We’re writers, so we write, right? Absolutely.

But that’s not all we do, and honestly the actual writing of a manuscript is far from the most time-intensive part of creating a novel. In fact, the writing of a viable manuscript is the culmination of a great deal of preparatory effort. We might spend months working on a story before we sit down to write that viable draft.

That final manuscript is like a beautifully crafted building we hope will stand firm for ages, so it must be built upon a firm foundation. Few people visit any architectural wonder just to say, “Wow, great foundation.” Most of us have eyes only for the finished product. Leave it to the architect to know all about the foundation.

Same principle with writing. A great foundation allows a manuscript to reach its full potential. Careful preparation allows a writer to pound out tremendous word count. For example, just yesterday I wrote about 13,000 words. During one writing retreat this year, I wrote 50,000 words in one week. And they were good words, not throw-away fluff.

So, can I write 10,000 words a day, every day of the year? Of course not. Those kind of word counts are not possible unless you’ve already got the foundation set. Much time is spent preparing for those burst of productivity. I’ve discussed those burst-writing times in detail in the past here.

What are some of those foundational items we as authors, the architects of our stories, need to understand? What are ways we can prepare for productivity?  The specifics of the list will vary depending on each writer’s style, but regardless of how we get there, we still need to end up with a firm foundation, or the story will fall.

Some common items that apply to just about everyone writing fiction include:

World building. What is our setting? Where is the story taking place? In what environment, what culture, what physical reality? Are characters human or animal or robot or jelly beans? Until we know these things, either written down or firm in our minds, we cannot begin a viable draft.

I write fantasy, and I generate copious notes about the world, the nations, cultures, religions, geography, climate, magic system, value systems, etc. Until it’s real for me, I cannot make it real for my readers.

Characters and conflict. There is no story until there is a conflict. For a conflict to exist and to matter, we need to have characters to torture. Before we craft scenes that will capture readers and draw them into the story, these elements must be clear.

One thing I do at the beginning of a story is to generate a list of names I feel fit this project. In my YA fantasy novel, I chose Scottish names for one nation and German names for another. Behind The Name is an excellent site to find names. Then when I need a name, instead of losing productivity trying to invent one, I just turn to my list, choose a name I’ve already decided will work in the context of this story, and move on with hardly a pause.

For those who are planners, who like to outline and craft a story before sitting down to write that viable manuscript, the list of preparatory items gets a lot longer, including:

Timeline sketches. Particularly for complex stories with multiple characters, charting out the timeline and how the various POV threads will interact can be invaluable. Even if you only have one main character and one main protagonist, the exercise of plotting out when and how they’ll intersect over time can spark new ideas or identify holes in the planned plot.

For me, this helps particularly in complex endings. When tons of things are going on and the action jumps from one POV to another, and from one quick scene to another, weaving all of that in together into a tight, constantly escalating climax is daunting. A high-level timeline sketch keeps it all under control.

Character profiles. Who are your characters, what is their backstory? What do they want? Why can’t they have it? What are they going to do about it? Knowing all this for every main character, and even for important supporting characters provides fodder for tremendous depth and complexity of your story.

Character development and depth has been a challenge for me, and this exercise has helped tremendously.

Outline. How is your plot going to roll out? What scenes will you write to drive the story forward? How exactly will you generate empathy for the hero in the beginning, reveal the true conflict at the first plot point, illustrate the stakes, etc? For planners, the outline is the skeleton, the frame upon which you build the story. This is where great energy and time is spent as you explore all the possibilities.

My outlines keep getting longer. This is where I spend the bulk of my creative thinking time. It’s so much easier for me to explore different options and look for ways to ratchet up tension or stakes or conflict up front than it is after I’ve written 50,000 words and realize something is missing.

For those who prefer to free-write, to discover their story through the act of following the muse down the rabbit hole, the preparation process is more like exploring the back roads around your city at night. There’s a certain excitement to driving into the darkness, not entirely sure where the road will take you. The trip may take a lot longer then expected, you’ll take wrong turns, and have to back track. You may end up needing to return to the very start of your trip and begin anew.

