Revenge of the Gamer

Being a perfectionist sucks, but being a perfectionist with a complete lack of patience is infinitely worse. 

Yesterday I began the fourth draft of The Bond of Jhordil, my first original novel.  I’m frustrated because I was hoping the third draft had finally nailed down the plot, and that once it was finished I could sit back and begin the loooonnnng editing process.  Unfortunately it was not to be.  I got through about two thirds of the third draft before I had to stop and re-examine the plot due to feedback I’d received.

I showed the early chapters to about a dozen people.  Six of them told me exactly the same thing.  We like it, but it feels like we’re starting in the middle of a book.  We need to know more about Aranthar and Briana, the new leads I’d added.

Why is this so frustrating?  Because Aranthar and Briana weren’t even in the first two drafts.  It originally centered on the town of Mountain Shadow, and the main characters were the offspring of The Dark Lord(tm) killed in the prologue.  Yet the more I wrote the more I realized the brothers couldn’t sustain a novel on their own.  The book was ok but it wasn’t amazing, and the sad reality of today’s publishing market is that if your novel isn’t amazing it simply will not sell.

So I went back to the drawing board.  I realized that neither brother was cut out to be the main character.  The lead in a compelling novel is one that the readers empathize with, laugh with, cry with and love to read about.  They are human and flawed.  Neither brother fit that closely enough, which meant I needed a new lead.

I’ve played Mass Multiplayer Games like Everquest and World of Warcraft for many years, and my all time favorite character was Aranthar.  He was an irrevrent drunk who wanted to do the right thing, but had a hard time putting his wineskin down long enough to do it.  During the years I played him the ladies in these games loved the character, as evidenced by the stories they still tell years later.

I decided to modify him and insert him into The Bond.  If I could bring him to life the way I did in those games I figured I’d have a pretty compelling lead.  The good news is that I was right.  Everyone who read the new draft liked Aranthar, and it was universally agreed that the book was much stronger with him in it.

I also realized that for him to work I’d need a foil, someone for him to argue with.  As Aranthar is the world’s biggest ManHo that character would naturally need to be female.  So I created Briana, a character that still needs work but one the readers really like so far.  The interplay between them works, and people enjoy reading their adventures.  Great news for me!

So I created four chapters with Aranthar and Briana trying to reach Mountain Shadow, but kept the rest of the plot intact.  The two vampyr brothers and the complete cast of characters I created in the town are still there.  The plot is still the same, though now its Aranthar investigating the mystery instead of the brothers.  It seemed to work perfectly, and I was very proud of myself.

Then came the feedback.  Readers liked Aranthar and Briana, but they had no idea why they were traveling to Mountain Shadow.  They wanted to know how the pair met and why they were traveling together in the first place.

The good news is that I have the answers to these questions, and writing those chapters is cake.  They’re also really fun to write, because I have a blast with the interplay between Aranthar and Briana.  However, it going to take me at least an extra month and will probably be closer to two.

Worse, adding these chapters creates some serious problems later in the book.  You see in the publishing world fantasy novels are limited to 100,000 words.  I’m already at 120,000 and adding these chapters is going to put me at closer to 150,000 words.

That means I need to cut nearly a third of the novel, all of which is going to have to come from the last part of the book.  That’s why I’m so frustrated >.<

I’m sure I’ll be able to find a way to do this, but its hard to effectively start over with the plot of the novel.  I’ve already done it three times, and a fourth is both tiring and daunting.  I’m not giving up mind you, but I do feel like banging my head against my desk.

GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Ok I feel better now.  Focus on the good, Mr. Fox.  The new version is way better than any of the previous versions!  Besides, I knew going in what I was getting myself into.  The publishing industry has changed a great deal in the last twenty years.

It used to be that any moron could slap together a fantasy novel, and if it was even close to readable it would get published.  Books as a whole are dying, and the epic fantasy genre is on the endangered species list.  That means only the very best of the very best will get accepted.

If I want to get published I need to master my craft, and that’s going to take years.  In the end it will be worth the investment of time, and I just need to remind myself that the payoff will make it all worth while.

The good news is that the first of the Rifters I’m published in arrived!  One of my Evil GM Tricks articles was the very first in the issue which felt good!

