The Winding Road to Now : Part 2

So there I am, 16 years old, determined that someday I'll be published. Now, some might think I started working on my first book right then and there, but I knew there was no way in hell I had enough writing experience to complete a whole novel. So I started exploring other avenues of writing, in order to practice and acquire more skill.

I started getting involved with another set of forums where people were waiting for a game called Horizons to come out. (Sensing a pattern here?) This was to be an expansive MMORPG with over a dozen races, detailed lore, and a vast world. Because it was a roleplaying game (unlike Starcraft), the writing material on the forums was better in general, and involved characters that people hoped to play in the game someday.

Unlike CWAL, where each story was more or less contained by the author, these forums were play-by-post, which meant that each person wrote one scene, then let others take the wheel. It was an interesting way to write. You had to be true to the voices of characters that weren't yours (which I still have problems with), and make sure you didn't go overboard with your own characters ("OMG my character kills all the bad guys and takes over the world! LOL") Here I developed my skills at creating vivid scenes with a beginning, middle, and end, with tension throughout.

Of course, that game didn't end up being nearly as good as it claimed to be, so I eventually moved on to other hobbies. This is when I started getting involved in Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons is all about character building. To the people only concerned with gameplay, this means developing new abilities and growing more powerful. But there are people like me who focus on the roleplaying aspect, and want to create realistic characters with their own motivations, emotions, and desires. Whereas others would spend hours drawing up stats for their character, I would spend hours writing my character’s background. From D&D, I learned how to make in-depth characters that were sympathetic but not necessarily perfect. After all, everybody rolls a natural 1 sometimes.

Jak, the main character of my novel, was actually born from D&D. I created him as a character, and played him in a campaign run by one of my best friends. He was even more paranoid and separated from the world there than he is in my novel (he had a charisma of 4, for crying out loud), but he had a similar mindset. When I wrote his character background, it ended up being over 40 pages long. Sadly, the campaign never came to a satisfying conclusion, and Jak was left by the wayside. But I’ll get back to that.

Now I was at the point where I wanted to write a novella-length work, as practice for my novel. I ended up choosing the Warcraft world as a base (I like Blizzard games, so sue me.) I ended up writing a novella entitled Passing of the Coronet and posting it on a fanfic forum, to much accolade. It didn’t seem too hard, so I figured now was the time to start my novel.

And that’s when I ran into the problem of setting.

Your average novel takes place on earth, in some city or town that the author is familiar with. Fantasy is different. In fantasy, the story takes place in a completely new world, often with new creatures or races, and always with new rules on how the world works (like magic.) Some authors get around this by writing urban fantasy or transporting a character from our world into this foreign place. But for the most part, when you’re talking about epic fantasies like those written by Tolkien, Jordan, etc., there is an entirely new world for the reader to explore.

Which means the author has to create that world. Up until now, I had been writing stories based off an existing world, so the setting was easy. It already existed. I had to create individual scene locations, but the world itself was concrete. Now, I had to create a world of my own.

I tried again and again to create a new story in a new world, but it was overwhelming. I had trouble creating both at once. I needed a setting to place my characters in, and it had to exist prior to the story taking place.

Once again, I turned to D&D. I began DMing (Dungeon Mastering) my own campaign. D&D campaigns, like books, take place in either new worlds or pre-existing ones. But in D&D, the DM creates the world piece by piece as the players need it. He can focus on the intricacies of the world and build out.

After years of DMing, I had manufactured a detailed world with geography, politics, and a plethora of characters. Now I had something to jump off of. Naturally, I had to tweak the world to make it my own and not something tailored for a pen & pencil game. But it’s easier to tweak than it is to build from scratch. Once I had a satisfactory setting, I just needed a story.

And here’s where we come back to Jak.

He had been abandoned years earlier, and has been gnawing at my gut ever since. His story wasn’t told. I had created him with a part of myself, and that part was screaming to be released. He was my favorite character, the person created by my imagination that I most wanted to know more about.

Now that I had a setting and character, the rest came easily. The plot developed out of a combination of the setting and how Jak would find himself becoming a key player in it. I knew who he would meet, what he would do, and what he would accomplish. 18 months and one wiped hard drive later, I had my story.

I had other lessons to learn still, and revisions to make, but those have been (and will be) detailed on the rest of the site. This was the story of how I became a writer.

I can only hope that this blog will eventually tell the story of how I became an author.