Writer Series: Initial Research

My idea for The Legend of Valtera came to me on Christmas day 2013. It came out of nowhere, didn’t make much sense, but I felt it was something that I had to do. It started with pretty much a vague one sentence idea: something happens and a young woman is forced to go on a quest for something like the sorcerer’s stone. Not much, but it was enough of a creative spark to get the fire burning.

Bored and not too happy with the selection of books out there, I basically decided to write something that I, myself, would want to read. When I decided that I was going to move forward with this project, I began researching the competition. I didn’t have a specific genre in mind, so I looked into books that I had read and enjoyed. I spent a lot of time on Amazon, reading the 1 and 2 star reviews of these books to see what the most common problems were. The things that most people didn’t like were centered around the characters: unlikeable, perfect Mary-sue, love triangles and one dimensionality. In terms of story and plot, the biggest problems were predictability, lack of character development, plot holes, pacing and decisions or story lines not making sense.

Moving forward, I tried to keep all of those things in mind when crafting my story and characters. I thought that it was better to understand these concerns at the beginning so that major rewrites were necessary. But I felt like I had a good understanding of what my potential readers were looking for and how my writing would be received before I had any of the story down on paper.