Considerations from My First Novel, Part 2
This article has been approved by my girlfriend.
I don’t recall what I talked about in the first part of this, but I figure it’s time for a follow-up since I’ve just finished the entirety of the detailed outline, barring a few details that need to be developed meanwhile.
I want to discuss the primary things I’ve learned so far. I thought I might have a lot to say, but there’s truthfully only two lessons I’ve taken from this experience, hitherto:
Firstly, don’t world-build before you have your plot progression down in at least a moderately detailed outline because you’ll end up just creating a bunch of irrelevant world-building that you really can’t use, and, in my case, you’ll end up expanding your small, one-village story into an expansive, multi-continental sci-fi fantasy epic. Which, in retrospect, doesn’t sound so bad. The problem is that when your plans go astray, when they expand, you tend to get discouraged. That might be odd in apparency, but regardless of how opulent and luminous the outcome shining in the distance is, it cannot affect you with its shimmering promise if you’re always looking back at how relatively little you’ve accomplished. As your goals unintentionally stretch out farther and farther ahead, the amount you’ve already accomplished grows comparatively smaller and smaller.
Secondly, know what your characters’ goals are, because if you just move them around like chess pieces—no, like throw-pillows and doilies, with no other tools than intuition and a vague notion of achieving the appropriate feng shui—without considering why they’re doing what they’re doing, you’ll find yourself creating some daft situations that make the writing feel as though it were written by an intellectual retard. (I mean that in the sincerest spirit of the word, even though it’s also funny.)
I’ve actually thought of a couple other things, but I believe I’ll save those for another article because I want to milk these ideas for as many posts as possible. Did you know I pay like twenty bucks a month for this website that no one reads? I’m mad. Mad!
