Hello! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Since January 7th of this year, I’ve been working on my next fiction piece “Karsica and the Sky Islands” for the blog. The idea was to take this Wizard NPC I’d created for a D&D game and write out her backstory and talk about the concept of Sky Islands in my world. Simple enough, right?
Wrong! What started as a project aiming for 10,000 words turned into the goal of writing my first novella (20,000+ words), with not-so-secret secret aspirations of turning it into a novel (50,000+ words). Such is life.
I wrote a small LinkedIn post about how something has clicked in me that is making me want to conquer the fear of writing long form fiction. I don’t know what that something is, all I know is that I hate it.
Because conquering your fear is hard, man. It’s not a one-time thing, it’s a daily decision. It’s not like skydiving, it’s more like marriage - it’s a decision to show up every day and be a better version of yourself than you’re used to being.
Every day I’m sitting down to write - some days blowing through full scenes, some days unable to write a single word. On those types of days, I have to remind myself that I’m running this marathon and I can’t stop now. My non-writing days are water breaks, not race dropouts.
The story is currently sitting at 9000 words, so I’ve still got a hilariously long way to go. I finished Act 1, but found myself unable to write anything for Act 2. Explored why for a while, and when I couldn’t figure anything out, I decided to do what all writers need to do to improve - I decided to read.
This past weekend, I started reading The Hunger Games trilogy, and I was so enraptured by it that I read all 3 books in 3 days. It is masterfully written. The world-building is so clear and the pace so fast and the plot so engaging and refreshing that I did the other thing writers do - I felt bad about my own stuff.
After a sufficiently long self-pity party, I sat down with Karsica again and began fleshing out the details of the world a bit more. I re-wrote chapter 1, and my beta reader (my invaluable friend) says that the difference is “night and day” so it’s a step in the right direction. I’m currently in the process of rewriting all of Act 1 and expanding it, to make Act 2 feel like a sensible extension of the story.
I’m also reminding myself that it’s not the word count that matters, but whether it is the story I want to tell, and whether I’m telling it well. But length matters too, because that’s how we measure the scope of the story. I can’t use the cliche of “quality over quantity” - it has to be both.
What is the most fun and the hardest thing is that when you expand the scope of the story, you realize how much the world needs to be thought out and how multidimensional the characters should be. Having never written stories this long before, I’m learning these skills now within the process. There’s no room for shame about how much I suck as a writer, when what I am doing now is practicing and improving my writing.
Writing this process made me realize how shallow my thinking is - the Sky Islands were a vague concept in my head. Karsica was a vague concept in my head. The Crowmother (a deity in the world) was a vague concept in my head. All of it is just fuzzy, hazy, cloudy ideas that float around in a void of nothingness that I have to paint together on a canvas to connect them all into a coherent picture.
Writing this book is incredibly hard, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t the most fun I’ve had writing in a long, long time. That alone tells me that this is what I should do. Whether this story becomes a novel or not, I know that I want to do it justice, because it has given me a lot of perspective and growth.
When it’s done, I look forward to sharing it with you. Until then, I must show up every day and be a better version of myself than I’m used to being. Simple enough, right?😅