McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Where to start?

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Nicodemus Archleone:
Hi Butcher fans:)

Okay so I read through the first 20 pages in authors craft and it seems this question has not been asked.
Where to start?
Do you start with a character and try to figure out what this person is about, what he does, where he lives and then what happens to him/her?
Plot idear? what is this about, what is to happen to the character, start middle, end thread?
Do you start figuring out what do I want to tell? morale and what not. I guess itīs the plot but I want to hear the opinon. Is it somewhere intirely different? I am not sure if itīs Plot or Character, but as I said, I guess itīs plot. What do you say?
Often when I write I find my idear originate from another film or book, this i realise after a bit of time so I have startet thinking plot characters and such.
As my Writers group has nearly started, and a deadline is sure to come up and be, in term of writing, soon, I thought I wanted to seek your wisdom on these questions.
This group is to activate and keep our creativity going and is not aiming at all at publicating and release our work to the public.
As such I thought, maybe I should try to write DF fanfic, as far as I know Fanfic is okay by the group. But then again, that I think just means I want to read DF again or read the new changes rather than creating something in the universe it self. For fear of not capturing Harryīs being correctly and makeing it be him. I love the series, itīs the best in a long long time, as such Iīd like to write fiction with Harry on the other hand I am afraid to write something and not be able to perform as Harry, Bob, Murph, Michael or other of our beloved characters. The same goes to some extend with Codex Alera. While I donīt hold it as dear as I does with the DF I still am afraid of trying to capture for instance Kitai or Taviīs brilliant tactics, I donīt think I can get into Kitaiīs unique mind and her attitude.
I mentioned that I can recognize idears from books and movies in my works when I work, this is becourse I am still a beginner i guess, and yes I am a beginner, if i think of an idear and think it is mine and is original I Hate it, I Hate it so much, when I discover it was an idear i picked up, from a book or movie, at a later point and things have developed I step back and see, hey Iīve seen this before in some form or another.This I find horrible when it is my own work and itīs supposed to be original, but if i start my story declaring I am in Fanfiction mode I have no problem being in another universe where it is not originally mine, and I just tweak things with my own plotline.
At this point as I am sure you have figured out, I donīt know what to do, where to start, the only thing i "know" is if my work is to be purely original (not going down the Fanfiction road of either DF or CA) that my genre is to be either Horror or Fantasy not even here I can make up my mind, as some of my idears fit Horror while others does the Fantasy genre. And unfortunately they come in, in a mix, and I only unfortunately seem to get idears if i think about now I want an idear, is there something wrong with me for this? that, if I am allowed to use a writer term, my muse will only visit when called upon.
I hope you can help me folks.
My deadlines in the Writers group is giving me stress and makes me fear I cannot come up with anything original in time, on the other hand if i donīt keep my mind on writing it seems I donīt get anything to write.
Do your muse submit idears to you at random? or like mine only when provoked to do something?
Or am I fooling myself in thinking I have muse, and really I canīt get idears to write at all and should drop this idear?
Hearing about Jimīs road to success and the arrival of DF and the Codex one just have to keep going and never give up, if one want to improve, and also from another writer I have herd something simmilar, I guess this means donīt give up hehe.
Anyway can you help me on my questions?
thanks in advance:D

Regards

Nicodemus Archlone
 

meg_evonne:
I doubt you will find many writers who always start in exactly the same way.

The best is to keep your butterfly net in hand, ready to snatch what comes your way.  This could be a place, a character, a situation, a theme, or as some here have reported--a great ending!  LOL

Another author said that he takes that initial kernal from those above and then researches it until he finds 20 too cool not to use ideas.

If you are starting raw from scratch there are several exercises that might help, but understand that coming in with a premise to discuss isn't a bad first meeting idea.  Or a scratched out outline.  Other writers can help you refine it.  I will never write another long work without a premise (a great hook, a great snappy original premise) that you will use to market it.  If you don't have that, then it's a trial to come up with one later.

Others chirp in with starting exercises?
1. Sit with a blank sheet of paper and a timer.  Write as many words as possible that start with M or W or A whatever.  After three minutes you will have wiped your every day life from your mind and ready to write.  Pick some of the words and start writing.
2. Visit an art museum, or search the internet for paintings--contemporary, classic, whatever.  Find one (don't take hours doing this) and start writing about an item in the painting.  The horse in the corner, the barn without a door, the road that leads nowhere. 
3. Read until you get to a spot that goes--ahh!  Then walk out of the written word and begin fresh with where the idea you had takes you. 
4.  Watch a really bad B movie.  I mean really really bad.  Figure out where it went wrong and fix it.  Write.
5.  Take a bunch of slips of paper and write verbs, nouns, adjectives, smells, emotions.  Draw randomly and write.
6.  Play Salvadore Dali... pick an item near your desk and stick it somewhere unusual and Write.  (Wait, I meant that mentally!)

Get the key thing here?  Write.  After five pages you may find your novel.  After 20 pages--it might be time for a beer.  LOL

Others with formal training can rattle off a ton of these.  They'll post 'em. 

