I'm gonna have me some fun.

This has been an odd, sad but enlightening week, so this post will be a little more personal than usual. But there is a saving grace to keep us all on topic with the following question: How much of your own emotional experiences should you put into a fictional story?

Since plenty of people who read this blog know me personally, I’ll keep things short and sweet: This week my fiancée and I broke up. It isn’t fun, but we remain close friends.

One thing that made me laugh, though, was remembering which scene I have to write next in the follow-up to Queen of the World. Ethanei, an incredibly drunk vagrant, has recently found his estranged wife in bed with another man. The start of the chapter cuts to him lying sprawled over a table spilling his emotional guts between sobs and curses to one of the series’ main character, Kanderil, who listens with a patient unease. He’s heartbroken, resentful and has given up trying to keep a lid on things, preferring instead to drown out his thoughts with alcohol. The guy’s self-destruction is in full-swing.

I can say with absolutely sincerity that this is a coincidence. The scene was the next in line and is not being written as result of my newly-found single status. There are plenty of written notes and around four preceding chapters to support my claim. Also the scene I described isn’t what I’ve been doing personally. There’s been a lot of beer involved but I haven’t quite reached the stage poor Ethanei has. However there are certain similarities between his current scene and mine. I reckon I could lay out a lot of my feelings – that is, the way I’m thinking and the things I want to say right now – through Ethanei’s actions and words, slipping them between the alcohol-fuelled excess and limb flailing. Being a fictional fantasy story I could get away with it too, most likely. In fantasy? Pfft. People expect angry men to fuckin’ RAGE, violent men to murder innocents on a nightly basis, and heartbroken men to start a quest or adventure or something equally redemptive. (They should at the very least write some poetry or sit in a bar staring at the same tepid ale for hours.) It wouldn’t be too hard to be metaphorical about the literal.

But I don’t want to pour too much out on the page. I want to focus and direct my personal experience into the dialogue, to give them a little realism and direction. But the rant Ethanei is going to give must be directed as his ex-wife, Claira. The words shouldn’t be directed at my ex-fiancée. So there’s the trick. It’s a fine line because I’ve already shared this joke with her and she found it kind of funny as well, but it also means she’ll be acutely aware of the scene when she reads it. I don’t want to offend her or come across as an idiot.

The adage ‘write what you know’, which I touched on a few posts back, is mightily applicable here. Other events in my life have been introduced to scenes and characters. Little sayings. Mannerisms. Almost all of them are so far in the background, or so layered underneath good ol’ fashioned fictional nonsense, that I don’t think even my closest friends of family could point out a line when Queen of the World launches and say ‘Oh man, this is so based on that time you...’ But my personal belief is that my experiences should add texture and a touch of reality to my fictional work. It shouldn’t dominate or make my created world semi-autobiographical. I need to save my real life stories for when I’m stinking rich and famous and am encouraged to pen my memoirs, after all.

Anyway, we’re getting to around two and a half months before the book should be released. Things are a little behind schedule – well, actually more than a little – but I retain my immense faith in Sara and Inspired Quill to get us back on course and keep things ticking over. I like to think I’ve had quite a lot of stuff going on this year, but it’s nothing compared to the amount of work and various other projects my editor has planned. I do my best not to stress her out with my occasional panic about things. Pretty sure it’s working so far.

As for now, I’ll be in Norway for another couple of weeks and then shipping off back to Essex for the foreseeable future. That’s going to be a barrel of fun. At the very least I will be doing much more writing in my old bedroom, which is the plan for now – type like a machine until I find a job to get things ticking over again. Good thing we’re heading into springtime. I haven’t spent a summer in England for about four years. Pub gardens, suspect barbecues and music festivals. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

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.