Hello. Today I am here to write about starting things. Beginning a new project is always exciting-- ideas popping up like daisies, the thrill of unpredictable twists and turns of the narrative, characters dumping their entire life's story on you at the most inopportune moments...
A couple years ago, I found out that a two others in my graduate cohort write, so I pestered them and we decided to form a writer's group. We agreed to trade chapters and give feedback each week, offer support and encouragement, and get excited about the worlds each of us was building. I showed up to our first meeting at a little coffee shop across from school with a few comic pages and a notebook of half-baked ideas for a project called Kingdom Animalia. It was a mess of too many different genres mashed together and characters ripped from unfinished high school stories with loose or nonexistent motivations. Anyways, long story short, I loved it, but I wanted it to be more coherent and knew I could do better. Over the course of the next eight weeks, I drafted half a novel and managed to keep up with my graduate work. I still don't know how that happened, but I am super jealous of past Megan's motivation (I couldn't keep it up past that when everything got topsy turvy, but for a while there, it was great).
And... The story wasn't bad. I went back and reread it this morning and it's a heck of a lot of fun. I can't believe I wrote some of the off the wall things I did while managing to keep it coherent and interesting. The only problem was, I knew it wasn't the beginning of the story.
Beginnings are tough. It seems like everything hinges on them. If you don't hook a reader in the first few chapters, you'll likely lose them.
I wanted to start from the start instead of incorporating a bunch of flashback nonsense, so, I took the story back to its roots from 2009. Suddenly IT ALL MADE SENSE.
I brought back Cobalt the Wicked, a horrible dragon who reveled in bloodshed, and I tied in the fact that one of the main characters, Seth, could shapeshift into a raven and had a raven friend named Roc. I brought back a lot of the medieval fantasy elements that I'd loved so much before. And then all the new stuff that stemmed from it became even more exciting. I added a character who completely hijacked the story and became the beating heart for the entire thing. I wrote a heck of a lot of the beginning of Ravenheart.
And it sucked.
Okay, it didn't suck. The writing wasn't BAD, but it was a total shift in tone from what I'd been happy with in Kingdom Animalia. What started out a comedy with witty dialogue became a tragedy with sadness. And the plot became more involved than I'd bargained for. I'd never written a super involved, well thought-out plot before, so I had no idea how to go about setting it up and pacing it in a way that wouldn't lose a reader and leave them in the dark. I let random internet people read it, and I probably shouldn't have because I wasn't at a good point to share it and I just ended up getting frustrated with my inability to communicate everything I was trying to communicate. Which was a lot.
Creating the beginning of a story when you know exactly where it's going is a difficult task. You want to word vomit everything in page one. You want all your clever, carefully woven threads to be shown off immediately. But you also know this is a bad idea. You KNOW what it's supposed to be, yet it falls flat in the first few drafts. It confuses alpha readers. It grossly falls short of your own expectations. BUT it gives you something to work with.
Because I've written out all of these scenes, I can rearrange them. I can cut them up. I can add new information and space out important points. I've been working on recapturing the more lighthearted tone of Kingdom Animalia, despite the heavier subject matter. I've expanded from two POV's to four-- two adult, one kid, and one raven. This seems to have balanced it out and doesn't limit the scope of the story like the previous version, which was told mostly through the eyes of the twelve-year-old boy. And I can carry that format into book two, which opens up with my favorite scene I've ever written ever, which happens to be from the POV of the twelve-year-old's half-crazy father.
Slowly, slowly, I'm carving this story out.
Writing is a process, and I've heard it gets quicker with every book you finish. I'm hoping that eventually I can start turning out a book a year as opposed to one every three years. Beginning a series is the worst. But it's exciting.
