I&E follow-along: Stage 3

So, I’ve done my preliminary musing (Stage 2), and now I’m ready to start planning the book, right? Wrong. I know that in Lesson 4 of How to Think Sideways, Holly jumps straight in with creating her Sentence (what is more generally known as a premise), but at this stage I still haven’t made any decisions as to what I’m writing about. I barely have characters, let alone a plot, so I need to do some more work before I can even think about nailing down the core conflict. In effect, I’m skipping ahead to Lesson 8: How to Develop Your Personal Writing Project System—which is appropriate, since I’m now in the position to know what works and doesn’t work for me.

I also have to confess that I don’t find mindmapping useful (heresy, I know!). It works well for the Sweet Spot Map where you’re just braindumping topics that hit your buttons, but for the story itself I need something more concrete. A line between two bubbles doesn’t tell me how those two things are causally related, or why I care about them. Nor does abstract thinking help me to develop my ideas—I need to write this stuff down, otherwise my Muse gets distracted (or maybe doesn’t think I’m taking her seriously). Hence my exploration takes the form of a long written discussion with myself, full of “what ifs” and “maybes”. All of this goes into my Project Journal and can run to many dozens of pages!

Stage 3: Exploring ideas

For me, conflicts grow out of the world that the characters find themselves in, rather than the setting being a mere backdrop. Also, because I’m planning on writing epic secondary-world fantasy, an interesting—no, awesome—world is obligatory. For these two reasons I began my exploratory process with worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is a huge topic in itself, which is why I intend to blog about it separately from this follow-along (probably later this summer). However, as Holly makes clear in HtTS, you don’t want to do a shedload up front, because a) it puts off the writing of the story, which is the bit that you get paid for, and b) you probably won’t use most of it anyway. Instead you have to focus on the crucial details that will drive conflict.

Now, different writers are turned on by different aspects of worldbuilding. For Brandon Sanderson, it’s clearly magic systems; for me, it’s culture. Clashes between cultures are a rich source of conflict, and writing in an invented world means you can change the parameters to create cultures that aren’t found in our world. One of the reasons I wanted to switch from writing purely historical fantasy was that I was burned out on the sexism, racism and homophobia of Europe’s past. In particular, I was bored with having to write women whose lives were constrained by their legal and cultural status as second-class citizens. Yes, you can have strong female characters regardless of culture, but I wanted to write about a place where women could follow pretty much any choice of career (without having to disguise themselves as men!). I still want to write male protagonists as well, but I’d like to have more options when casting characters in diverse roles.

In tandem with exploring ideas about culture, I worked on the island city-state that I’ve mentioned in previous weeks as the focus of the setting. I looked at concepts for cities that I’d come across in fantasy fiction I enjoy, such as the world of Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series, where cities are built around the cyclopean ruins of an ancient alien civilisation, and thought about how I could make mine different. Why was this city originally founded? Who founded it? How has it developed over the centuries?

Once I had decided on the city’s origins—it was founded by a group of exiles expelled from the empire, hence the remote location—I started looking at how I could tie this into the character concepts I’d come up with. I knew I wanted to write a roguish maverick hero, so what is the establishment he’s defying? That’s where I’ll find my antagonist and conflict, and probably my theme as well.

Finally, if I’m ever going to get beyond refering to characters as ”the best buddy” or “Bad Guy A’s chief minion”, I need to work out a naming scheme for my imaginary world’s nations. I’m going for a quasi-European feel for much of the Empire, so I spent a while looking at different cultures’ names, both present day and historical. There will be characters from far-flung provinces as well—as with the Romans, my empire likes to move its officials around a lot to break up nationalistic loyalties—but they won’t be in the majority, so I can worldbuild those nations as and when I need them. (As an aside: I enjoy reading books set in other cultures, but Europe is what I know well and find easy to write about. Yes, it’s a comfort zone; bite me!)

Now I can finally start trying out different iterations of The Sentence, varying the details of the conflict and twist to sharpen it into something compelling. I’m still coming to terms with the idea that your initial premise is very much a work-in-progress; my impatient side wants to pin it down so I can get on with planning the book, but I know I’m not ready for that yet. A single conflict is too thin for an epic fantasy, so I need to add layers and subplots, and those in turn may shift the emphasis of the main plot or character arc.

As a result, this is the stage where I keep bouncing back and forth between HtTS Lessons 4, 5 & 8* and also referring to the other resources I mentioned in previous posts, debating with myself how the characters I have so far might interrelate and contribute to the plot and theme. The important thing is that I keep digging and don’t just accept the first idea that pops into my head; I’m constantly on the lookout for clichés, stereotypes and other lazy thinking. I also keep referring back to my original bullet-point list, to ensure that the project is staying on track.

Eventually it all begins to gel and I’m ready to move on to the next stage: planning!

 

* I’m deliberately missing out 6 & 7 because whilst they’re a valuable part of the course, they’re not relevant to my present situation—I’m happy with my current genre and have no interest in self-publishing this series.