Stick this in your pipe and -delete-

While I’m unemployed, I’m writing full time.

I’ve got it down to an actually shift, now. I sit down around three in the afternoon with a fresh coffee and my headphones, switch off the Internet and just write. My aim is at least three thousand words a day. Sometimes it’s easy, and the words hammer across the page like the Road Runner. Other days I crawl along with a line here and a paragraph there, staring at the screen thinking to myself ‘What the bloody hell is the point of this scene?’

When I wrote Queen of the World, I had a break between the first six chapters and the final fourteen. I was on a motorbike travelling south through Vietnam, staying in cheap hotels and getting drunk with strangers in hostels. It wasn’t exactly conducive to writing, so I left the manuscript alone for about two months. During that time I would think about it often. The doubt would sometimes kick in. Was it any good? Was it boring? Was the pace too slow? Were the characters interesting? I didn’t let myself read what I had. I just kept churning ideas over my head, so when the time came to carry on with it I just blurted everything on the page in a mental purge. Three months later and the first draft was complete. I left it alone for about four weeks, until I watched the Game of Thrones series and was inspired to go back and read it all and begin the editing process.

It turned out I quite enjoyed what I had. The pace was steady, but I didn’t feel like it was boring. I enjoyed the exploration of the characters and how they found themselves in the situation they’d been handed. Queen of the World was never going to be an action-packed thriller. The film isn’t going to star Jason Statham. (Yeah, there’s going to be a film. Somewhere around the time I build my towered castle out of Red Bull tins and hire Morgan Freeman to read the newspaper to me in the mornings. IT COULD HAPPEN.)

Now with the sequel I’m working on, I’m having those same doubts. I feel like I just have scenes at the moment, and that they’re not very good. I also feel like I’m flailing around too much in the early scenes and that there isn’t a unified story happening yet. That’s to be expected, since the first draft isn’t meant to be spot on. It’s meant to give the structure you need to make it good. Some may argue this, of course, and more power to you. If you can pull a finished story out on the first draft then I give my complete admiration.

I think the issue here is that I’m a pantser, and I write things as they pop out of the ether.

Quick definition for people who aren’t aware of the term: A pantser is someone who has an idea for a story and then writes it down, mainly from memory. They write by the seat of their pants, hence the term. A plotter is someone who outlines a story in advance; they work out the scenes they need to write and then follows the plan. The latter tends to result in a stronger first draft but can impede the spontaneous development of a story, since the writer already wants to get from point A to B. The former, which is my camp, has a much broader canvas to work with but can sometimes get stuck, left with nowhere to go.

Since I’m working from nothing each time I write, I sometimes end up with an empty thousand words where not much happens. They might begin travelling to a place they need to be, or they might reveal a little about themselves, but it’s just scratchwords. (I call anything which is fun to read but adds no weight to the story a bunch of scratchwords- i.e stuff which can be deleted if I need to trim the word count.) I have scenes in my head, of course. I have quite a few fun things I’m going to include in the current manuscript. I think I have a good book in my head. But if I can’t make it a good book on paper then I might as well just go to people’s houses and tell them what would have happened. At least that way I might get the occasional cup of tea out of it.

Another issue is that this is my first real sequel. With Queen of the World I had the time to let things develop naturally – introduce the characters, the setting, a little here and there about the world’s history. Things unfolded with no real urgency. With this manuscript, though, I’m working with the assumption that the readers at least have some idea what’s going on. They enjoyed the first book and now want more. (Unless the first book sucks, but we’ll talk about that another time.) But I also need the sequel to be a standalone story, which people can read without being confused by what they missed in the first book. I’m struggling with how much back-story to use and how much to leave to the occasional reference. I don’t think I’ve done too badly – there isn’t a prologue, at least, and characters don’t say things like ‘As you know, this is all because blah blah blah...’ – but it’s still new ground to me.

Ugh. Anyway, the edits on Queen of the World have been slightly delayed due to unavoidable publisher workload, but everything is still on schedule. That, added with my employment status, is why I’m writing so much at the moment. And also why I’m basically emptying my brain into this blog. I don’t think this is a great blog post, but I feel a bit better. So thanks. –grins-

And please feel free to comment if you have any ideas of experience with this kind of bewilderment.

You Don't Need Dice: Pt.2

(Read 'Part One' here.)

