The biggest thing for me is that I've met and exceeded my initial writing goal, which was 52,347 words. It was a promise I made almost casually, and then suffered through a period of a couple of weeks when I wondered how on Earth was I was to live up to it.
The change in my attitude came when I figured out what I wanted to write about. The idea of the character of Bryony and the culture she found herself in had been in my head for at least five years, maybe longer. And it came in a dream.
No, seriously. I waking up and being treated like royalty, then being taken before an older, very powerful woman with tattoos on her cheeks. The environment she was in was a shopping mall. It was at night, and in the way things are in dreams, I knew that the shoppers were special people, much higher in status that the people who worked there, and that during the day we would not be allowed to be there.
Other elements were clear as well, including a mask that bestowed the tattoos and a grandmotherly figure. These things were all kind of jumbled up in the dream, and I'm not sure exactly how they fit in, if they even did
But you know how some dreams are particularly vivid? They just stick with you way after you wake up, and you can sink back into the the sense of the dream, that peculiar blend of emotions and mental state and, well, I'm not quite sure how to describe it. But the dream made me feel a certain way, and that has stuck with me.
And as time went on, I developed the story in my mind, like layering papier mâché over a skeleton, or adding layers of mother-of-pearl onto a piece of sand.
Does anyone else do that? It's like I get a story idea in my mind, and worry at it. It's not really a fantasy, or a daydream, although I guess you could call it either pretty accurately. When I'm bored, or trying to go to sleep, or just passing time, I tell myself stories. It's not that I'm every planning to write them down, I just think about them to pass the time. I've got about a dozen of them that I switch back and forth between, depending on my mood.
When I decided I wanted to write a novel for my October goal, this idea eventually just popped out of the tank, like a numbered ball popping out in a lottery drawing. And as the last few days of September dwindled down, I started to sculpt that amorphous blob of story into a narrative.
One quick aside--to me, story is the series of events, characterizations, plots, setting, and everything else that I'm trying to get across. The narrative is the specific series of scenes, chapters, climaxes, rising and falling actions, etc. that I use to show the story to the reader. Any given story can be presented in hundreds of different ways, and I think what makes an effective novel is being able to cleverly craft a narrative that best serves the story.
Contrary to my usual practice, I did not write a complete outline for the whole thing. Instead, I came up with a bunch of scenes that I though would advance the story, without regard for where they went in the narrative. Because I've been familiar with this story in my head for a long time, I already know the character arcs pretty well. The only trick was coming up with names--in my head, none of them had names yet. Some didn't even have ages or genders. They were all archetypes, changing to serve the needs of whatever scene I put them in.
And so my next step was to pin names and characteristics. The computer geek in me almost thinks of this as declaring variables in a program. (Follow me, here.) It's bad computer programming to just create a new variable in the middle of the program, especially if you don't declare it first. Sure, the program can probably handle it (depending on the language), but if you don't know what each variable is for, its type, and the purpose it serves, you can wind up duplicating variables or reusing it inappropriately. Plus, it's just sloppy programming.
So I tried to declare all the main characters I would need at the beginning. And as I learned very quickly, you can't anticipate all the needs of the story from the beginning.
This first month of writing has followed Bryony pretty closely, going in to hour-by-hour detail about her first week or so in the Market. As I've stated before, that's a state of affairs that's about to go away, but I think it has accomplished a lot.
First, I've met people I didn't expect to. Fiya, Tonio, Jancel, Pritchard, Cohenrad, and several others were never in the initial concept. But the story threw them out to me when I needed them. This early in the story, I think, I can get away with that. I've also introduced some characters that might not reoccur, and once I come to edit, they might be pruned away.
Second, my lack of outline has allowed me to explore avenues that felt natural without abandoning the points I wanted to get across. I had not mapped out the entire Market, just like I hadn't mapped out the entire plot. So a lot of what has happened has been me exploring the market along with Bryony. I'm reminded of something that Steven Brust once said:
My favorite way to build a world involves a lot of just writing something because it's cool, and then examining the consequences. I do that a lot.Well, yeah. That makes sense. I've tried to do that in my first month of writing. For some reason, I think the idea of a magic-enforced class/caste system is interesting, and setting the story in a marketplace that produces and sells high-class goods seems like a good place for conflict and tension. And it's cool. There's a lot of other cool stuff I have planned, and I can't wait to show it off.
If a tradition is something that has always been done, then the natural partner of that is setting a precedent. That's when you tell the future what its traditions are going to be, dammit. And I'm going to do that now by establishing that the end of my monthly State of the Novel post will include hints for the month that is to come. You might consider these to be spoilers, but there won't be any specifics given, so read at your own risk. Think of them as things to watch for, and they may not all come true. Next month, I'll see if I managed to do them or not.
- So far, we've seen the highborn and the middling. It's time to introduce the lowborn.
- We've seen a lot of magic so far in the story, although you may not always have recognized it when you saw it. We'll be seeing a lot more.
- Gessica knows everything that's going on. Everything.
- I need more scary moments, and a few of them are coming.
- Around the middle of the month, Part 1 (or Book 1 or whatever I decide to call it) will be coming to an end, and there will be a massive jump in time. Expect the temporal structure of the story to change after that.
- The story isn't going to be stuck in the walls of the market forever. Look for at least one trip into the city around the latter half of November.
- Expect more male characters to surface. So far it's all been pretty weighted to the girly side, but that's been driven by the story.
- I'm considering doing some Devan or Yancy POVs. At this stage, it's just an idea, and I'm not sure if I'll follow through or not.
- Wondering about the Patroness? You'll meet her, probably in November.
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- Bryony at the prow of a pirate ship, sailing out to see the Sea Wall in person.
- A battle that takes place in the Hall of Ministration, down the eastern side of the Hill, in the Grand Cascade, and out the gates.
- Amassing an army
- A lone ship sailing out of the west
- Bryony confronts her father
So there you go! It'll probably be January before we get to most of those, but who knows? At this point, I've just got to do one day of writing at a time.
Speaking of which, it's past time to do today's. Thanks for reading!
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