I don’t know about anyone else, but I blinked and January disappeared. O.O I’d intended to get this last part of my NaNo blog series up weeks ago and, well, obviously it didn’t happen.

Anyway, welcome. 🙂 I’m covering story evolution today.

For me, story evolution is an organic, yet still logical process. Be it plot advancement or character development, it’s little chunks of building material stacking up in a pattern. Usually, that pattern doesn’t fully reveal itself until the end.

That’s the thing about fiction—at the end of the day, it has to make sense. Real life is full of strange occurrences that never get explained and loose ends that never get tied up, but a good story has to resolve things…at least mostly. You might have an end or two poke out to make readers contemplate things long after they’ve finished the book, but you can’t permanently leave them hanging. In my experience, it leads to ranting, raving, and marching up and down the room waving my hands in the air. (Needless to say, I was a very interesting person with whom to watch Lost. And I still say a parallel universe would have made more sense at the end.)

Forming that pattern is the challenging part. It requires knowing the starting point and knowing the endpoint…or at least having a fairly good idea of what the end is supposed to be. Often times it also involves a few clear pictures of scenes that have to be worked in at some point.

When I had the initial idea for TOSOTH, I had a handful of scenes envisioning a modern science fiction world with a nautical Firefly-esque old-fashioned flare. I started writing the story with that paradigm in mind. In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to the subtle shift that took place when I wrote the second chapter. That would have clued me in as to what was coming down the pike.

As it was, those first few chapters poured out so quickly that I didn’t think much of it. But then, gradually I realized that the technology I was thinking of didn’t work in this world…or at least the world to which my main character belongs. Bit by bit, as I wrote down the scenes forming in my head, I realized that this world had taken on a decided vintage Victorian look and feel.

Yep. That’s right. Never mind the fact that it doesn’t even take place on Earth, TOSOTH decided it was steampunk.

Complete with aliens, no less.

I don’t even know what genre that falls under.

So…yeah. I really should have seen that coming. My second epiphany, however, is a great example of how a story can grow in a different direction and catch you by surprise.

Up until I wrote the scene after the one where my main character actually makes it to the Other Side of the horizon, I thought I knew how TOSOTH was going to play out from there until the end. It was going to be a harrowing adventure and it’d be fun. And then I wrote that scene and felt like I’d opened a door expecting a closet and instead found myself standing on a plateau looking out at a panoramic view of another world. At that moment, I realized the scope of this story is so much bigger than I’d imagined.

The point of TOSOTH is not necessarily why people can’t cross the Wild Sea without disappearing, it’s what happens to them after they disappear. That’s where the story exploded. Organic story evolution at its finest.

To be honest, it’s a good thing I was near the end of my 50,000 words when I hit that point. I’d love to say I was able to roll with it and keep going, but I only managed to squeeze out the last few thousand words I needed to finish NaNoWriMo before I stalled. I hadn’t planned for anything in this new twist and I didn’t have the faintest idea how any of it would play out. It required a completely new chunk of worldbuilding and I needed time to think about it before I could actually write something that would advance the story.

So, instead of powering through the next stretch of the book in December like I’d planned, writing in between visiting family and the holidays, I scratched out page after page of notes to pin down exactly what TOSOTH’s new paradigm looks like and how it works. I wrote another few thousands words advancing TOSOTH, and worked on editing Portal Woes, but did not accomplish anything anywhere near November’s 50,000 words.

Needless to say, that was quite frustrating. Here I was, fresh off of finishing NaNoWriMo and breaking barriers in my work that were holding me back, and I couldn’t use any of it yet. The rest of TOSOTH’s foundation had to first be relaid.

That’s the downside to organic story evolution. You have to be willing to throw out—or at least set aside—wherever you thought you were going before the story took an unexpected detour. And as far as sci-fi or fantasy are concerned, that can also involve entire sections of worldbuilding you hadn’t anticipated having to do.

Since December 1, TOSOTH’s cast has increased by at least fifteen characters, I created an aquatic alien species, invented an entire city with very specific spatial requirements (I would love to actually be able to visit this place), and I have several plot threads involving corruption, oppression, and conspiracies to weave together. As of Thursday, my rough draft is almost 70,000 words. I figure the finished manuscript will be somewhere in the 100,000-120,000 word range.

I’m hoping to have the rough draft completed by the end of March.

Ambitious? Yes. Can I do it? Of course—NaNo taught me that. Will I accomplish it? Well, by the grace of God, yes.

Completing NaNoWriMo was the first challenge. Taking what I learned there and applying it to my writing the other eleven months of the year while balancing editing prior projects is the next challenge.