For those free-writers, or pantsers as they’re often called, the early drafts of a story are like those late-night drives in the darkness. This is where you discover the story, just as a planner discovers their story through the outlining process. This effort can take a great deal of time, and through this process, the free-writer is building the foundation of their story. Once all of the necessary elements are in place, only then can the free-writer begin a viable draft that can stand successful.

This list is not exhaustive, but it’s a good place to start. Writers must think about it, particularly as we begin a new novel. Understanding the foundation we must build, regardless of how we choose to get there, is one of the most important things writers need to grasp.

This knowledge, and understanding how we individually approach the foundational elements in our story, allow us to become truly productive. Once we have these elements in place, we can dive into that manuscript, and the words will flow faster than we can write them. I type pretty fast, but sometimes I can barely keep up.

I started as a free-writer, and over time and as I’ve come to better understand these foundational requirements, I have slowly drifted across the spectrum to becoming more of a story planner. I free-write within each scene. This hybrid approach, which I think is fairly common, provides the most focused, most productive result for me while still allowing for some of those midnight drives.

How do you approach these foundational elements in your own stories? What other foundation blocks would you add to the list?

 

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The spring migration is late this year but I only learned that because someone died.

A close friend’s death pulled me from my concrete world, forcing me to travel across endless prairie, to see spring repaint winter’s stark world with the tender greens waving away the north wind’s last cold breaths. And in my journey to mourn, I see the spring migration – gathering energy to fly to thawing northern nesting grounds by fervently feeding on the last crop’s stubble, not one stray seed left behind. A friend had died and with her, part of my heart died yet here was nature, hopeful, fervent, telling me the cycle must continue, that despite all that happens, life stops for no one.

This journey takes me back to the farmstead home where I grew up – right in the middle of the great spring migration. Flocks of Greater and Lesser Canada geese, cranes and Snow geese formed feathery swarms. Circling gracefully down to water, then like arrows shot into the sky they circle yet again searching for perfect feeding fields.

The choruses of honks and krooos carried by cool spring winds are a music once familiar, now alien, to my ears.  These choruses are the excitement of spring, the energy of rebirth and creativity and somehow, through my tears of grieving, I am stilled to peace.

A walk across stubble fields, still too wet for seeding, floods me with memories, once known in my youth but now seem otherworldly. Who was that person who remembers where the trees once grew, where cattle grazed in pastures, where weeds were pulled from garden rows at a nickel a pail? Who is this person who now deigns to wear sandals through straw stubble, ankles scratched – a child of the city now – alien worlds converging, lifetimes past and present merging.

Walking along a windrow, a prairie chicken is spooked from the grass. My partner is now lost in his memories of times hunting before pesticides and farming diminished this delicacy. As we share the past I realize that few words can bring to life the images, the memories, the smells, the aching muscles, the laughter accompanying sliding down haystacks in winter … time has made  the once familiar foreign. The migration darkens the sky above us as birds swarm debating if this field will yield enough scattered grain. I feel the noisy migration sweep my old ghosts away for their focus is on today  - it is all that matters and all that ever will matter.

At 4 a.m., the winds change and I know, lying in the dark, protected from the diamond sky and sun’s first yawning, that it is time – that this is the last night of honking and krooing wakefulness and that silence will ensue. I leap from my bed to watch the geese and cranes, their last grazing of  grain speckled stubble fields completed, rise to the skies, circling, a choir in flight, summoning all to follow, their v-shaped lines flapping arrows aimed at northern nesting grounds.

Then, the earth gasps at the timeless glory of the final migration before relaxing with a sigh. But, the silence I expect never comes.

Instead, I hear the almost quiet – the earth’s soft belches and burps of spring moving to summer. Frogs croaking bass melody day and night, the percussion of duck calls, crows cawing oblivious to the frog’s melody, the crescendo and decrescendo of wind whispering then whistling through budding trees – the new, softer melodies of insects crawling over warming ground, farmers preparing the land for seeding, hoes working gardens. The south wind, carrying the frenzied migration northward now blends these spring choruses to new compositions.

