fantasy
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A few months ago, I finished the first 100k words of this novel. Since then, I’ve been moving very slowly forward. A lot of this was spent deepening the world, expanding and strengthening what was there, rewriting existing chapters, writing poems and songs to fill out the world still further. And then there was all
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It’s been a while since I updated the writing diary but things have slowed down. Just harder to find the time to sit down and write, sadly, though I was able to add about 5,000 more words to it last week. The novel has slowed down, not out of lack of interest, but just time.
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Brick by brick and stone by stone, we write this out of sinew and bone. On page 383 of this novel, after writing 110,000 words, I was adding some color and texture to a chapter. It was a new chapter. I was doing the strange work of taking an existing chapter and turning it into
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About 300 pages into this novel, I wrote a festival scene and this scene is a full 15k words long. This is what the kids might call a flex, especially because the chapter includes a dozen songs (that I’m currently writing). These big long sequences are some of my favorite things to write, especially when
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My writing advice to anyone out there is to not do what I’m about to describe. If you’re already deep into a novel, don’t add a new character to the core cast who needs to be written into most of the book. I no longer remember when I realized this character was missing from the
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On a recent podcast appearance, I brought up Patrick Rothfuss a few times. More than that, I mentioned that I’m making a study of his two novels. There are reasons that go into this beyond the writing of a novel that I may get into someday, but much of this concept of layering that I’ve
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And so we’re back at it, discovering little holes here and there where wind whistles through. Part of my writing process is dropping little seeds here and there, somewhat chaotically, somewhat randomly, and so only just now did I realize that I planted a seed for a very important worldbuildy chapter, but I never picked
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There is a benefit to rereading your novel as you go. For example, late last night I discovered the perfect spot to seed some information. Bits of worldbuilding and so on. But the fun part of writing is discovery. For example, I haven’t yet added this information and I also don’t know what this information
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Something Charles Dickens does extremely well is use stock characters in complex ways. The usefulness of a stock character is that it makes them immediately pop off the page and stick in your eyes and ears. Stock characters get a bad reputation because they lack complexity. Which is all fine and good and true. But
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It’s been over a month since I looked at my novel. I stepped away to write some short stories–one of which has already been accepted and will be published soon–and then a whole lot of other things happened in my September. But I’m back at it and I’m hoping to be finished with this first
