This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
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Notes -
Anyone here have any advise for writing a fantasy novel?
I've been inspired for some reason in ways I've never before been inspired to write. Originally as a "Fixing" of a novel I read with an interesting premise, but it's slowly been mutating as I branch more and more away from the original other than the beginning framework and aesthetic veneer (that I want to make deeper). I've written about 15k words so far over 6 chapters, sort of haphazardly strewn over the book. I have a general plot outline and a deeper epic fantasy authorial cannon + magic system that I've conceptualized. I even have a nice complex romance subplot sketched out with some "Sapphic yearning".
But I seem to suck at coming up with names, or fictional idioms. And apparently I suck even more at making engaging descriptive dialogue. I've been having my alpha-reader-slave (ie my GF) read my chapters and then quizzing her on them. The general pattern is that I'm actually ok when things are happening, but my dialogue is bland or non descriptive. Several male characters read through my voice instead of their own. Things like theming or subtle clues seem to alternate between too subtle and a bag of bricks.
Almost universally, real authors basically say that to get better at writing, you just need to write a lot (and fail). They also say that almost always your first book doesn’t turn out, so if this is your true passion novel/magnum opus unfortunately you’re “better served” by setting it aside, writing a different fantasy novel or maybe novelette or short story, and then coming back to it. Or maybe just write a deliberate side story, same universe. So I’d say your expectations might need adjustment; 15k words is not that much, to be honest. For example over on Royal Road a lot of successful series have maybe 3k-word chapters or so? And you almost always need something like 30+ of those to really be going somewhere.
Like sure, you can make it a bit more efficient by listening to or reading the many author resources out there (Sanderson’s lectures being an easy low hanging fruit example, though not all advice is universal) but I am not kidding when I say literally every single author I’ve ever heard talk about it has said the key is just to write, and write lots.
Even if you’re the rare author whose first work hits (eg Eragon, written by an author who started at 15 and was 18ish when published?) you’ll notice that a) it’s still 130k words or so of finished product and b) I’m pretty sure the author has said the writing is pretty immature with retrospect. I want to emphasize that he’s the exception in a sense, again most good authors basically have to write a mostly-complete but highly-flawed full novel and only then are they capable of producing something decent, after (and for many it takes longer)
I hope this doesn’t sound discouraging; in fact I think it’s mostly encouraging in the sense that it’s very possible to get better as a writer and there’s a clear ish path to do so, but I think it might be helpful to get a sense of scale - at least in my personal opinion, 15k is too small a sample size to conclude anything major. None of this should be taken to mean that you shouldn’t bother getting better at writing dialogue, but it should be taken to set expectations that dialogue doesn’t get better overnight with one easy trick. Writing is hard. I admire a lot anyone who does it - you included!!
Yeah I've heard that. I've also heard to the effect of "Just set yourself a writing budget each week". My goal rn is 5k words a week. Looking to do a book in the ballpark of 240k words. Assuming a range of 2000-5000 words a chapter. The biggest problem is that I feel zero inspiration to write another book/novel. As I pretty much am only doing this because I feel inspired to, as a creative outlet, that makes it difficult to switch. I'm sort of aware that this first book is probably going to suck a lot. I've been calling it my coprolite novel.
I forgot that BSandy has lectures on narrative building, I'm curious how helpful they would be. I've read a metric fuckton of books in my genre, including most of the really high quality ones. It's not so much world building, plot, characters or systems that I'm worried about. It's the smaller, low level things: sentence structure, prose, word choice, dialogue. I might peruse his lecture series and see if he goes over any of that. Though in my opinion his prose and dialogue is pretty average.
Eragon got published because both his parents run a major publishing house. I don't think Christopher has written anything else, and the books are pretty juvenile. I don't think YA existed as a strong label at that point (or at least I hadn't heard of it) but they are strong examples of it. And it's a genre classification I really want to avoid. It has a very stable narrative structure and very predictable tropes, to the point that often world building is both the only unique thing, and simultaneously window-dressing.
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