Best wishes!


Ah and a word of advice.  Crits for the other writers will teach you a ton.  Never short a crit.  Never sweeten a crit.  Never skip a crit or they won't crit yours.  In your writing group you will find half or more of your time will be taken up in reading others work.  I repeat my Nevers above.   Then write your pages. 

Also on receiving your crits from others.  Listen, don't talk and if they run out of things to say then question them.  You're there to get their best opinions.  They may be hiding them to go gentle.  Forget gentle.  My best crit session ever was with a small group of genre writers and Michael A Stackpole.  Most of the comments were bland (exluding Stackpole of course!) and I worried how I was going to get what I wanted out of them.  I made sure I was sprawled on the floor.  (yeah, body language/interpersonal communication was my major in college.)  That gave them a feeling of control and wow--did I get them going and I wasn't defending.  I was writing as fast as I could.  Later someone came up to me.  They were afraid I had been offended!  I had to let the sweetheart in on my secret.  I suspect next writer's workshop, she'll use the same trick.

Finally, if you get the same feedback from 4 or 5 readers--fix it.  If it's one - don't sweat it.  Be prepared that sometimes your crits will be pointing out symptoms and they don't realize it.  You are the writer, you figure out what's a symptom and what was the real problem and fix it!

Listen, listen, listen. 

Nicodemus Archleone:
Thanks Meg:) be open to criticism good idear:) hehe, and Iīll try to draw in idears from what you mentioned, itīs a form of writing what you are talking about I am not fammiliar with. Can you answer or opinonate on the "itīs not my idear part"

I have a tendency to find idears which I at first think is good, then go, ohh somebody else gave me that idear, (that is it has it origin in somewhere other than my mind) some movie or book and such, and I had just aparently tweaked it enough in my mind to make me belive it was my own idear, when I realise this I shoot down my idear and im left again empty minded, how do you avoid this?

Kali:
I admire meg's fortitude.  I lack it, and therefore I must say it's i-d-e-a, not i-d-e-a-r which might be how you're pronouncing it.  A lot of people where I live (Virginia) do say "idear" but there is no "r" on the end.  I dunno why that one in particular I had to point out, but I did.

But on to the real comments...

So what if you're writing something and you realize that it's based on something else?  Write for the fun of it, for the hell of it.  It's still practice in writing; it may not be what gets you published, but it will help make you better and stronger.  Write what you love, write the cool ideas in your head and heart and screw what anyone else would say.  So what if your characters are all Mary Sues and your plots are a mish-mash of Star Wars Meets Twilight?  Write anyway.  Tell yourself you'll stick it in a drawer and never show it to anyone, but this is just for you.

And let's face it, no idea is new.  Name a movie, I can tell you other stories that use the same basic plot and/or theme.  Even the Bible is largely a re-tread of older tales.  What matters is HOW you tell the story, with your characters and their emotions and their lives and their particular quirks.  Fifty gajillion romance novels published every year have the same setup:  Boy meets girl, boy and girl hate each other, boy and girl overcome problem, boy and girl fall in love.  People still sell them, editors still buy them, the public eats them up, because the plot simply doesn't matter much.

That's right, I said it.  Do your worst.

The plot doesn't matter much.  The plot is the broad strokes, it's the overview.  And they've all been done.

It's like a football game.  You know largely what will happen.  For three downs, the offense will either pass or run the ball.  On the fourth down, they'll punt (unless it's fourth-and-inches and you're Bill Belichick, but I digress).  Some of the defense will try to stop the players from moving the ball, some will try and take down the quarterback.  Back and forth, back and forth, until time's up and then whoever has the most points wins the game.  Same thing every Monday night during the season, twice on Sunday, sometimes even on Thursday.  And yet, millions watch.  Why?  If we just wanted to know what happened, we'd all read the scoreboards at the end and no one would go.

But it's HOW these things happen that people want to see.  The specifics.  Even if the general idea is the same over and over, the specifics, the nitty-gritty details are fascinating. Will they pass or run, which play will they pick, will someone go offsides, will Brett Favre lose the ability to count at a key moment in the game, will someone's leg snap on 3rd-and-goal?

Same thing with stories.  The broad strokes are repeated from book to book to book.  The hero is a poor boy who doesn't know he's really a prince, but rises to greatness during an epic quest to save his people from an overwhelming threat.  Seen it.  Star Wars, Alera, Prince Valentine, Assassin's Apprentice...  But what makes these things fascinating is HOW everything came about.  That's why you read. 

So screw the plot.  Let it be derivative.  Don't sweat the big stuff.  Sweat the small stuff.  Sweat the details. That's what'll make your story spectacular, and make it worth reading.

...

Hey, I ranted. 

Nicodemus Archleone:
Thanks Kali:) that was encouring, I think Iīll pick up something I felt i got from another story and pick it up again, tweak it, make it my own. I hope I can find it or pick it out of my mind again and continue something that last time around never got started:)

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