I joined Beehaw specifically hoping to get in on the ground floor of the growing writing community here, but I have to admit I haven’t had much to say.
So, for the other folks checking this community once a day or so to see what’s being posted, “Hi!”
I’m enthusiastically nearing the end of the first draft of my first novel, and pretty excited to jump into revisions once that’s done.
I aspire to be traditionally published, though I’ve heard how unlikely that is for a first novel over and over, so I’m (primarily) viewing this first novel as a learning experience, and it’s very much been one of those.
I’m interested to hear where others are at.
Hello there!
I’m at a place of “I want to write, but I can’t figure out what I want to write”. I recently came to the end of a project that I’d been working on for a number of years, and while I feel like I’m done with that story (after about 1.3 million words, not intended for publication), I just can’t figure out where to go next. I haven’t quite landed on an idea I can get excited about.
I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be published. Nothing kills the joy of writing for me more than “okay, but is it marketable enough to sell?” No shade on anyone who wants to be published! It’s just not for me.
Sheesh. I’m at 106k words and that’s 10x more than any single thing I’ve ever written before. 1.3 million sounds impossible - what a journey writing that must have been!
I can get that. In my case, I am going to need a second career as I age, and personal circumstances limit the sorts of things I can consider. Fortunately, this is something I can consider, something I am really enjoying, and something I think I can learn to be good at.
If you are willing to share, what’s the scope and general description of your huge work?
The huge project was basically a big, sprawling sci-fi/fantasy adventure. Magic, aliens, transformation themes. I just started writing one day and kept going. The 1.3 million words was over five or six years, so it’s mostly just that I was sticking with one story rather than hopping between different projects. It was definitely a journey, and I really enjoyed working on it. There’s something really liberating about just writing whatever I want and not really worrying about writing for anybody but myself. But I just reached a point where I felt like I had nothing more to add to it.
That does sound pretty awesome. Writing a blended sci-fi/fantasy story is on my list of things I want to do, but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet.
The worldbuilding for something that size must have been immense, I feel like that must have been the most fun part in a way.
A sci-fi/fantasy blend is less complicated than it seems, if it is something you want to give a try in future. Mine basically started out very Star Wars-esque, before it took on a life of its own and I played up the magical elements more. I find that I don’t enjoy world-building for its own sake, so I tend to incorporate it into a story as I write. The results end up pretty fluid, but disorganised, which is interesting.
What kind of thing do you write?
I’m writing what I think of as “classic fantasy” - though whether others would find that term applicable I do not know.
No dragons, no Tolkien-esque races, but a typical Europe-ish setting, say 18th-ish century without gunpowder, and a fairly hard magic system which is both powerful and self-limiting, with a story of pursuing justice while being pursued by those who would deny it. The theme has ended up being very heavy on friendship and loyalty. It’s not a cozy, but it’s very much not grimdark, either.
I’m a little bit worried that I don’t provide enough possibility of death to any of the main characters via the story as written, but I’m so close to the end that I’m not going to change anything unless I still feel this way during revision.
I do this as well, but I take somewhat copious notes regarding the significant details as I create them. It’s too early to tell whether this is going to generate a result I’m happy with or not. 🙂
I was thinking about one of your opening comments before:
As kind of weird as it is for me to feel this way, I’ve been having random ideas lately that might be a good fit for where you are, depending on if you feel you are done with the entire world or not.
I have found myself daydreaming about doing short stories involving some of the secondary characters and the lives they had/have before they got swept up in the events of my story, or a slightly different idea would be to do short stories that may involve new characters but showcase a particular culture from the world, or an interesting situation to be solved in an interesting way with magic, or etc. For me, I feel like that’s a fairly foolish daydream for the point where I am at this time. But for you, with all that body of work, and looking for something to do - maybe a good fit?
Edit:
My worry there is that I’m not sure I can learn what I need to in order to write credible sci-fi while also learning to write. But I’ve been a majority-fantasy reader for my entire life, from a very early age. I feel like I’ve got a built in comfort zone on the fantasy side that is allowing me to focus more on learning to write than learning to write fantasy.
additional edits for minor corrections and clarity
This sounds really cool, actually! I think the “medieval” fantasy has been such a staple for so long that an 18th century vibe is quite refreshing. And nothing wrong with heading for the middle ground between cosy and grimdark.
I’m not sure how much you’d need to worry about threatening your characters with death. I kind of think the whole Game of Thrones “anybody can die at any time” thing is a bit overdone now, and it risks alienating readers too. I’ve dropped a few series because once all my favourite characters had been brutally killed off, I just didn’t care enough about the handful still left alive that I was willing to keep paying for books, you know?
I’m definitely done with the world. Like, I love it, and I might go back to it one day, but after writing so much about it, I’m really ready to try something new and different. I’m feeling drawn to some xenofiction, maybe, I just haven’t hit on the idea that really makes me go “yes, that one!” yet. I actually find short stories really challenging, because I tend to write by going really deep into a single character’s POV, so if I care enough about them to write about them, then I want to write a lot. So… I just need to find that character+world combination that I feel attached to enough to spend time on, if you know what I mean?