Eventually I plucked up the courage to join in. I used the best typewriting I had, which mainly consisted of the correct capitalisation and an occasional comma. I made KurtCocaine walk over to one of the tougher looking characters and stare him right in the eye. And it had to be STARE HIM RIGHT IN THE EYE because, like my name, it made me sound cool and rebellious.

This other person, typing somewhere else in the world, wrote a brilliant descriptive paragraph about meeting Kurt’s gaze, giving a wry smirk and then punching him square in the face.

I wish I’d saved that paragraph somewhere because the effect it had on me was profound. To my credit, I typed back a hastily worded response about being punched in the face and falling over. I had enough sense to not try and make out I was all-powerful and untouchable. But I sat there dwelling over that response. This person, who’d never met me before and had no reason to acknowledge my ignorant intrusion on his game, had taken the time to respond to me. And it wasn’t just a ‘go away’ response. It was six or seven lines of good writing, crafted just for me to react to. I eventually sent the person a private message, asking a bunch of questions about the chat room I’d found myself in and thanking them for punching me in the face. The person responded by introducing himself as Frank, laughing about my excitement at being chinned and spent about thirty minutes explaining the general rules of the room. He also directed me to a forum which had been set up to support the game, introducing me to dozens more players.

The best part about the game was that there were very few rules at all. You couldn’t affect people without their permission, you couldn’t take the piss and create a character who was essentially God, and you couldn’t rip people off and imitate them. There was a combat system in place which did have quite a few stringent rules for the turn-based nature of it, but that was all. Anything else went. If you wanted a fire-breathing Jedi who rode a vampiric badger around, you could have one. If you wanted an undead mail-room clerk who occasionally ate a baby, you could have one. My imagination was limited so I initially made a barbarian-type character with a big sword and an even bigger beard. I remember typing the words rippling muscles a lot. I ran up that £300 pound phone bill I mentioned, but nobody ever questioned what I was doing with it.

I played and wrote in this game for about seven years.

Now think about that for a minute. Seven years. I reckon I accessed the rooms for around twenty hours a week from the ages of fourteen to sixteen, at which point I was allowed to bring the computer into my own room. Then my weekly access increased to about fifty hours. And also consider that everything was based in text. Character description. Narration. Dialogue. World building. Structure. The rules, the backgrounds and the accompanying prose. Every single thing about the game was written down and created through a keyboard. The players behind the characters became friends. Close friends. Two of them met up in real life, got married and had kids. I still know a few of the people from those days now, and have met several of them in real life. That was just in England; in America, where the majority of the players lived, people would travel hundreds of miles to meet up for lunch or hang out at each other’s places. I imagine quite a lot of us ‘roleplayed’ with each other for real... We were all teenagers, after all. I had two social lives, and I considered them equally important for a time. Those I went to school, worked and partied with – and those I knew solely through their writing.

It’s important to make a distinction there – this wasn’t a place to ‘escape reality’ or anything like that. I wrote about characters I enjoyed writing about in stories which interested me, but when I spoke to the other players I was still me. I was still Ben (Referred to as English Ben, since there were quite a few Bens involved). I purposely made sure I was truthful about what I was like in real life, so I didn’t make up a fake persona or present myself differently. I simply had to rely on my writing, which improved dramatically over those years.

So when it comes to ‘Read a lot and write a lot’, I used to believe I hadn’t written or read enough to qualify as an author. It held me back in attempting to write Queen of the World. I’d always written, but mainly in short stories or poems and the like. I’d always read, but within the genres I liked. I read fantasy by Gemmel, Eddings and Pratchett. I enjoyed horror by King, Herbert and Barker. I read a bit more here and there, but never ‘broadened my horizons’. I never read Chaucer, Austin or Hemmingway.

But then I realised that I had written and read HUGE amounts of text during those seven years. Maybe none of them were published or critically famous, but they were my age and they were of my level of competence at least. Many were better, especially in the beginning until I found my own style. Between twenty and fifty hours a week of writing for seven years to create worlds and stories with people from all across the world? I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hundreds of thousands of words I put down. We created together, became better writers together and learned from each other’s strengths and faults. We saw what was good and slipped it into our own input. We saw what looked pretty terrible or what jarred us out of our little bubbles of immersion, and we cut it from our posts.

