101 Writing Books & One Conference...Why I am World Building.

Last week I attended the Algonkian  Writer's Workshop.  I signed up for the conference in February, naively believing that my novel The Sea Knife would be finished by June.  By May, I stopped working on my novel, except for small tweaks.  My first draft was not working.  For my second draft, I decided to let the conference dictate the way my novel would go.  And it was a good thing that I did.

One of the main messages of the conference was "let your pitch be the tail that wags your novel dog."  The pitch, as defined by the conference, is the catchy one or two paragraph summary of your novel.   and the point is that if you can't write a good or sellable pitch - your novel is probably too boring, too confusing, not marketable or has already been written.    My pitch was jumbled.  I had pieces of plot intermingled with a world that I hadn't yet figured out. 
So for the last week, I have been world building on www.mindmeister.com.  

 I didn't start by using  a mind map.  I started by first pulling ideas out of my head with no structure, then using a questionnaire that I pulled from  http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/ , and finally organizing things on mindmeister.

 There are a lot of good reasons to just world build:

1.  A fantasy world needs consistency and rules - otherwise it won't be believable.

2.  How can I immerse my readers in a world that I have not immersed myself in? 

2.  World building is helping me see the overall meta plot that I want to achieve.  It is an investment for the future.

3.  It is helping pinpoint an antogonist because she is actually defined by the rules of my world.   What is the worst way possible to to use the world rules?  It is also helping me define my hero, my mentor and the other players of my plot.

4.  I now can understand the groups of people in my world and why they might have issues with each other.



I used to get frustrated every time I wasn't directly writing.    Now I understand that the actual writing is a just piece of a much bigger process.  Writing is the way to communicate how mind-blowing my concepts are, but if I don't  understand my concepts, neither will anyone else.

Killing the writing that doesn't match my log line

The first draft of my novel is so flawed that I plan to read 101 writing books, blog about them for at least a year and then maybe sign up for some therapy in order to fix it.  But if I'm going to pinpoint my first draft's biggest wound, the one that would cause the most pain for its reader, I'm need to discuss log lines.

What is a log or story line? It's that one sentence that nails what your book is all about. It's the line that you would recite to an agent if you meet one in an elevator. 

So what if you don't have one? According to Writing Fiction for Dummies  by Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy that might be OK .  You just won't be publishing your book by reciting one line.    But, beware, if you are lucky enough to be published and haven't thought of a story line,  you will be given several because everyone, from your agent to your marketer, will think of one for you and they all might be different.


There is another reason to write a log line.  According to Ingermanson and Economy, the main reason to write a storyline is "that it can serve to focus your own creative efforts during the arduous months when you're planning and writing your novel." p.136 I completely agree. For me, the process of creating my novel's log line was as important than the log line itself.

After reading Writing Fiction for Dummies,  I sat down to write a log line for my story.  The sad truth was that even my initial efforts  didn't match what I had written so far.  I wanted The Sea Knife to be about family and relationship boundaries, particularly in a divorce situation, but in my first draft, my  protagonist, Kristian, dealt more with his nightmares than his parents.  There were other distractions in the draft as well:  a female character who spent chapters needing Kristian's comfort, carefully edited paragraphs about Kristian's difficulty learning Finnish (hey, it is a damned hard language to learn) and another supporting character whose narrative arc merited its own book and theme.

So here is my current logline:


In order to find a magical object that may save his parents from divorce, a popular high school student uses his new found and fragile ability to influence monsters' minds.

 

This is about the 10th , no 11th, no 20th  (I just changed it again) attempt at a log line.  I expect that there might be others in the future.  But I don't mind thinking of them.  It really keeps me centered.

Killing the Wandering Protagonist

A week ago, my novel's second chapter sucked.  I felt that hopelessness that all but the most cocky fiction writer's sometimes face.  What was I doing wrong? 

I edited  my way through the chapter and realized that minor edits were not going to save my meandering mass of words.  My MC, Kristian, needed something that I was not giving him.  He needed a "scene purpose."  He needed to attain it or not attain it, not just wander around Helsinki, meeting a vast array of interesting characters. 

A "scene purpose", defined in the book Plot &Structure by James Bell, on page 114 is  "may be anything that is a step in achieving the story goal."  So I took this advice.  I gave Kristian an idea how to stop his dad from keeping him in Finland.   This idea pulled the chapter together like string.  In giving my MC a purpose, I had, inadvertantly, given myself one too.   I knew which characters needed to be chopped.  I knew why Kristian needed to visit his cousin's house. 

Now this chapter needs more work, but the rambley, "why am I reading this" feeling was gone.   I am back on track - Thanks, Mr. Bell.