That makes sense, yeah! Working with a new genre is challenging, especially if it’s not one you’ve read a lot. But a sci-fi/fantasy blend is more forgiving in that respect than hard sci-fi, since the magical elements allows you to get away with fuzzier science.
Aw thanks!
Thanks - though I must admit it’s a very loose triangulation just based on sort of the state I wanted technology and such to be. (except the gunpowder of course) I didn’t want to have to write about people eating from trenchers and such. Due to the lack of gunpowder I’ve preserved certain weapons that otherwise would likely not be very prevalent with firearms around, but it’s not the kind of story where I go very deep in drawing attention to that, either.
Thanks - I try not to get too inside my own head about those sorts of things, but from time to time I get an imaginary “reader” on my shoulder saying “Oh sure and somehow none of them died during all that?” I appreciate your pointing out that not everyone will have that reaction though. The character I was considering killing off has probably got the broadest appeal of any of the main characters, so if I had, I might have walked right into the trap you mention. 🙂
Yeah that totally makes sense. That’s a lot of words (and who knows how many more you revised/trimmed out over the years) for a solitary pursuit, I could absolutely understand wanting to do something different.
I’ve read a fair bit of sci-fi too, but not a quantity that I feel is really going to help me write it, if that makes sense.
That’s a great point, and something to consider.
I had to google that I admit - that does sound very interesting. Now with your comment about short stories I’m going, “So like a squirrel who witnesses some major historical event while going about his daily life, but has no idea of the significance it poses to humans?” Would that be the sort of thing that would qualify? I have to admit THAT is a genre I have never read.
I totally do - it’s funny how things just grab you. My story originates almost entirely from a dream I had that inspired the magic system I use. I didn’t even decide I was going to write a story for another year or more after that, but all during that time I kept thinking it would be a fun magic system to work with. When I decided I was ready to start writing, it was immediately what I thought of.
Well, if you decide to let folks read your work, I can’t promise I’ll get through that many words in a timely fashion, but I’d love to give it a shot.
So basically an 18th century vibe in terms of the culture and most forms of technology, but still using swords and the like for weapons? It immediately makes me curious about how an 19th century world would develop if gunpowder hadn’t been available. Very interesting idea.
Oh yeah, it’s probably 1.5 million if I include the bits that have been revised and trimmed. I had a particularly challenging plot line where I wrote and deleted and rewrote and deleted and rewrote several times, and on one occasion I removed an entire 40k word section (I kept a backup in case I changed my mind.)
Yep, that would totally qualify! Xenofiction covers everything that tells a story from the perspective of something that isn’t human (or a near-human analogue like dwarves, elves, vampires, humanoid aliens a la Star Trek). So that could be a squirrel witnessing a major historical event while having no idea of its significance, where the purpose of the story is showing how an event of great human importance looks from the outside. And then there’s stories where the whole point is to immerse oneself into the perspective of a non-human creature’s own experiences (Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Jack London’s White Fang are good examples here, as stories which are focused on how the animals experience life, but also completely grounded in a sense of realism - both these books are public domain, so can be freely downloaded from Project Gutenberg), which are often events that are completely unimportant to humans.
Then there’s also xenofiction that overlaps a bit with fantasy, where the non-human creatures are sapient and have their own cultures, folklore, languages, etc, while still looking at the world in a very non-human way, and the worldbuilding might include some very minor magical elements. Richard Adams’ Watership Down is the go-to here, which portrays its rabbits as animals who don’t have the ability to understand things the way humans do, while still giving them enough sapience that their culture and folklore is a big part of the story.
The next step beyond that are proper fantasy and sci-fi books that are written from the perspectives of dragons, aliens, etc that are very clearly and explicitly equal to humans in intelligence/sapience, while being non-human. There’s not a lot of good examples where the whole book is written like this, but the chapters of the Temeraire series written from Temeraire’s point of view are decent examples of how it works.
I actually find a lot of modern xenofiction a bit disappointing. There’s kind of this assumption that it’s a genre for kids, so while they’re often violent, they’re… dumbed down and sanitised in a way that stories like Black Beauty and Watership Down aren’t, with the characters coming across more like 11 year old humans in furry bodies rather than beings with a completely different perspective on life. A really good xenofiction book should challenge you to feel genuine empathy in a very raw and visceral sense, with something that experiences the world in a completely different way. Black Beauty and Watership Down are absolutely brutal to read (and the latter famously had an animated adaptation in the 1970/80s that traumatised an entire generation of children because it was classified as “suitable for all ages” and it really, really isn’t).
So I think I want to write something focused on non-humans, but for an adult audience and not middle grade. Probably a limited market for it, but it’s what I want to read, which always seems like a good place to start when writing something!