Since I last posted, I've done absolutely nada on Manuscript 3 (the sapphic dystopian romance I was hoping to do for NaNoWriMo), and maybe that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because didn't I say that NaNo wouldn't happen for me?
Anyway, I chalk it all up to grad school. I've spent the past week frantically cobbling together the first draft of my capstone paper and now tonight, I'm driving out to Rowan to do a writing workshop with my cohort. I would literally kill to do a writing workshop for Manuscript 3, but alas, I'm now going to die of boredom editing The Thing I Didn't Want to Write, But Have to For a Diploma. In the words of the late great Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five, "so it goes."
But in the meantime, today is November 14th, a day I've alternately yearned for and dreaded, because today is the day I can officially touch Manuscript 1, Draft 4, and hopefully get that bad boy ready for the alpha readers and, ultimately, a January/February round of queries.
At some point, probably next week, I'm going to write about how to make the most of your editing and revising journey, but I want to get a bit further into line edits first. For now, though, I want to talk about worldbuilding, which is a fantasy/sci-fi essential, and yet one that is so hard to do.
I have a friend, beloved beta reader of a few chapters, someone I love bouncing ideas off of, who's writing this brilliant fantasy based on clockwork and set in a Middle Eastern-based world. She's always talking about worldbuilding and expanding her story to where it feels truly immersive, doing crazy amounts of research, and I love that. I have no doubt that when her story is fully written, edited, and ready for submission, it's going to be a world so real you can step into it.
But her strategy is different from mine, and the first few times we started mapping our stories together, I would come away feeling bad about myself. Why didn't I have such detailed backstories? Why weren't my magic systems and fighting styles mapped out on paper? Why did I have no clue where the hell my characters even were, geographically OR physically?
We both spent years perfecting our ideas, and yet her world always felt much more fleshed out than mine. But it's finally now, coming to the end of my drafting/revision phase and entering my line editor/continuity phase, that I realize: my friend and I come from different writing backgrounds. We approach our craft differently. And neither one of our strategies is more valid than the other.
And so I will introduce the Planner and the Editor (different from the Planner and the Pantser--that, my friend, is a plotting thing, and I will get to that in another blog).
My friend has been involved in Dungeons and Dragons for years. She's been a DM, she's done one-shots...the whole shebang. And she's told me on numerous occasions that she plans and writes her work from a D&D lens, which means that while some things are on the fly (character interactions in between plot points), most things are totally planned (the rules of magic governing fight scenes, the general world, etc). My friend is a Planner.
Although she often revises plans for her world, she doesn't go too far forward without a plan. That is to say, most of the planning happens before the writing stage, not during it. While course corrections can happen along the way, they're relatively minimal.
The pros to this approach? Pretty obvious.
Minimal continuity errors/extraneous elements
Less of a risk of a deus ex machina at the end
A more confident, certain attitude to writing (so fewer stops and starts!) = quicker manuscript writing when you're ready
A fully fleshed out world that feels so real, you can touch it
Lots of input from others!
But the cons?
A looooong planning phase
More attention paid to worldbuilding than to character arcs/interactions
Lots of input from others...
There are probably more that I'm not thinking of, as this isn't my approach. But I think it's valid and wonderful. Because my friend stays in the planning phase, she's able to thoroughly research and bounce ideas off of her friends, which stops potentially bad ideas pretty early and catches some of those awkward worldbuilding holes that no one really talks about, but are kinda problematic when you think about it.
I tried to do this early on, because writing advice on the Internet told me that planning out your whole world is the way to go. I read all the Celtic mythology. I studied up on my gods. I crafted a single island, Tech Duinn, the home of the dead and Ais's family, with so much detail that it probably bordered on dull. I researched every rock and tree...and then I told my readers all about it!
Aaaaand I got so mired in detail that I forgot the most important part: having a plot.
As I've mentioned before, this is the main thing that left my manuscript floundering for 3 or 4 years. It was still floundering when I picked it up later and got another 3 chapters down, but still nothing you would describe as a "plot."
And then I decided to forget all of the advice. I loved Celtic mythology too much. I was becoming lost. I would take what I learned and just keep one or two things. The rest? We could shelve those. I kept the geography. I kept sidhes, the underground homes of the fae. I kept the bile trees, sacred groves imbued with power. I kept Aiselde's powers (sorta). But that was it.
Suddenly, unburdened by rules and regulations, I told Ais's story as a person. Her character arc became more apparent, while her world became background scenery.
Now, this is not to say I told Ais's arc particularly well, because I didn't, and I would argue that no one comes out with a fully fleshed story on Draft 1. But I got it together enough that, suddenly, these were words on the page that I could work with. Now came the tricky part: adding the world back in.
Because while there are many pros to being an Editor...
Quicker writing vs planning phase
More focus on your characters as people
Less of a fear of info-dumping
Relationship-driven narrative (plus better dialogue)
Minimal input from others
There are many, many cons:
Tons of extraneous elements, particularly in early chapters
Continuity errors abound
Confusing/conflicting worldbuilding
Minimal input from others
And I can say this firsthand, because I experienced every single one of those cons and more that just aren't springing to mind right now. The biggest issue I had was that the worldbuilding in my first half and second half almost felt like they belonged in different books and that's because, while I am 100% an Intuitive Planner while writing my plots, I am also an I'll Deal With it Later with worldbuilding. I was changing things on the fly, and it showed.
Another issue is that minimal input from others can be great! Fewer voices to muddy up your thoughts means that you can write the story you want to write. However, it also means having lots of elements that no one has told you make no sense outside of your mind. A consequence of this is that I held onto really bad parts of my worldbuilding, tying them into every part of my story, even though they clearly didn't work, because I had no one to tell me that it was a stupid idea.
Still, I wouldn't change my approach, because I'm learning and discovering even while editing. I have this brilliant book of Irish trees in folklore and mythology, and I'm going through it to definitely pin down my plants and trees, now that I know which role they'll play in my story. The roles won't change, but those small textual details will. And now that I know they'll be a small role, there won't be pages of description to slog through.
If I'm feeling bold enough and sad enough, remind me to tell you about the godawful marsh andromeda scene from an early draft...five pages of describing fruits and plants. It was, in a word, tragic.
Or maybe it was just a symptom of trying to write in a way that didn't work for me. The world may never know, but I can tell you one thing: it's not seeing the light of day.
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