Progress on my book
On the 5th of May I finished the book I was reading, Dead Centre, and started up my next book, A Game of Thrones. I had never read the book, or any of the other books in the series, but I had watched every episode of the TV series.
My interest in the book was not so much about whether it was any good, or even whether it was better than the TV show, or different to the TV show. My interest, primarily, was how similar it was to my own book.
With baited breath, I opened the first page, and saw a map, then another map, and another map, and I found them to be pleasant and well-made. I was happy. Then I saw a heading of "Prologue" and I had my pre-conceived ideas about what was to come, expecting to have some grandiose story about all that had transpired before the story began, a compacted story of the dawn of men, the battle between the Children of the Forest and the first men, then the long night, the dragon conquests and all of the rest, but instead I had the exact things I had seen in the first episode of the TV show.
It was boring.
Every word was repeated in the TV show, flickering back in my mind like a memory. While it had been years since I had seen it, it seemed to me to be exactly the same, identical even, but somehow worse. The TV show was better than the book, I quickly concluded.
It wasn't until I read the second chapter - or the first real one - that I saw the majesty of the book and how I would use it. The first chapter was not named "Chapter One" or "1" or some cutesy yet annoying name that may as well not be there, but nor was there a child-like name to summarise the chapter. Instead, the chapter name was the name of a character, and, in spite of the addition of maps and a prologue, there was no index.
I flicked through and saw that it was all like this. Some characters had several chapters named in their honour. They were written not in first person but in point of view.
I have written many short stories in first person and a few in point of view, but I had never had a point of view chapter like this. I was curious as to how to do it. Was this what I was looking for? A technique that would work for my book?
The first time I had tried to write Children of the Crescent Moon, when I was just 21 years old, I wanted to write it all in first person as I like writing in first person. I am the main character, a variation of my own life, or at least my imagination of what my life could be, and this is what I am comfortable doing, and yet, for this book, I couldn't do it. The story lends itself to first person and yet there are two, equally important, main characters.
I had argued with several people, some agreeing with me, that I could still have it as first person, but that I would need to alternate between them, but when I tried to write it, and others tried to read it, it just became confusing. Even when I made the chapter names out of the characters whose perspective I was using, it was confusing, and not in a good way.
Third person doesn't work either, not really, as you lose some of the passion. My characters all have unique perspectives, each with their own personality, and, in this story, it is difficult for those personalities to shine through if I do not show things from their point of view.
The other story I am seriously considering turning into a novel, the horror story Karta, is mainly from the perspective of the main character, but I do like to have perspectives of at least some of the others, who meet their demise without the main character being present. It would still mainly be first person, but with snippets from others. It wouldn't work in an alternating point of view style. It wouldn't make sense. That's a survival horror where people die, for the most part, at the hands of ghosts. There is no point giving the perspective of the ghost. You don't want their perspective.
So I started a rewrite of my novel for the first time employing the point of view chapter style.
They are still in third person, but they are written from a point of view chapter perspective. The first chapter is the Prologue, then George, then Sarah, just as the story has always been, and for a while it simply alternates from George to Sarah to George, but then slowly I introduce more characters, and some of them get their own chapters.
I wrote it generally in a similar way to how A Game of Thrones was written, not in terms of content but in terms of style. Is it stealing? I don't think so. He doesn't have a copyright on the method of story telling. My story has few if any similarities.
I decided to change some of my character names too, as a popular, yet unfair, criticism of my novel was that I had too mundane names. So instead of Elizabeth I had Izbeth, instead of Nicholas I had Niklass, and instead of Horace I had Haas. They were subtle changes for relatively minor characters, but I kept going with them. Some of them stayed the same, but others changed. I couldn't bear to change the name of Sabrina nor Bertrand and especially not Cassandra. Those are names I have known and loved for too long. Even D'Char and D'Eliza stayed the same. Herald did not move either. But Horace did. Haas sounded better. Even though it is a name used today in certain characters, it is a bit more fun than Horace. After all, that's all that George RR Martin did with his names. He just used normal names but changed their spelling.
It started out as a bit of an experiment, but as it continued it started to feel really good, and now, as I am nearing the completion, it is starting to feel like this might be my best version yet.
I am up to 210,000 words now. I checked and A Game of Thrones is 280,000. It might be a similar length by the time it is finished. If that is a normal size for a book of that kind, then perhaps it is a target I should aim for. My previous version was just 99,000 words.