I’m also on schedule as far as my short stories go.  I finished The End of All Things in January, and am just about done with There is No Such Thing as Werewolves for February.  March’s short story is entitled Sacred Duty, and should be done before the end of the month.

So I am meeting the goals I’ve set for myself.  My work continues to improve by leaps and bounds, but while the short stories are getting picked up the novel needs at least another year of improvement before it will blow people away. 

Guess I’d better get back to work on that!

This week marks a very important milestone for me.  Exactly one year ago I made a promise to myself.  I swore I’d write every day for the next year.  I promised I’d belt out at least five thousand words a week, for a total of a quarter million.  I didn’t just beat my goal.  I tied it up, beat the shit out of it and dumped it’s body in the river.  My total for the year was 1.2 million words, over 600,000 of which was fiction.

In honor of keeping that promise I’ve decided to start a new tradition.  Every February I’m going to reflect on my growth as a writer during the previous year.  However, as this is the first post in my new series I’m going to start at the beginning and tell the tale of how I became a writer.

My interest in writing began when I was six years old, back when my biological mother sent me a set of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books.  I fell in love with the fantastic worlds they offered, and quickly decided I wanted to create and share my own.

I started writing primitive stories, none of which I remember now.  I knew my stories sucked, but that didn’t deter me.  I kept writing and writing, hoping that one day I’d be good enough to see print.  That day came eight years later when I turned 14.

The U.S. had just launched operation Desert Storm, and I felt so strongly about the war in Iraq that I wrote a letter to our local paper.  The Herald Journal chose to publish it as an opinion piece, and I received a call from the youth director a few days later.  He told me about something called the Herald Junior, a newpaper published by local teens for local teens. 

So at age fourteen I took my first step into the world of writing.  Over the next couple of years I published a number of articles in the Herald Junior and a few in the school paper.  None of them were amazing, but seeing my name in print awoke a hunger for more.  Articles were all well in good, but my real goal was getting fiction published. 

I was a voracious reader, often finishing a novel every day.  By the time I was fifteen I owned several hundred books, and had read hundreds more from the library.  These books filled me with ideas and fueled the creation of my own fantasy world.  I began taking notes, writing (bad) short stories and inventing characters.  Much of my freshman and sophmore year were spent daydreaming in this world, and the more time I spent there the more fleshed out the world became. 

In the second half of my sophmore year my gifted and talented class was given the chance to work with a professional in the field of our choice.  Not surprisingly I decided I wanted to work with an author, and Mrs. Notcher (my G&T teacher) hooked me up with a professor at Syracuse University named Paul Griner.

He helped me pen my very first short story, a horror piece about a woman discovering the existence of werewolves.  Over the next six months I learned to craft a story, create a compelling lead and to revise my own work.  Paul’s guidance was invaluable, but not nearly so much as his encouragement.  He told me something that stuck with me to this day.  Never stop writing.

I wish I could say that I followed his advice, but my teenage years were a difficult time.  I only had a single semester to work with him, because my family packed up and moved from New York to California.  I lost my job with the Herald Journal and access to my writing instructor in one fell swoop.  This put a major kink in my efforts, and for the next three years I stopped writing fiction entirely.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that I found a new creative outlet, one that made me a far better storyteller. 

I’d discovered Dungeons & Dragons when I was six, but I’d always been a player instead of the game master.  That meant I was running around in other people’s worlds, seeing their imagination in action instead of my own.  When I arrived in California I quickly found a gaming group, but that group consisted of four guys all interested in playing roleplaying games instead of running them.  We had no gamemaster, without which playing was impossible.  That meant someone had to step up and run the games.  I’d never done it before, but I figured what the hell?  It couldn’t be that hard.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Crafting a world for people to run around in was far more difficult than I’d ever imagined, but despite the massive amount of work I loved it.   At first I used recycled plots from the many novels I’d read, but as time went on I began to experiment with stories of my own.  There was something magical about weaving a story for my friends, and I ran campaign after campaign over the next several years. 

My world took on more and more definition, and by the time I was eighteen my games were well known among the gaming community as some of the best to be found anywhere.  When I ran a campaign with my friend Aaron at the local gaming shop we had over thirty players apply.  That game lasted for nearly a year, and people were so impressed that even those who weren’t playing came every week to watch.