Ah yes, the rhythm, the balance of the earth, timeless beyond man – these things I now ponder. And I also wonder about the worlds I create as I now sit in my walled home, in my city of concrete and asphalt and unearthly noise. Do my characters wander through worlds which gasp, belch and burp? Are they  aware of the subtle things which affect their lives? Am I aware of these things? Maybe. Maybe not. But I now know that sometimes we and our characters need to take the time to breathe – to feel the change, to feel the sorrow and the timelessness of life.

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When many, if not most, readers enter a fictional world, they want to stay there until they’re ready to leave. For us writers, that means having to avoid doing anything that pulls the reader out of our world. Failing in this task may make it difficult for a given reader to buy into our creation. They may set it down and move onto something else. If this happens, we’ve lost them.

Any aspect of storytelling is vulnerable to this. Someone breaking out of character, the introduction of a deus ex machina, and even poor handling of point-of-view are all good ways of infuriating readers, and rightly so: they are violations of an unspoken trust with our readers that the stories we are telling them are self-consistent.

Setting is an aspect of storytelling which is particularly vulnerable to this kind of violation, especially in genres where setting is important, such as in fantasy, sci-fi, and historical fiction (by setting, I mean all things related to world-building, such as culture, dress, geography, the laws of physics or magic, etc.). Read enough reviews in any of those genres and you will see that one of the widest criticisms is that the author described some event that could not or would not have happened in that context, and thus the reader was pulled out of the story. There’s a good reason for why this can be such a problem for a writer: setting, by its very nature, consists of a vast number of interrelated concretes. Consider the difference between a character arc and a city, full of people, buildings, roads, belief systems, cultures, and so on, and you should see what I mean. It’s very possible (and necessary) to track the shape of a particular character’s arc, but far more complicated to track the goings-on of every person and thing in a city. There are many ways we can forget a detail that affects the story later on, and thus cause one of those reader-losing violations.

Of course, simply not knowing how an aspect of your world works can also do this. Many of our readers are smart enough to know that you can’t ride a horse at a gallop while swinging a fifty-pound sword for five hours straight. As most writers should by now know, doing some research solves most of these problems.

But there’s another related issue that can be a little subtler, and it relates purely to a world’s self-consistency. Unless you’re writing an alternate history or time travel yarn, your Imperial Roman soldier isn’t going to call his wife on his cell phone, since cell phones didn’t exist back then. An obvious example, but things get a little trickier when you’re writing in a purely secondary (or, purely imagined) world.

I once wrote an epic fantasy story in which one of my characters was exhausted, and was described as feeling as if he had just run a marathon. While it seemed pretty innocuous to me at the time, someone in my writing group couldn’t buy into it, because the word “marathon” is named for the run of Greek soldier Pheidippides during the Battle of Marathon. And since such an event never occurred in my world, he argued, how would the concept of a marathon in the normal sense even arise?

Hearing his criticism was a bit of a wake-up call for me, and now I sometimes find myself watching out for the same thing with books that I read (as much as I’d rather just sit back and enjoy them). Of course, in my hierarchy of priorities, I’m going to put a satisfying plot over catching myself using the word “marathon,” but I still keep an eye out for something like that slipping in. Whether or not you’re that meticulous about your world’s etymology, rest assured that some of your readers will be.

* For another interesting post on the topic of word choice, check out the earlier post by Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, if you haven’t already.

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I recently had the pleasure of finishing my reading of Brandon Sanderson’s latest Mistborn novel: The Alloy of Law.  It was fantastic, full of his snappiest dialogue to date, hilarious self referential jokes and a plot that moved forward with the stunning pace of a bullet train.  Taking place some hundreds of years after the conclusion of the original Mistborn trilogy, the world and setting had completely changed, and yet it was at once instantly familiar.