Why the length? Partially it is because, with the freedom afforded by point of view chapters, I found myself repeating some things, told from different perspectives. I didn't always do that, but sometimes I provided two or even three perspectives of an incident, different truths, to add depth to what had occurred. It wasn't simply saying the same thing over and over again - it was saying different things, the same thing but presented in different ways.
My story only has one bad guy, it should be noted, yet I have 20 or more good guys, but many of them are manipulated into appearing to be bad guys, so that most of the fighting is good guy versus good guy. So the different perspectives are important, and it helps to understand the degree of manipulation at hand and how it comes to work.
In previous versions I had kept secrets from the reader, the kinds of things that could only be fully understand after 10 or more reads, but in this version I experimented with revealing deep secrets as I went along. I was nervous about doing this but I found that it didn't ruin the story. It made it easier to understand. Even though they were big reveals, there were still deep secrets beyond that, secrets that remain right until the end.
I found myself introducing new characters too, people who of course existed in previous versions but I never allowed them to speak.
And, in spite of the increased length, I cut out some of the boring bits. There was no chase scene through the valley of the sabre-toothed tigers, nor was there the part of the sweet innocent little boy and girl turning horribly evil at the slightest suggestion, nor the bit about using the powers to turn into trees so they could hide.
The thing about the point of view chapters is that I found it easy to cut some out and I might find it easy to cut out more in editing. I'd write down a chapter and then if it felt boring and it didn't advance the plot, then I'd delete it.
I found myself introducing sex too. This has never had explicit sex scenes, but it has always had sex, something that some people have told me I should remain from it. But, as something that is based on a true story, there are certain things that just ruin the story if they are removed, and one of those things is the sex. I don't want to turn it into a porno or anything like that, but I do want to have people having sex, and falling in love. I think that I did it in the right way this time.
I am yet to edit it and I feel like I might just toss out a few entire chapters and even whole character arcs as I go through it. There is one arc that I am a bit nervous about and I might remove.
As I head to my ending, I wonder if I am better to have the glamorous castle battles I was at times encouraged to have, or if I am better to tell my own story. I think I am better to tell my own story, which means that the castle battles look somewhat different to how you usually see them. This is about strategy and manipulation, not raw power.
The novel is almost complete, and once complete then I will worry more about a publisher.
It's better if I have something to show them than to worry about who to show it to. I have always thought that if it is good enough then finding a publisher should be easy, and to worry about making it good first.
Hopefully this time around it is good enough. And hopefully I can finish this before the end of the year.
Editing can be tough.
My interest in the book was not so much about whether it was any good, or even whether it was better than the TV show, or different to the TV show. My interest, primarily, was how similar it was to my own book.
With baited breath, I opened the first page, and saw a map, then another map, and another map, and I found them to be pleasant and well-made. I was happy. Then I saw a heading of "Prologue" and I had my pre-conceived ideas about what was to come, expecting to have some grandiose story about all that had transpired before the story began, a compacted story of the dawn of men, the battle between the Children of the Forest and the first men, then the long night, the dragon conquests and all of the rest, but instead I had the exact things I had seen in the first episode of the TV show.
It was boring.
Every word was repeated in the TV show, flickering back in my mind like a memory. While it had been years since I had seen it, it seemed to me to be exactly the same, identical even, but somehow worse. The TV show was better than the book, I quickly concluded.
It wasn't until I read the second chapter - or the first real one - that I saw the majesty of the book and how I would use it. The first chapter was not named "Chapter One" or "1" or some cutesy yet annoying name that may as well not be there, but nor was there a child-like name to summarise the chapter. Instead, the chapter name was the name of a character, and, in spite of the addition of maps and a prologue, there was no index.
I flicked through and saw that it was all like this. Some characters had several chapters named in their honour. They were written not in first person but in point of view.
I have written many short stories in first person and a few in point of view, but I had never had a point of view chapter like this. I was curious as to how to do it. Was this what I was looking for? A technique that would work for my book?
The first time I had tried to write Children of the Crescent Moon, when I was just 21 years old, I wanted to write it all in first person as I like writing in first person. I am the main character, a variation of my own life, or at least my imagination of what my life could be, and this is what I am comfortable doing, and yet, for this book, I couldn't do it. The story lends itself to first person and yet there are two, equally important, main characters.
I had argued with several people, some agreeing with me, that I could still have it as first person, but that I would need to alternate between them, but when I tried to write it, and others tried to read it, it just became confusing. Even when I made the chapter names out of the characters whose perspective I was using, it was confusing, and not in a good way.
Third person doesn't work either, not really, as you lose some of the passion. My characters all have unique perspectives, each with their own personality, and, in this story, it is difficult for those personalities to shine through if I do not show things from their point of view.
