disgusting mental imagery aside, I'm pleased with my progress, even though it's relatively minor in the grand scheme of what I need to do to finish the damn thing. It is progress, though, and while I'm still not feeling great about bumming around at home all day rather than having a proper job, it is at least helping me to feel like I'm achieving something, however miniscule that something might be. And that's pretty important.

Let's hope I can keep that motivation going, a bit at a time.