In fact, while the main and supporting characters were thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly hilarious with all of their requisite Sanderson corniness and wit, I found myself mostly intrigued with the setting itself.  I was stunned to realize: the setting of this book was just as much a character to me as Wax and Wayne and the rest of the cast.  What made that so?

I think, for me, it was the progress, the change and development to the setting since last time I had visited Scadrial in the original Mistborn trilogy.  Without throwing out too many spoilers, within the three hundred or so years between books technology had begun to modernize.  Trains now race through the city and branch out through the unsettled “Roughs”, criminal and lawman alike have dropped their blades and taken up potent firearms, main characters from the original story have faded into myth, legend and theology.  As I said, I found a new sense of conflict and development in the actual world building behind the story.  It had become a living, breathing character.

I tried to pin down how, exactly, Mr. Sanderson was able to achieve this, and I think it boils down to the most obvious aspect: the passage of time.  In a lot of fantasy stories and series, it is sometimes surprising how little time actually passes.  For example, in The Wheel of Time, after twelve exhaustive books, I’m pretty sure only 2-3 years have passed.   Sure, the setting might be growing and changing based on the actions of the characters, but profound change in technology, government and lifestyle usually takes decades, even centuries.

That is why after three hundred years or so “off screen” I was fascinated by my second trip to Mistborn’s Scadrial, and I’m really interested in finding more stories or series in which time and generations can pass, and the setting is able to develop as a prominent character.  Another one I can think of off the top of my head is Kevin J. Anderson’s Terra Incognita series.  The stories move at a blistering pace and sometimes years pass a decade at a time.  The landscape and inhabiting cultures are scoured by war and the vast scope of the story really gives room for the world itself to develop.

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With the holiday season passing us, I think it is a good time to look around us and figure out how we can put this in a fiction world. Looking at our own holidays is a great way to help world-build and create believable celebrations in your own world. A well designed world that includes holidays may also provide a look into the history and cultures that exist in the world.

Looking at Christmas, we can see different elements coming from different cultures with different priorities, the two that jump to the front being religion and harvest. Religion has been with us since the first cognizant person witnessed the first lightning storm or felt his first earthquake. To their primitive culture, such acts could only be accomplished via a supreme being. It’s not surprising then that many of the holidays surround the worship or appeasement of a god. Even the name holidays comes from Holy Days.

The date is centered around the Winter Solstace, or December 21st. The Norse celebrated Yule, which focused on the return of the sun. If you watched the sun in the sky, each day it would drop lower and lower as the days got shorter. On solstice, the sun would stop its movement and start rising as the days got longer. To celebrate, they would get large logs and light them on fire and feast until the flames went out. The Norse believed that each spark from these Yule logs, which could burn for around 12 days, symbolized a new life that would be born in the forthcoming year.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia in honor of Saturn, the god of Agriculture. Since farming and agriculture paused for the passing of winter, it provided time for celebration and feasts. Saturnalia also centered on the rebirth of the sun and the hopes of a good new year. One big part of the celebration was the day of Gift-giving on December 23rd. On this day, people gathered to give gifts to friends, family, and patrons.

Finally, with the coming of Christianity, many of these celebrations were converted in an effort to bring more people into the religion. As society progressed and became industrialized, the rebirth of the sun and the worry about growing crops for the next year subsided. Despite this, the history and concerns of our people in the past is still evident in how we celebrate now.

Looking back at fiction, you can put these same ideas into your holidays. If the people of your world never had to worry about food or the loss of the sun, then having them celebrate a Christmas like celebration wouldn’t make sense. Also, in a world where Gods are not only worshiped but actively walk and affect the lives of their followers, certain requirements may be demanded upon them. Think of how these requirements would change through the years. Perhaps a past god required one thing and was replaced with the current god who actively protested the celebrations. How would this effect the world and those living in it?

Even if you don’t tell the world of all the history, it can help give ideas and really give color to the world. If nothing else, it will give you, the author, a deeper understanding of your world and the people who live there. And that can only help improve a novel.

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