The other story I am seriously considering turning into a novel, the horror story Karta, is mainly from the perspective of the main character, but I do like to have perspectives of at least some of the others, who meet their demise without the main character being present. It would still mainly be first person, but with snippets from others. It wouldn't work in an alternating point of view style. It wouldn't make sense. That's a survival horror where people die, for the most part, at the hands of ghosts. There is no point giving the perspective of the ghost. You don't want their perspective.
So I started a rewrite of my novel for the first time employing the point of view chapter style.
They are still in third person, but they are written from a point of view chapter perspective. The first chapter is the Prologue, then George, then Sarah, just as the story has always been, and for a while it simply alternates from George to Sarah to George, but then slowly I introduce more characters, and some of them get their own chapters.
I wrote it generally in a similar way to how A Game of Thrones was written, not in terms of content but in terms of style. Is it stealing? I don't think so. He doesn't have a copyright on the method of story telling. My story has few if any similarities.
I decided to change some of my character names too, as a popular, yet unfair, criticism of my novel was that I had too mundane names. So instead of Elizabeth I had Izbeth, instead of Nicholas I had Niklass, and instead of Horace I had Haas. They were subtle changes for relatively minor characters, but I kept going with them. Some of them stayed the same, but others changed. I couldn't bear to change the name of Sabrina nor Bertrand and especially not Cassandra. Those are names I have known and loved for too long. Even D'Char and D'Eliza stayed the same. Herald did not move either. But Horace did. Haas sounded better. Even though it is a name used today in certain characters, it is a bit more fun than Horace. After all, that's all that George RR Martin did with his names. He just used normal names but changed their spelling.
It started out as a bit of an experiment, but as it continued it started to feel really good, and now, as I am nearing the completion, it is starting to feel like this might be my best version yet.
I am up to 210,000 words now. I checked and A Game of Thrones is 280,000. It might be a similar length by the time it is finished. If that is a normal size for a book of that kind, then perhaps it is a target I should aim for. My previous version was just 99,000 words.
Why the length? Partially it is because, with the freedom afforded by point of view chapters, I found myself repeating some things, told from different perspectives. I didn't always do that, but sometimes I provided two or even three perspectives of an incident, different truths, to add depth to what had occurred. It wasn't simply saying the same thing over and over again - it was saying different things, the same thing but presented in different ways.
My story only has one bad guy, it should be noted, yet I have 20 or more good guys, but many of them are manipulated into appearing to be bad guys, so that most of the fighting is good guy versus good guy. So the different perspectives are important, and it helps to understand the degree of manipulation at hand and how it comes to work.
In previous versions I had kept secrets from the reader, the kinds of things that could only be fully understand after 10 or more reads, but in this version I experimented with revealing deep secrets as I went along. I was nervous about doing this but I found that it didn't ruin the story. It made it easier to understand. Even though they were big reveals, there were still deep secrets beyond that, secrets that remain right until the end.
I found myself introducing new characters too, people who of course existed in previous versions but I never allowed them to speak.
And, in spite of the increased length, I cut out some of the boring bits. There was no chase scene through the valley of the sabre-toothed tigers, nor was there the part of the sweet innocent little boy and girl turning horribly evil at the slightest suggestion, nor the bit about using the powers to turn into trees so they could hide.
The thing about the point of view chapters is that I found it easy to cut some out and I might find it easy to cut out more in editing. I'd write down a chapter and then if it felt boring and it didn't advance the plot, then I'd delete it.
I found myself introducing sex too. This has never had explicit sex scenes, but it has always had sex, something that some people have told me I should remain from it. But, as something that is based on a true story, there are certain things that just ruin the story if they are removed, and one of those things is the sex. I don't want to turn it into a porno or anything like that, but I do want to have people having sex, and falling in love. I think that I did it in the right way this time.
I am yet to edit it and I feel like I might just toss out a few entire chapters and even whole character arcs as I go through it. There is one arc that I am a bit nervous about and I might remove.
As I head to my ending, I wonder if I am better to have the glamorous castle battles I was at times encouraged to have, or if I am better to tell my own story. I think I am better to tell my own story, which means that the castle battles look somewhat different to how you usually see them. This is about strategy and manipulation, not raw power.
The novel is almost complete, and once complete then I will worry more about a publisher.
It's better if I have something to show them than to worry about who to show it to. I have always thought that if it is good enough then finding a publisher should be easy, and to worry about making it good first.
Hopefully this time around it is good enough. And hopefully I can finish this before the end of the year.
Editing can be tough.
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