In a nutshell: I learnt to write through applying my imagination to the ideas of others. That sounds like some kind of tagline I want to try and put into quotes, but it is a good for any self-help enthusiasts who need something inspiring. I don’t reckon anyone will look to me to teach them how to write, and my work probably won’t win any awards for technical application of the English language. But I did learn to tell a story. The only difference is that with Queen of the World I told it by myself instead of with others to guide me, but without those brilliant writers who welcomed me into that online world of text – now sadly defunct, since Yahoo decided that everyone who uses internet chatrooms is either a child or a sexual predator and closed all user created content – then I don’t think it would have ever been written.

So to anyone who ever heard of Tenaria: Thanks.

And remember that reading and writing comes from a large number of different places. Don’t limit yourself, and don’t be afraid to try something new.

You Don't Need Dice: Pt.1

Sometimes we take advice too literally.

(I was going to put a ‘literally/literary’ pun in there. -sniggers-).

One of the most regularly repeated tips when it comes to writing is ‘Read a lot and write a lot.’

This is, of course, excellent advice to any writer regardless of experience, background and raw talent. If you don’t read plenty of authors who use a range of different styles then you won’t be exposed to what’s possible. If you don’t read something that takes your breath away then it’s difficult to know when your work could do the same to others; you’ll have nothing to aspire to. Likewise, if you don’t read something that just plain sucks, then how will you understand what to avoid in your own prose?

Same goes for writing. You need the tools to write. You need to practice, just like you need to practice drawing, playing an instrument or kicking a football. You need to write to find out your vocabulary level, your ability to use tenses and the best way to apply grammar. (For the record, I really suck at grammar terms. I know the rules and the application for the most part, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what a Predicative Adjective or a Reciprocal Pronoun is precisely. Let’s just say I won’t be teaching creative writing at Oxford anytime soon.) You need to know if you can get the idea in your head down onto the page without losing any of the spark which got you excited in the first place. You must learn how much dialogue, description and introspection makes the best mix for you. All this comes from writing as much as you can.

But the endless supply of writing advice which is available on the internet and in magazines rarely specifies where you should practice these main two rules. Is it exclusively books? Fiction? How about websites? Do newspapers count? Blogs? Text messages?

How about games?

How about roleplaying games?

Ooh, got ya. See, here’s the bit where at least one person reading will say ‘Oh, Christ. This is where Ben confesses that his book is based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and it’s going to be terrible.’

But it isn’t. Queen of the World is an original idea in a world I created. Some of the character ideas I’ve used through the years have been put through a grinder and find themselves sprinkled amongst the manuscript, though. Bear with me while I tell you a little story.

Years ago, maybe around 1997-ish, my family got its first home computer. It was a gift for me, under the pretence of ‘a good idea for doing schoolwork’ which is probably what every young teenager tells their parents before getting one. However, I wasn’t allowed to have it in my room, so it went into the landing and became the family computer. I shared it with two elder brothers. Mainly we played games on it. Commandos, Championship Manager and Half-Life are the games which stick in my mind. But the main novelty was having access to the internet. This was before the days of having broadband attached to your phone line – remember kids, you’re lucky these days – and we had to use a 56k dial up which made a buzzing sound as it typed in the phone number to connect every time you turned it on. It was also before pre-pay packages, so internet time was limited. There was no Facebook or Twitter. No Reddit or Imgur. Livejournal hadn’t exploded yet, and neither had MySpace. Mainly there was Hotmail, ICQ and chat rooms. One of the biggest ones was Yahoo Chat.

Now Yahoo Chat, like many other chat rooms in those early days of the mainstream internet explosion, gave users the ability to create their own rooms. These could be public or private, and weren’t policed very heavily. Some of the names were pretty grim. In the Teen section – and I was a fourteen year old boy so I qualified – there were a lot of rooms dedicated to sex. Now despite what a lot of my friends reading this will immediately presume, I never went into these sex rooms. Mainly because I was terrified it was somehow traceable, and my parents would get an email from the phone company about how I’d racked up a £300 pound phone bill in HOT TEEN SEX CHAT 16-19s, a room created by b1gd1ckst3ve.

