Hello!

News:

This week has been all scene-sequel and resolutions. (That and a minor nuke dropped on my Tuesday productivity in the form of beginning nighttime potty training. Don’t put that off too long or it’ll bite you hard, but also try to start it sometime when being comatose the following day won’t ruin your life.) The outline is not quite finished (and believe me, that’s even more frustrating for me than it is for you), but significant progress has been made. Hopefully I can finish fixing it in the next few workdays. It takes a lot of work to fix the places where your manuscript lacks conflict or makes things too easy for your characters, but fixing those issues does a lot to make the story better. Sometimes you even have to kill your darlings. There’s one character I kind of wanted to live but it just makes so much more sense for them to die. Sad. I’ll miss you, figment of my own imagination. 

Something nice about taking the time to think about issues with your books is that while you’re doing that, you can have ideas for other things that need to be fixed with it that you hadn’t even been considering, or ways in which the worldbuilding is broken and should be fixed for a more believable, immersive experience. I even remembered to add an entire scene that I’d been planning on but which I’d forgotten to put into the original outline! It’s kind of crazy sometimes just how long I’ve been thinking about this one book. Hopefully I can learn to spot these kinds of issues and fix them without it taking nearly so many years on future books.

So…my new goal is to finish the FrostFire Outline by the end of next Tuesday, and once I can start drafting, my goal is to draft 2000 words per day!  I’ll keep you posted on whether I manage to achieve those goals. I still want to finish drafting my Frostfire Revision by the end of August at least, since it looks like I probably won’t finish in July. 

For Gondor!!!

Writing Advice:

Things shouldn’t be too easy for your characters. Life is hard, and if you want your book to be exciting, engaging, or even mildly interesting, it should be even harder for your protagonists and viewpoint characters. Easily getting what you want is BORING. If your characters can solve their problems with minimal effort, they need bigger problems to deal with. Having your characters try and fail to defeat a problem can show your audience that this problem is challenging, and the audience will feel like the character actually has to work for their victory. Standard advice says that no problem is seriously difficult unless the character has to try at least three times to defeat it. That seems to gel with my experience as a reader/writer.

I know that at times we can feel protective of our characters and don’t want to hurt them, but remember it’s for the good of the story. The heroes I love best are the ones who’ve had to go through the hardest challenges. Give your hero the gift of a challenge that will bring them to the brink of utter misery and eternal despair and you’ll give them the chance to become truly great. Nobody remembers the person whose greatest challenge was learning to butter their bread, but everyone remembers Frodo, Kaladin, and Batman.