Yet as rewarding as being a great Storyteller was, roleplaying games didn’t quite scratch the itch I was looking for.  In the back of my mind I was always aware that I’d given up my dream of being an author.  I’d convinced myself that my work sucked, and stopped writing because I figured what’s the point?  No one wants to read what I write.  This was backed up by my friends, wife and family who all started backing away and looking for the nearest exit whenever I asked them to read my work.

This malaise lasted through my mid twenties, until I moved to Los Angeles.  I’m not sure why, but I decided to belt out a short story for the Rifts universe.  I submitted it to the Rifter, and was shocked when they picked it up.  I’d expected a rejection slip, but instead found myself cashing a check.

This inspired me to keep trying, so my next piece was a novella set in the Exalted universe.  It was hosted at a site called The Exalted Compendium, which had a feature that allowed users to review and rate stories.  Flight into Darkness became the number one story, and the only one consistently rated 10 out of 10.  It was the longest piece I’d ever written, and the best received out of all my work.

This spurred me to keep writing, but I was tired of playing in other people’s universes.  I’d spent my late teens and much of my twenties creating the Faelands universe, so I decided it was time to write the novel that had been bouncing around in my head for years.  The only problem was I didn’t know how.

I belted out 70,000 words before I finally gave up in disgust.  My work was juvenile, cliché and poorly written.  No one was ever going to pay money to read it.  I might be a hell of a storyteller when it came to roleplaying games, but Robert Jordan I was not.  So I gave in to the Great Lie.  I decided that I’d never be good enough to get a novel published, so I stopped trying.  After all, I reasoned, I’m just wasting my time.

The Great Lie is both evil and insidious.  It claims that writers are born, not made.  It is a complete and utter fabrication.  Anyone can learn to write if they have the patience and commitment.  Some people have natural talent which will accelerate this process, but even they have to put in the time to learn their craft.  In my case I was trying to get by on talent alone, but it just wasn’t enough.  I’d never learned the building blocks of great fiction, and without them I was doomed to mediocrity.

Twelve months ago I decided to give writing another try.  This time, though, I went about things differently.  I ordered several books on writing, and actually sat down and read them cover to cover.  Then I spent a few months putting the principles I’d learned into practice.  I ordered more books that covered different aspects of writing, read them, and then spent a few more months putting those principles into practice. 

I repeated this process several times over the last year.  I read over a dozen books on topics like Plot, Characterization, Point of View, Grammar and Dialogue.  Looking back at everything I’ve learned I’m amazed.  The quality of my writing has grown by leaps and bounds.  I’ve had many more short stories accepted, and for the first time ever I’ve finished a novel.

Six months ago I turned my attention back to Faelands, my original world.  I belted out a first draft to my novel, then a second.  On January 20th I started the third draft.  The work finally feels like its publishable, and by the end of march I should have a solid manuscript.

I’ve shown it to friends and family, and the feedback has been very positive.  Instead of the cringing I’m used to they’re asking questions about the story.  Even better they want to read more!  The novel needs a ton of work, but I feel like I’ve gotten over the metaphorical hump.  I now have all the building blocks to tell a great story. 

I understand how to evoke emotion in my readers, how to write memorable characters, and how to build gripping plots.  These principles are still new to me, and I’ll need a lot more practice before I can say I’ve mastered my craft.  But at least I understand what they are, and know that I should be trying to create them.  Before I didn’t even know what my work was lacking.

One million, two hundred thousands words.  That’s what I wrote in the last year.  I finished ten short stories, a complete novel and two drafts of another.  I learned more in that time than the previous twenty years of work put together.  I finally feel like I’m an author. Instead of worrying if I’ll get a novel published I now wonder when.  I know in my bones, in my secret heart of hearts, that I was meant to be a novelist.  That my work will make it.

I no longer believe the great lie.  Great Writers aren’t born.  They are forged in the fire of discipline, hard work, practice and diligence.  Great Writers never give up.  They never stop writing.  They never accept that their work is good enough.  They always reach for the next hurdle, the next story, the next novel.

My name is Christopher Fox and I am a Great Writer.