This past week has been a fun one.  Here the  Bard’s History of the Landian Clans continues with the start of the First War.  We’ll conclude Keto’s abridge history this week, setting the groundwork for all that plaques Illithiust.

On the back end of the site, I continue to cut my teeth on WordPress and should have some added navigation features implemented in the next week or two to make sure stories are easy to find as more go up.  On the storytelling side, once the Clan Histories are explored I expect to return to another drop or two with the Fey and Bard before introducing the Soldier in her own short story.  More so, the novel I hinted at continues to develop and I wrapped the fourth chapter this week.  When any of that will start to appear is a good question.  Suffice to say it requires significant editing, not just because of my skill level but also because of how I’m writing it.

I’ve written two novel length pieces of fiction in the past.  Both proved to be valuable experience in telling a story of such a length.  Eighty thousand words, often considered the normal length of a 300 page trade paperback novel, requires significantly more planning than a short story, and certainly more than a drop story.  I’ve approached writing novels in different ways each time I’ve done.  My two past successes (in that they were written, not necessarily that they were any good) falling into the realms of a very detailed outline and a developing the outline a few chapters at a time.  This time, while I have a general outline complete, I find my writing experience to be much more on the seat of my pants.  That is to say I have a general idea of what any given chapter needs to complete with regards to the bigger narrative but many of the other details are less planned out.

I’ll be honest that this manner of writing makes me somewhat uncomfortable.  I have preferred the well planned out novel but is also a lesson I learned from the last novel I had written.  While I may one day decide to post that work, it’s biggest lesson for me was as I was in the midst of the climax I came to a point where my main character was suppose to return to fight in a final battle.  Except that main character had just fought two large battles, battles which proved largely effective in completing his story arc.  However, that main character had a companion with him.  Said companion had been along the ride the entire novel.  I realized in the midst of writing the climax that the companion had been progressing through an arc of facing her self-doubt and she needed to resolve that arc.  It turned out that the final confrontation of the story made far more sense with the companion leading the charge.  I ended up having to pause and re-outline the entire last few scenes of the climax to make this work, and while frustrating the novel was far better for it.

The great lesson which I learned from this is that if you build your characters well enough, if you make it so that they are developed people in their own right, then the art of storytelling can be as simple as putting all the characters in their starting places in your world and simply recording what happens.  I didn’t expect the ending to need to change when I wrote that novel, but accepting that it could resulted in a far stronger story.

I’m trying to lean into that approach that with my current novel. While it is resulting in many notes on things to tweak in previous chapters, I think the flexibility will result in something very tightly woven once it is done (and admittedly a lot of editing happens).  Certainly, I can get away with this for several reasons.  One is that I do have a general outline to help keep things on track.  The second is that the characters are well enough developed to make their own decisions (in fact many of the stories that show up here are to help flesh out those characters).  The final is that the world is well enough developed to push back on the actions of the characters.  That last perhaps being the most important, as after the protagonist and the antagonist, the most important character in a novel, and especially a Fantasy novel, is the world.  It’s impact on all the characters, after all, decides just what all of them will do.

So, plenty going on here in my little corner of the web.  I hope you’re having success in any of your endeavors.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean