How I Became a Writer

[revena]

Inspired by the recent spate of “this is one good way to write a novel” posts I’ve been seeing all over the internets (seeksadventure has a very nice roundup of them here), and particularly the one that I helped kphoebe put together about our experience writing our first novel together (notice how I said first there? That’s because we’re three chapters into one of the sequels. Yeah), I thought it would be interesting (to me, at least, and perhaps to others!) and possibly even helpful to do a little “how I wrote my first novel” post of my own.

I’m finding it a little difficult to begin, though, because the process that eventually became my first novel was really convoluted. So what you’ll find under the cut is a little advice to people who want to write a first novel (some of which might be useful generally even to people who’ve already done that, or who have no interest in writing novels), and a lot of personal history that probably won’t help anyone but me, but may be entertaining anyway.

It turns out that this isn’t a post about how to write a novel. It’s a post about how I became a writer.

Like many people who write, I’ve been telling stories for a long time. I used to love those creative homework assignments in elementary and middle school where you could pretend to be an ancient Egyptian princess or whatever, and write about it like a story, instead of doing an essay (later, I learned to love essays in their own right, but that wasn’t until college). I also loved imagination games, which are basically stories told while dressing up in fun costumes – what could be better than that?

I didn’t really do much recreational writing as a kid, though. My friend Megan and I decided we were going to write a fantasy novel when we were ten (or maybe nine, or eleven), and got about five (very short) chapters into a horrible monstrosity that involved ancient magical rings and prophecies written in rhyming couplets, and featured characters named things like Odorf and Oblib. There were kind-hearted drow in it, too. I think maybe I was reading too much Tolkien and Forgotten Realms stuff for my own good, maybe.

Anyway! What I mostly did for my storytelling outlet as I grew a little bit too old for dress-up imagination games, was play RPGs. I started with Dungeons & Dragons, learning to play from my cousin and older brother, and then when I was about twelve, I learned to MUD.

Now, for those of you who’ve never played a MUD, there are two basic ways to roleplay on one (presuming that that’s what you’re interested in, rather than, say, playerkilling). You can do real-time RP, which involves taking on the persona of your character in public and private chat channels within the game, and interacting with other characters who are also online at that particular moment, or you can write notes. On the game I played longest (and still dip into, periodically), Magrathea, note-writing RP was pretty standard. You’d come up with a very short story about your character – often some kind of triumph over other characters in the game – type it up, and post it within the game so that others could read it.

When other people weren’t being very entertaining or accommodating, if you wanted to do a little note-writing RP all on your own, you could always write up a little bit of your character’s backstory. Since I wasn’t very good at playerkilling, and rarely got involved in the various clanwars on Magrathea, I spent more time writing backstory stuff for various characters than anything else (and if anyone wants to see some of it, I might be able to dig some up – it’s hilariously bad, if my memory serves me). I guess I kinda got hooked on it.

So, what the hell does any of this have to do with writing novels? Patience, dear reader… I begin, at long last, to approach the point.

A few years ago, my brother and several of our mutual friends decided to put together an old-fashioned tabletop D&D game. We gamed together through one Second Edition campaign (mercifully brief), and then decided to convert to Third Edition, since all the new books were so very shiny. I created a PC that I really liked for that campaign – Tourmaline – and was always a little disappointed that I didn’t get to explore the aspects of her story that I was most interested in, in-game.

When we decided to upgrade to 3.5, and start a new campaign, I was a little burned out on being a player. I was the only woman in the gaming group, and I often felt that I was the only one willing to make compromises, which seemed to mean that I was the only one who never got her way. Naturally, I volunteered to be Dungeon Master for the upcoming campaign. POWER, MUAHAHAHA.

Of course, as those of you who’ve ever been DM will know, Dungeon Mastering comes with its own set of compromises and Sacrifices for the Good of the Game. One of these is that, quite frequently, you can spend a long time as a DM creating and fleshing out some really interesting NPCs, only to have the players decide that they totally hate them / are completely uninterested in them / would rather tie them up and torture them for information than have a decent conversation, etc.

That’s kind’ve what happened with Valmai, Emlyn, and Wynn. Not exactly - what actually happened was that I created the three characters very quickly and with almost no personality or history, fully expecting them to get killed, and then they miraculously survived their encounter with the PCs. Jameson was visiting me that weekend (this was before he moved out here), and had helped out with the game, and we talked about it afterwards, and that was when the NPCs started to get personalities.

I liked them. I used them again.

That was when the players started hating them.

For some reason, it seemed to me that the absolute height of hilarity would be to keep forcing the PCs to interact with these characters they had taken a profound dislike to. So I did. And at one point, one of those interactions did not make a lot of sense.

The PCs were traversing the desert, and were suddenly attacked by some monsters led by a meant-to-be-recurring villain. I had set the encounter up so that it would be more challenging than usual, and I was a little worried that I was going to accidentally kill off some of the PCs. So I had a contingency plan. If they were getting overwhelmed, their hired camel-drover would run off towards the nearest oasis and return with reinforcements.

The reinforcements would be Emlyn Tamesis, half-breed bastard son of the Valerian aristocracy, successful merchant, and all-around pain in the ass, and his bodyguards, Valmai Hammerhand and Wynn Swiftknuckle. Because if anyone was going to rescue the PCs, it should be the NPCs they loathed the most, right? Right!

Now, I had already laid some ground for why those three characters would be in the desert, and how they could be in the right place at the right time. My players were not at all surprised to see them when they came riding to the rescue. When the villain, who made a threatening speech before escaping to return another day, mentioned Emlyn’s name, though, I knew I had some explaining to do.

Oops. How had that slipped out? The villain was supposed to know who the PCs were, but he’d have no reason to know Emlyn.

Or would he? My old habit of writing backstory notes for characters on Magrathea prompted me to come up with some rationalization. Perhaps Emlyn and the villain had met before! Perhaps they had an old rivalry unrelated to what was going on between the villain and the NPCs!

Well, it was the sort of information that was never going to make it into the game. It bugged me that I’d put words into a character’s mouth that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but my players couldn’t have cared less.

But I couldn’t let go of the idea I’d had that would explain my slip, so I wrote it out in super-short-story (and terribly formatted) form, titled it “Veils” (which, in addition to being a terrible story, isn’t even an accurate reflection of the worldbuilding in the VVerse, anymore. Oops) and posted it on my blog. I wrote it from the perspective of one of Emlyn’s bodyguards, Valmai, for no particular reason. At the time, I had a vague idea that I might write some more tiny little stories from the perspectives of other NPCs, as the mood took me.

And then, the next morning as I took a shower, Valmai Hammerhand rose up out of my subconscious and took firm grasp of my brain.

“When you spend every waking moment watching someone else’s back,” she whispered in my ear, “you learn to like the shape of it.”

And then I was lost. Suddenly, I knew all of these things about Valmai that I hadn’t realized before – she had been the fourth living daughter of a miller in a tiny village in the far north, and had left home as a teenager, seeking adventure. She sent money home to her parents, but never any letters, so they wouldn’t be able to get in contact with her. She didn’t think of herself as very smart, but she liked to read poetry.

She was in love with her employer.

Huh, I thought. That’s interesting. And then I sat down and wrote another short story (a much longer one) called “The Shape of Him” and, again, posted it on my blog.

The next story, “Watching”, came about a week later. It, too, went online. And then I wrote another, and another, and another.

Some of them came out of nowhere except my imagination. Others were responses to things that had happened in the D&D games. Sometimes, I had the plot for one all ready to go, and then I’d run a game on Sunday and realize that I needed to change something in order to make the story fit into the gameworld. In a lot of ways, this was very frustrating, and sometimes it resulted in really stupid plot choices. But it did provide a handy and never-ending stream of challenges and little goads to get the plot going again if it started to stumble. So I kept writing.

These were not very good stories. They were intended to stand alone, but none of them really introduce the characters or situation well enough – really, they’re vignettes, and poorly written ones, at that. But I had two things going for me – characters that I myself was fascinated by (and which apparently fascinated other people), and feedback. Because I was posting the stories to my blog, and writing them pretty quickly, and telling friends (and my players) about them, I soon had an audience.

And the audience wanted to know what was going to happen next.

I’m not sure if I would have written enough Valmai stories to realize that they were actually serial pieces of a novel, and not stand-alone stories at all, without that audience. I probably wouldn’t have finished the first book, once I knew what the ending was, except that I wanted to share it with my readers. By that time, I was deeply infatuated with the characters, and I would have drawn the process out for way too long, trying to make the ending “perfect.” But I did have readers, who would have been annoyed if I had asked them to wait while I attained perfection, and so I kept writing steadily, and I did finish.

It took me just over a year, and what I wrote was a hugely flawed, highly derivative novel with some not-insignificant plot problems, and no beginning to speak of.

But it was a novel. And now that I’ve done it once, I know I can do it again (in fact, I’ve done it. After the first Valmai novel, I started writing a sequel. I also polished up a novella about Tourmaline [that I wrote the bulk of the November after I started Valmai I] which, while not great, has some good bits in it. And then I jumped into a whole new world and co-wrote Seen and Spoken with Karen, and I think it’s the best yet – which means that the next one ought to be even better, right?). And when I get a little time, I’m pretty confident that I can go back and salvage Valmai I, or at least parts of it (I’ll probably give it a proper title, at that point!). The characters really are great, and parts of the story are pretty wonderful, too.

So that’s how I wrote my first novel, and how I became a writer (and I definitely think of myself that way, now, though I still have yet to sell anything!). And this is the advice I’d give to others who want to write a first novel, and are afraid to start, or afraid they won’t finish:

1. Start with a character.

If you’re an RPG geek like me, an old roleplaying character is a fine place to start. Chances are good that he or she will be a big Mary-Sue, but this is your first novel, so who cares?

The important thing is that the character has to be someone you’re interested in enough to write a novel about. Once you’ve got one character, chances are good that s/he will suggest some others to you – your character needs some friends and enemies, so find out who they are!

Hopefully, your character will also help you do a little worldbuilding. If he’s a bounty hunter who carries a gun, then you’re going to be writing about a world where guns are used, and bounty hunters exist. Take it from there, and see what else you can find out as you go along. If she’s a courtesan who solves murder mysteries with the help of her immense social network and a little magic, then that should tell you something about the world she lives in, too (where did that just come from? Man, I wish I had time to introduce myself to new characters right now… But I’d better finish writing this, first!).

If you aren’t the sort of person who ever starts with a character, I suspect that you could start with a plot, or even start with a setting. I don’t think that way, but I bet it’d work about as well for someone who does.

2. Start writing.

Don’t freak out about writing the perfect opening sentence, or whether to start at the beginning or in media res or whatever. Just go. Open up an empty Word file, or pick up a blank notebook, and just start.

Then keep going.

3. Show someone.

You might want to dispense with this for later works, once you’ve proven to yourself that you can finish something, and you’ve had a lot more practice writing (because, dude, by the time you’ve finished writing a novel-length work? You will have had some practice). But for your first novel, my advice is that you have at least one first-draft reader who will give you encouragement and only the very gentlest of critiques.

You don’t want an editor, yet. You haven’t finished the story, much less a clean second draft! What you want is a cheerleader, a supporter, someone who will eagerly ask you when the next part is going to be ready, because they want to know what will happen as much as you do.

The point of “show someone” isn’t to learn to be a better writer, or to find out where the holes in your plot are (and they will probably be many, and large – relax!). It’s to get encouragement to keep going, and to finish the first draft, so that you’ll have something to work with when you’re ready to go back and fix things. Or so that, at the very least, you’ll have had the experience of completing a novel when you’re ready to go on and write your second, much better work.

You might find that you actually work better if you edit as you’re writing, or if you do a chapter, then edit, then write the next chapter, or any number of other arrangements. Whatever works for you is good! But if you have a hard time finishing stuff, give the “show someone” approach a try.

If you feel too self-conscious to ask someone you actually know to read your stuff, try the internets. A public blog (I posted Valmai I bit by bit up on my blogger account) worked for me. Now, that means that I may have some issues with that story if I ever get it to a point where I’m approaching publishers with it – because pretty much the whole thing has been up on the internet for pretty much anyone to read it, I may have some problems with first publication rights. But, y’know, how many people ever publish their first novel, anyway? I must confess that I don’t feel as though I foolishly gave anything valuable away! The experience was very worth it, even if I’m never able to make a dime off Valmai.

But for people who are more prudent than I am, look into the possibilities of password protected writing groups, or friendslocked lj communities, or small listservs, or other things like that.

4. Above all, give yourself permission to suck.

Don’t put too much pressure on the first novel, ok? Write it because you want to, because the characters are cool and you want to see where they go, and because you’re having fun, and because you’re stubborn enough to keep going for those little chunks of time when it won’t be fun. Recognize that you will someday look back on it, count your adverbs, and be horrified. Be ok with that.

When I teach someone to knit or crochet, I always recommend that they buy some cheap yarn in a color they’re not too enthusiastic about, finish one entire scarf out of it, and get rid of it before they try to make a project as a gift for a loved one or a personal accessory. People mostly ignore this advice, and buy some expensive, lovely yarn, and then spend months doing the first ten rows of a scarf and pulling them out again because they’re not straight.

The thing is, sometimes you have to just put your head down and finish a project that you know is shaky at the beginning so that you’ll gain the skills you need to do it right the next time. If you start a million ten-row scarves, your stitches might still be crooked, because you’ll never have given yourself enough time on one project to figure out just how to hold the yarn and the needles. If you start a scarf, accept the crooked, and keep experimenting with yarn tension and hand positions until the thing is done, you’ll probably be ready to knit something that’s straight and even, next time around.

The ending of Valmai I is way, waaay better than the beginning. The beginning of Valmai II is better yet. When I get around to finishing Valmai II, I expect that the ending will have so much technical improvement that it’ll seem like two different writers had a hand in the book (fantastic incentive to go back and revise the first part!). This is a good thing. I am learning as I go, which is far better than never learning, and never going.

One of these days, I’m going to have some finished, polished things that are good enough to impress potential agents and publishers (I’m already quite optimistic about several of my current projects). But if not for my horrible first novel, I wouldn’t have learned any of the skills I’m now improving.

I’m really glad I wrote it. Really, really glad.

If you haven’t written a first novel yet, you should give it a try.

And if you’ve got any questions after reading this post, or want to know more about anything I talked about, just let me know.