I've never published any of my writing, unless you count my blog, Dispatches from Otherworld. That gives me a lot of doubt over my identification as a writer. Ever since I was a kid, I've been writing stories, and I even got a college degree in dramatic writing, but I've always had a huge amount of anxiety about actually putting my work out there in a way that forces me to let someone else tell me whether it's good enough or not.
And lest you respond "well, that's just what it means to be a writer, so tough it out," I'll tell you I've told myself that for the past fifteen years or so, and it hasn't helped me produce anything.
Two years ago, I started writing, of all things, the backstory for a Dungeons & Dragons character (I think the reason I became obsessed with this game when I started playing eight years ago is that it's basically improvisational collaborative novel writing). But after this story ballooned out to over ten pages - far beyond the length that I'd force a game master to read for context and to inform NPCs and other plot elements that they might want to incorporate into a campaign - I realized that I didn't really want this story to be just for a game that would ultimately be told collaboratively and with another person having the greatest hold on the reins of the plot (and, to be honest, the subclass that the character would most logically take is also one I don't have a lot of interest in playing).
So, I took the lengthy backstory and rewrote it, instead, as the beginning of a novel. This wasn't terribly hard - my preparation for playable characters usually lends itself to a novelistic writing style, so it was mostly about expanding upon important conversations and events in that backstory.
This true first draft of the first part of the story - which I considered a prologue until it reached nearly 40,000 words - I finished while waiting at Logan Airport for my flight back to California, after having spent some time on the east coast for a friend's wedding around Halloween (appropriate, given that the story has many gothic horror elements, not the least of which is that the main character is a dhampir, or half-vampire).
The feeling of accomplishment there was fantastic, but I decided that I should refine the draft, iterating on it, and feeling like I needed to polish it before I could begin the second part (I don't know how many parts the novel will have, but I'm beginning to suspect that it will be a long book).
That, as it turned out, had something of a chilling effect on my writing. I certainly made some changes to what I had written that I think improved it significantly - for one thing, I made the secondary protagonist's motivations easier to believe, and in so doing I think I also gave her a richer characterization. But I was gunshy about actually writing more, in part because I wasn't precisely sure how to continue.
But, about a week ago, I found myself writing again - the plot jumped forward two years, and the focus went from the primary protagonist to two secondary ones. Indeed, the main character of the story is absent for nearly the entirety of part 2, and this shift in perspective gave me a great deal of forward momentum.
Now, I do have some worries here - if part 1 was all about getting the main character on the path toward the meat of his story, part 2 is sort of doing the same for the other two characters, which means that I worry that a reader will need to get through 70,000 words before things truly get cooking. Certainly, editing will slim that down a bit, and I also need to recognize that it's not as if nothing happens in these first parts of the story - in fact, quite a lot of things do.
I also think, on a philosophical level, this is perhaps part and parcel with my own struggles with adulthood. As of last year, I've spent more time in my life as an adult than I ever did as a child, and there's a sort of anxiety about feeling that I'm still only just getting started - that I'm waiting for my life to begin.
Perhaps, then, the lesson to bear in mind both in the story I'm writing and in my own life is that we're constantly starting and getting going. That there is no solid state of being a full, functional person, at which point you get to simply relax and coast.
I have dreams that this book will be published, and that people will love it. In our social-media age, even if the platforms and their effect on us is probably toxic, I nevertheless dream of writing something that inspires someone to make fan art. I've never been particularly talented when it comes to visual art, and the idea that my words could inspire someone is truly a dream of mine.
And, of course, there's the hope that I'll get some glossy book, and find it with some staff recommendation card at a book store.
I want that external validation that my writing is good, that it means something to someone. But what I've needed to do for this is to just toss out those expectations. I've approached this in a very different way than I typically do.
I love worldbuilding, but when I started to write this D&D character backstory, I left the details vague so that I could plug him into whatever world in which a friend might want to run their game in. But now, this has actually given me a license to make up the world as I go along. The goal here has been to let the characters drive the story forward, and to let them go where they will.
Now, did that stop me from coming up with an absolutely crazy, genre-busting origin for the protagonist's vampire father, who serves as the chief villain (if such a thing really exists) of the story? Not at all. Worldbuilders gonna worldbuild.
But there's been some kind of taoist ethos I've tried to adopt where the writing happens when it's going to happen, and I try not to pressure myself to make it happen when it's not going to. And yeah, I just wrote like 40,000 words in the past week, so I think it's paying off.
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