I also wasn’t interested in rooms about Anime / Manga, Premier League Football or Take That. I couldn’t care less about rooms dedicated to people from California, Melbourne or Glasgow (Although when I did visit the Glasgow room one time to see if they typed in their accent, I was confronted with an incredible number of uses of the word ‘Fuck’). But what I was interested in was a few rooms dedicated to roleplaying. I clicked in and had a look, using the entirely roleplay appropriate name of ‘TheRealKurtCocaine’. Yeah, I was a Nirvana fan and I thought the surname pun made me sound cool and rebellious. Nevermind.

What I found was a room of about twenty people roleplaying. When I say that, I mean using an entirely text-based platform to create their game. Roleplaying existed on forums but it was too slow, having to wait for people to come on and post huge reams of description and exposition just to say ‘My character waves and leaves the room’ because they weren’t going to be able to get back online for a week. But in this chat room it was reactive. A group of people were creating a story on the fly depending on the actions of others. There was a loose ‘Type something then wait for others to have their turn’ but it wasn’t rigid. Some wrote several times while others hung back, waiting to contribute when the time was right.

I sat there and watched for about an hour, captivated. I sipped my can of Sprite and didn’t dare ruin it. I’d never taken part in anything like this before so I was worried there would be a huge set of rules I’d have to follow, and trying to join in would get me hounded out of there and banned for life. My brothers had dabbled with roleplaying – we had a couple of D&D books and a Call of Cthulhu game manual in our house, as well as some Warhammer miniature and a big foamy sword for LARPing as evidence – but I’d never taken part personally. Besides, the internet had only been filtering into people’s homes for the last year or two, discounting corporate, enthusiast or government use. This was new. This was for me.

(Read 'Part Two' here.)

Happy New Swear.

This post is going to contain a fair amount of profanity. If that isn't your thing, or you're offended by such words, then you might want to skip this one.

I recently started reading the book Fuck It by John C. Parkin. It's quite good. The humour is a bit hit and miss and the language deviates from the point occasionally, but the message buried within the Fuck-laden prose is positive and serves to reinforce the message; Things aren't quite as important as we make them out to be.

I've not had a great month. I won't go into too many details here because this is supposed to be a blog focusing on writing, but let's just say things haven't really gone my way in December. I've spent a lot of time dwelling on things which seem huge and impossible to get through. I read a quote once which said 'The broader the imagination, the greater the fear'. I'm not saying I'm somehow blessed with a fantastic imagination, but I think people who explore their creative sides do tend to think about things a little more honestly. For better or worse.

So this book essentially says Fuck It. Fuck the problems, fuck the worry and fuck whatever might happen. I can relate to that. I tend to say Fuck It to quite a lot of things in my life. Always have. Worrying about things you can't change doesn't help. If a problem is out of your hands - or even a potential boon - then you might as well just wait for things to unfold by themselves. Saying Fuck It out loud does give a nice little boost.

I thought I'd borrow a very small part of the concept and apply it to writing, since it isn't directly addressed in the book (as far as I know). Writers can be incredibly good at procrastination. We look at the work we need to do and say 'Fuck it, I'll just make a coffee first.' Then we check our emails while we're drinking it. Then we quickly look at an article we've been linked. Then check our local writing forum. Soon we're browsing YouTube or talking to a friend on Facebook. Hours pass. We look at that writing and think 'Fuck it, I'll do the work tomorrow.' Check any writing site for forum posts or articles - it won't be hard to find one asking for advice on how to just get on with the work instead of avoiding it.

So try saying Fuck It. Fuck It, I'll just start. Fuck It, I don't need a coffee. Fuck It, I can look at videos of kittens later. I've done this a few times even before I started reading this book and it does help. I feel that mindset of avoidance sneaking up on me and then I have to force myself to just sit down, open the laptop, load Word and just get typing. As I'm sure many of you will agree, writing is much easier once you've started. Besides, what's the worst that could happen? Even if you manage to write one sentence, it's still one sentence more than you had when you started.

I'm not usually one for self help books or life counselling or all that jazz - I'm a guy from Essex after all, where we often deal with our problems with alcohol and loud music. But the concept Parkin utilises is pretty straightforward. Things aren't really as bad as we think they are as long as we're willing to accept that.

Fuck It.

Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all have a very positive year, full of success and enjoyment and stress-free living. I also hope you're all as excited about this summer's release of Queen of the World as I am. -sniggers-