As I’ve mentioned, I am a reformed seat-of-my-pants writer. I love those sudden bursts of inspiration where I sit down and write multiple pages of something in a white-heat, but those bursts tend to work best for short stories, initial novel ideas, and scenes in an existing novel structure. I’ve learned the hard way that a lassiez-faire burst approach doesn’t work well for me when it comes to writing entire novels. The story ends up taking a meandering route that Billy from Family Circus would appreciate and it’s a nightmare to edit. Hence my increased use of outlining, plot structure, and writing consistently Monday through Friday.

Plus, I’ve learned that not knowing where I’m going or having a lack of description of my environment leads to writer’s block. (Which, as Brandon Sanderson put it in his NaNo Week 4 pep talk, would be better described as “creativity block”.) This was one of those realizations that changed my writing life.

My periods of burst writing are usually stories or scenes that have been brewing inside my head long enough for me to have a good mental grasp on them. That’s why they pour out so effortlessly that sometimes that I’m always afraid I won’t be able to type or write fast enough to keep up.

I tend to run into trouble in sections where I don’t have a good grasp on things. I’m not familiar with a character or a setting, or I need to invent characters or settings. The burst of inspiration tapers off and dries up until I have those things figured out and then I’m off again.

On a side note, I also noticed that those slow days were the times I faced the most temptation for procrastination.  I don’t think I’ve ever had so many urges to check my email or look up recipes, or read other writers’ blogs as I did during November. I probably would have done better on a few of those slow days if I hadn’t given in to temptation. You don’t realize how much time is slipping by until you look at the clock and realize that your writing block is up and it’s time to start dinner.

At any rate, NaNoWriMo confirmed my suspicions. As long as I have characters, setting, and a general idea of what needs to happen, writing went very well. When I didn’t have those things, I slowed down considerably.

Even then, I managed to write over 50,000 words to complete the challenge. I’ve never written that much in four weeks before. In fact, up until November, my weekly average has been in the neighborhood of 5000-6000 words.

If you’re shooting for a book or so a year, that’s still fairly respectable. But as I learned this past month, I’m capable of writing much more than that in a week. All it takes (for me—your mileage may vary), is a bit of planning and forethought.

Oh, yeah, and time. *grin* All the planning in the world doesn’t do you a bit of good if you never sit down and actually write.

This, I think, ties directly into the current hubbub about fast writing. Myths about fast writing equaling terrible writing abound. (Long-time writer Dean Wesley Smith debunks that myth here.) The goal is not to simply throw words at the wall in the hopes that some of them will stick—although some times that’s a good way for a beginner to get started, or to overcome a block—but the goal is to write well, however long or short a time it takes.

I mentioned Brandon Sanderson’s pep talk earlier. Out of all the NaNo pep talks I read, I identified with his the most. One of the things that especially resonated with me was his mention of writer’s “writing reservoirs” or “creative wells”.

He said, “One thing that non-writers don’t understand is that for most of us, we have a kind of “writing reservoir” inside of us. Consider it a creative well that can be tapped only so far in a given day. Once it runs dry, it’s often hard to create anything, even if we have the time to do so.”

He continued on to say, “One of the lessons I learned as a storyteller was how to refill the creative well while doing other activities. You can do it while driving, exercising, eating . . . anything that doesn’t take your full attention. During these times, many writers I know run through plots in their heads, feel out character personalities, think about conflicts. They make connections, overcoming blocks.”

That is so true, and not just for November. When I get stuck or need to think through a plot point, I like to take a walk up and down our driveway for a change of scenery and some fresh air. Granted, it’s a little more problematic when it’s pouring rain or there’s a lot of ice and snow outside, but it helps. 😛

I would also add that a writer needs to refuel by reading other material. We are wordsmiths, after all. 🙂 That said, music, movies, and TV can all play a role in helping to refill that creativity well again with new words, ideas, ect..

To some extent, I wish I’d tried NaNoWriMo years ago. Realizing that I can in fact accomplish 10K-12K words a week, even with unexpected curveballs in life, has been both mind-blowing and incredibly freeing. I’ve got a whole list of stories I’d love to tell—now I know it’s not going to be twenty years before I get to them. *grin*

Didn’t get to story evolution and TOSOTH’s twist today, but I’ll talk about them in the next post.

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Bad Faith, the first book in my sci-fi series, The Guardians, is now available. You can get a physical copy through either Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Sample chapters are available from all ebook providers, or you can read the first three chapters here.

For the Kindle copy, please use this link.

To purchase it through Barnes & Noble for your Nook, please use this link.

To purchase it through iTunes for your iPad/iPhone/iPod, just hit this link.