My book Metl: The ANGEL Weapon was just published!
But even though it’s my first published book, it’s far from the first book I wrote.
So let’s take a look at my first, hot-garbage-fire of a book that I wrote, and talk about all the things that I learned from it.
You’ve enjoyed the power of stopping time your entire life.
You have as much free time as you want to work on projects, relax, and even catch up on sleep.
But then, one day, when you try to start time again… it doesn’t work.
What the heck is an unreliable narrator?
Shouldn’t, of all people in a story, we be able to trust the person telling the story to us?
Not necessarily.
Writing fantasy, especially fantasy that takes place in a different world, is extremely difficult. You have to walk the fine line between giving the reader enough detail to see the world, but not so much that you overwhelm them.
Thankfully there are lots of authors who have already done this extremely well, whose works we can look at! And one such example is A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge.
Boring descriptions are boring. When writing a story, it’s important to not only engage your reader with the plot, setting, and characters, but also with the very words on the page.
If you’re not having fun describing something, your reader won’t have fun visualizing it!
“As Yams McKenzie set down his bulbous, starchy body on the surface of the moon, he remembered his days as just a sprout in the ground.”
For the last stream’s exercise, we went over something that’s a pretty divisive topic: when/how to write a prologue.
I’m not a fan of prologues. In the Ten Writing Commandments we came up with, the second commandment outright says: “Thou shalt not start thine story with a dream, flashback, or prologue. At best, thine readers will be disappointed when they start your “main story,” at worst, they will be bored, confused, and stop reading.”
I would steer all beginner writers away from writing prologues, because it’s too easy to use them as a crutch. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a place sometimes.
So for the last stream, chat voted for a randomly-generated plotline, and then we wrote a prologue for that story. Here’s what we got: “A cowboy and a maverick heavily conspire to prepare an irritating pixie.”
It was a fun exercise, trying to think of what kind of information would be justifiable in a prologue for that story. Here’s what we came up with:
Today we started off the stream by doing something I’d been wanting to try for a while: re-writing a viewer-submitted story.
During out last stream, viewer QueenLavana submitted a story during freeshare that I thought would be an excellent candidate. It had potential, but the beginning was getting bogged down by backstory, was too quick in places, and left the reader not knowing what to feel. After getting their permission, we re-wrote the beginning during the exercise portion of the stream.
We made sure to pay attention to three things while re-writing: (1) giving the reader the who/what/when/where/why so that they can visualize and understand what’s going on, (2) showing the reader how how to feel by setting the tone, and (3) not being afraid to take it a little slow and set the scene.
Here’s what we came up with:
Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We’d already come up with our story idea in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: creating an idea toolbox.
An idea toolbox is basically a bunch of brainstorming. You come up with lots and lots of ideas by following these steps:
#1. Ask a question about your story idea
#2. Write whatever answers pop into your head (you can have multiple, even contradictory answers!)
#3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you have about a page full of information
#4. Read through your page and pick out the parts that “spark emotion,” things that get you excited to write
#5. Compile all your favorite parts together, then go back to step 1
As always, chat came up with some great questions and answers based on the idea we came up with. Here’s where we finally ended up:
