Writer Wander 041 - Embrace the Rollercoaster

Wander talks about the merits of writing quickly, why at one point your first draft will stop sucking, and how an extended sabbatical is affecting his writing.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Rider Wander 41, enjoying the roller coaster. I'm very happily able to announce that I've finally begun to develop a writing habit, and I've been able to do it while I was on this extended vacation. As I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to enter an extended sabbatical, which is what I'm currently going through. And it's been a time where I've done a lot of reconnection with myself. There's just a lot of value in the fact of being able to have an extended period of time just to yourself. This is why children are very creative, or at least I think it's part of the reason why they're very creative, is that the part of creativity, part of what is necessary for it to emerge, is for you to have a significant amount of unstructured free time. Because the moment you start getting into schedules and the moment you start having itineraries, the more you have to occupy your brain space, the less space you have for that productive boredom that often leads to the best ideas. Which uh, and you know, to point that's been made before, a lot of people say that the fact that we can fill our white space time with our phones nowadays, rather than having to come up with our own imaginative games and whatnot, it is a is a reason for why it feels that uh people are just less creative in general nowadays, and maybe they're more given into uh to trends and things of that nature. One of the things I'd I'd always like to make an episode about is like the concept of paracosums, which was like this um this thing that used to happen, that kids used to do. Like you you can look this up, it's it's a fascinating thing where uh and it probably still happens, and uh where children had the habit of just world building for fun as a means of escaping their b boredom. One prominent example is the uh the Bronte sisters, who actually, before they made their famous romance novels, they actually had like various cycles of romantic prose that took place in a fantastical uh world that was uh you know inspired by their own imagination. And it was like this world that they had built up together collaboratively as children, just as a way to have fun. Another one that comes to mind is the author of The Worm Uroboros, E. R. Edison, who that story, when I read the preface to it, that's a story that I haven't finished yet, but I want to finish it. But if you know anything about that novel, it's a fantasy novel that predates The Lord of the Rings, and it's written in like this dense Elizabethan English. So it it has been very difficult for me to read it. I think I've tried like on three separate occasions and I failed. But I I know that one of these days I'm gonna crack the code. I I am the it is a novel that I'm interested in reading. In fact, um this sabbatical is probably the best opportunity I'll ever have to to actually finish reading that novel, because it it it does provide me sort of like with the unstructured free time that I need for for a book like that. But that's neither neither here nor there. My point is that that book, when I read the preface, I think it was written by one of the author's best friends, he's sort of talking about the fact that, you know, the the best friend of the author, he's like amazed at the fact that after so many years, the author has managed to bring to life the childhood fantasies that they had shared uh together uh because the characters in that novel were basically based off of his paracosum, right? But this episode is not about paracosum. So you know, all of that is to say that I I feel that I've had sort of like a mini creative renaissance and a creative reset ever since under undertaking this uh what I suspect to be uh a sabbatical that is a year, maybe maybe like a couple months longer uh than a year. And uh I think it's it's it's allowed me to rig not regress, just return to a more childlike atmosphere. But I feel just complements my my creativity a lot more, and I've been very grateful for that. And along with that, um I've been able to resurrect my writing habit to a great deal. I haven't ridden as much as I used to in my in my prime, so to speak, but uh I'm slowly returning to the daily habit, and that brings me back to the you know, the purpose of this episode, which uh I I'm gonna name something like Embrace the Roller Coaster. And the reason I'm gonna call it that is because prior to entering this sabbatical period, I was struggling a lot with this uh novel. I think I made one episode called First Draft Blues, right? Where I I think I was just you know lamenting the fact that uh just as an inevitable part of the writing process, your first draft on some level is always gonna suck. And there will never be a moment in an author's life in which they are they are satisfied with the way that their first draft is. You are always gonna be pissed at the way your first draft is going at one point or another. But the good news about that is that it's just a certain point, and I feel that I'm reaching a point where like the book is actually starting to feel kind of good again. It's not matching the vision that I wanted it to, but I think I I finally managed to to slog through, to, you know, to fight my way through all of those parts that were coming off as like like really boring and and really tiresome. And I think that part of the reason that I was able to do that is because uh for a long time, and I've always believed this, I never stopped believing it, I just stopped putting it into practice uh like a month ago or two months ago. Uh I was of the opinion, I am of the opinion, that a first draft should be written as quickly as you possibly can, right? A lot of people in the writing community kind of have a problem with that with that opinion. A lot of them think, oh why would you how could you say that? You know, if you're just going really fast, how can you guarantee that it's it's gonna be good? But the thing about the first draft, and this is what people always tell you, is that you know, on some level, it's always gonna suck. You're just getting the skeleton of the story. So my approach is that I try to get it done with as quickly as possible because the more you slug in it, the more you mire yourself in, you know, the complications and the difficulties of the first draft, the harder it is to escape. So to give you an example, uh, I reached a point in the story where I think uh we had arrived at this elven citadel. Finnegan had arrived at this elven citadel with uh with his companion, and uh during this this whole journey, right, uh they'd been tagging along with this group of people, this group of paladins that were sort of like the companions of a a head priestess called Lady Astris. And Lady Ostris is a character that I really liked in my outline. I really love the concept of this character. And to give you an idea, uh she is a cleric, um, but she is blind. And the reason that she is blind is because she has the miraculous ability to heal people, but it's not like some DD style healing where you just do a magical ability and uh call it a day. It's this healing ability where yes, you can heal someone, but to heal the person, you have to assume their injury. And the reason she went blind is because, you know, at one point in the past, she had given up her eyesight to heal a young child that was born blind, right? And uh, I think that uh, you know, that's one of those things, one of those rare occasions where I'm actually agreeing with Brandon Sanderson, which doesn't often happen, but I feel that one of the strong uh points of any magic system is uh if you have a tangible cost for the magic, that just elevates it so much more. And I think that from a from a symbolic standpoint, the idea of you being a healer, but to heal someone else, you have to assume their wounds. I think that's something that definitely resonates with my with my Christian worldview, which I'm I'm certainly uh I'm certainly pumped for, and I find rather interesting in just in that regard alone. Um but all of this is talking about how Lady Astris was in the outline, and I have to say that in the process of writing Lady Astris, it has been very, very difficult for me. I think that in this version of the story, this this first draft version of the story, um, I completely botched her character. Like I I completely dropped the ball on her. I have not done justice to how cool she was in my mind, and I I have completely like just embarrassed her in this point of the story. And aside from that, I'm also kind of you know disappointed in Finn's behavior in this point in the story because I feel that his character is kind of stagnant. He he hasn't um he hasn't become as much of an active protagonist as I would have liked by this point in the story. And I think that part of that is because of the story structure that I chose, in which you don't have a through line narrative, it's just Finn going through like a bunch of like random adventures. But I know that once I get to the second draft, one of the biggest questions I'm gonna have to answer is how is it that I can make it so that Finn is more personally attached to each of the plot lines that are going on? Because a lot of cool things have happened in this story, but most of the cool things that have happened do not have a personal impact on the life of Finnegan. They don't have a you know an internal pathos or or significance in his life, and I feel that as a result, it's sort of making him a very weak protagonist in this iteration of the story. But I'm very comfortable talking about this because again, and you know, if if there's someone listening to this that would one day be interested in writing a story, uh I guess one tip I could give, I'm I'm not a published author or anything like that, but I have finished a few novels. One tip I could give is that you need to learn to be happy with uh your story, even in its incomplete stages, and you need to understand that it's incomplete. You need to understand that it really is a work in progress, and a lot of times a lot of basic story elements are going to be missing in your initial um in your initial writing of the story. It's just not gonna be there because writing is very difficult and it involves paying attention to multiple details simultaneously to the point where you would have to be some kind of prodigy to be able to nail those details on your first attempt at writing the story. So do not be too harsh on yourself regarding that. But my point in all this is that I was in this prolonged period where he'd arrived in this elven citadel accompany accompanying this priestess lady, and I wasn't really satisfied with how the priestess lady was and how he was. And yeah, I realized that they had been venturing for a long time into this city, and it was a lot of scenes of like like talking and a lot of like descriptions of going through nature and stuff like that, and I had some fun describing you know the very uh the very weird surroundings of the the elven uh the elven place, the the elven setting. And I think I was having too much fun with the setting, and that kind of distracted me from the fact that hey, there has to be a plot here. Uh, if you want more details about that, you should go look at the episode. I think it's 37 where it's uh the city of Ilaris, something like that, the elven citadel of Ilaris. You might be interested in if you want to hear more about the kind of stuff that I did and the approach that I've taken to elves here, which conceptually I found fascinating, but from a plot standpoint, I think I was too interested with like those theoretical angles, and I was kind of distracted from you know what the fundamental point of the story, which would be, you know, the plot moving the characters forward and you know just getting stuff done with them. And eventually they enter the citadel and they talk to the elves, and then there's like this prolonged sequence of like banquets and interactions, and there's this cool mystical moment with like a beating heart tree that is in the middle of the citadel. Um, and it was one of those moments that I had designed in the story with the idea of adding more mythical depth to it. Because I I I like the idea of you just having like this this bizarre magical tree that defies all explanation, that isn't really categorizable into any of the categories that that our characters have in mind, and it beats like a heart. And when you press your ear against it, you can hear the tree sort of tell you what your what your deepest desire is, right? But again, I feel like I botched it because I feel that um I like the concept of the moment, but Finn as a character was not prepared to approach the heart tree in that particular moment of the story because as an author, I have failed up until this point to establish a fundamental um concrete motive for him to be traveling. And I think that um these are things that happen when you're writing sometimes where you just have to keep pressing forward, you have to keep moving forward, and so since I didn't want to spend time or uh spend too much time like trying to think, oh, what should the next step be, I just made it so that he he listened to the tree and he heard the name of his brother, right? Even though, and you know, some of you listening to that, you know, who remember what the point is that you know Finn's brother had left long ago, and um part ostensibly part of the reason why Finn had left his home was to find his brother, but that sort of betrays the idea with which I had gone initially in this novel, which was that yes, Finn's brother had left, but this novel was not a novel about finding his brother. This was more of a novel about Finn finding himself. But the problem is that when you have such an abstract premise, it's very hard to sort of like apply that in the concept of a setting or or in the concept of a of a scene like this where you have a character that has to confront uh his desires present in the tree. So that's just another thing that I botched, and you know, this is something that I've noticed, right? That I don't know what it is. Sometimes the scenes that I am the most excited for in the process of outlining, the scenes that I am the most pumped for, that I'm I'm the most um imaginative about in my mind, when I get to writing them in the first draft, they turn out like complete garbage. And I I'm not sure if if it's literally the fact that my writing actually gets worse when I get to those scenes, or if it's just that my writing, the quality of my writing is just equally bad at all times during the first draft. But when I get to those scenes, since my mental image and my mental standard is set so high, it it the disappointment just hits even stronger. I guess it's it's one of those things where at the end of the day, it's it's really it's impossible to tell. There's no way to tell. You just gotta keep going. So again, I I just botch that. And to make matters even worse, there's still two other very important scenes that happen here. There's the scene in which uh Kenem is finally finally has his identity revealed as one of the ancient companions, uh Talison, and he's the one who was the friends of the elves and whatnot. And again, I just feel that it it sort of happens, and the interactions between Feyn and Ken, you know, I I I I'm not afraid to admit it. I think I I just didn't think far enough on how it would look like, right? I think I had a lot of ideas that I implement them because they sound cool and they are cool and they they can lead to a lot of cool stuff, but I think that I I I didn't visualize them far enough. And as a result, you know, you kind of have this reveal where it's like, yeah, I'm Talison, so what? You know, there's nothing there's nothing further, you know, going on from that. You know, I I haven't found a way to hook it into something else. And I think that uh, you know, this process, even though it sounds like I'm trashing my own work and I'm laughing at myself, I've actually found it very constructive because I've been able to think through about a lot of things that I would like to change when I get around to the second draft. And I think that one of the things I'm gonna do is that uh I'm going to have multiple points of view in the story. And at first I had relented from doing that, but as time passes, I'm starting to realize that it's actually surprisingly important for this for this story because I have a very huge like ensemble cast uh in the story, and having all of the story up until this point told from Finnegan's perspective often limits the emotional impact in a lot of scenes, and it limits the kind of you know the kind of things that I can I can show, and it's very ironic. It's one of those cases where I evaded doing something that I usually do because in most of the books I've written, I have multiple points of view, but for this book, I I had the impression that um since it it was going to have a much stronger personal dimension initially, that it would make sense for Finnegan to be the only point of view character throughout the entire story. But I'm finding out that the scale that I'm trying to go for with this story would benefit greatly from having multiple POVs and multiple um multiple perspectives, and it wouldn't be the first time that I did a major change like this. I think the biggest change I ever did to a novel was that after the first draft, I basically half of the roughly half of the novel was told when the point of view of another character. And basically what I did in the second draft is that I completely scrapped that other character and I rewrote an entire set of POVs from the perspective of another another character that had grown to prominence in the process of writing that first draft. And I think that book came out a lot stronger as a result of that. So I'm I'm very proud of the I'm very proud of that result, and I feel that something similar is gonna have to happen with Echoes of Heroes. And basically, where I currently am with the story is that Finn leaves uh the Elven Citadel with his companions, and they have like this sort of quest where there's another elf in another citadel on the other side of the elven valley, and he wants to be um that elf, um, you know, the elves from Ilaris, they've been trying to contact him, but uh none of their messengers have returned. And basically they they suspect that something weird is going on there because they're they're also like you know finding strange patrols coming over from there, and they have reason to suspect that uh the scouts and emissaries that they sent were relaid, and so they send this, you know, this party of humans that has just shown up uh to see if maybe they can accomplish something that the other elves haven't been able to do. And um, it's in this part where I have the carissimi moment where Lady Astris releases everyone from their former vows and tells them that if they want to keep following her, um they will have to do a new vow, and um those that choose to accompany her, she will consider uh carissimi, which is uh uh roughly Italian or or Latin for dearly beloved. Um and that was another scene that was supposed to be super impactful, and I just found myself kind of like rushing, rushing through it. And that's another lesson that I've learned from this. When you have a long period of time when you're not riding, um you you you have to focus on like greasing the wheels again. You can't try to go slow in the hopes that you'll just return to the quality where you were at before, right? You know, you just gotta grease the wheels and you gotta move fast and you gotta start building up that momentum so that once you have that momentum, you can finally reach uh that original quality that you may have had in the past and and you had you had lost in this in this process, right? And now we're at the point where I really am now, where like they set out from the Elven Citadel to the other. Said it at all, and I'm noticing that the quality is starting to pick up again. Like this is starting to be a novel that I'm excited about again, in part because uh I forced myself to start writing every day. I know and I'm forcing myself, right? There was a period of time where I was like, oh, it's it's okay, Wander, you know, you can skip a day or two, but no, now now I'm I'm literally I'm just forcing myself, and I'm noticing that this has been better because it's it's allowed me to retain a stronger memory of what was happening in prior sessions and in prior scenes. And we got to the point where we are where like Finn is heading to the citadel and he's sort of like ambushed by this other party of elves, you know, the like evil elves from the other other citadel. And you know, I have like this scene where there's like a rickety bridge, and you know when there's a rickety bridge, it's gonna get chopped off. And I had like this completely like bogus reveal where like for some reason Finn's brother is among the elves. I I probably don't even I don't even know if I'll keep that for the second draft. I just I just added that because I needed I needed some pizzazz. There's this really good book. Um, I forgot the author, but it's about how to write pulp fiction, how to write pulp fiction, and this is not a pulp fiction story, but one of the things that one of the tips that I really liked from that book was it's sort of the writing advice book, and it tells you if you ever feel that your story is getting boring, uh just uh just add this sentence, and then someone walked in with a gun. And that that that's interesting, and I think that's very true for the first draft. And I think that sometimes when you're writing a first draft, you need to sort of manufacture stakes through shitty writing, even if it doesn't make sense, if it makes no sense at all, you need to manufacture tension, like toss in like a grenade randomly, just to sort of like light that fire and get things moving, even if you're gonna get rid of it in subsequent drafts. Because I'm probably gonna get rid of that. It doesn't make sense for Finn's brother Nial to be there, it doesn't make sense for Niall to be a bad guy. Uh maybe I'll change that in the revision, maybe it will make sense. But right now, the point is that it doesn't make sense, but it makes it increases the tension of the story and it sort of ties Finn to whatever's going on in the current plot line, which it accomplishes a lot of the things that I had not done before, and most importantly, it is getting me excited again to work on this, and then after that, there's like this great scene where like uh Lady Astris uh and three others, including Finn, um they survive uh the fall, and they they they're like in this canyon and they're walking to this canyon and then they get ambushed, and uh Lady Astris is very weak because she had to use her magic to soften their fall through levitation, and so she can't help them with the magic. But like there's this great scene where Lady Asterisk sort of like hands her staff to her assistant, and she sort of like whispers into her ear, and the assistant uh there's like this core reveal where the assistant is is actually capable of using magic herself, and she does like this this rope of light that like snags an archer from a ledge on the other side of the chasm and slams him uh against the enemies that were about to attack Finn in one chasm and that that gives Finn an opening to be able to uh to strike at them with a sword, and I'm really liking the way that that scene turned out. I'm I'm very I'm very satisfied with that, and I think that a lot of the reason for that is because because of the fact that I you know I untied the knots in the story that were going on in my head. I was able to focus on the moment to moment of of writing on the soul of the story that I was trying to that I was trying to get out. And this is what my point was like embrace the roller coaster, right? I you know, I started recording this with the idea of like focusing on this analogy of the roller coaster, but I'm just tagging it in now at the end. They give you an idea, but it's like, you know, in the process of writing the first draft, you have to sometimes you just have to power through long enough through the shitty moments to get back to the good moments, to the moments that actually make you enjoy the story. And some of the best ways to do that is are just to write quickly, not spend too much time dwelling on things that you don't want to dwell on, because at the end of the day, this is your book, this is the story that you want to tell. And if you spend like too much time like mulling about and thinking through things, like you know, that that's not fun, right? You can you can you can leave that for the outline for the for the subsequent drafts, right? But right now, in the first draft, you gotta go ham. You gotta let someone walk in with a gun for no reason whatsoever, just to just to get the ball rolling, and any inconsistencies, any, any lack of nuance, any lack of subtlety, all of that can be fixed after the first draft. But right now, in this moment as an author, you have to power through. And right now, to give you an idea of where Finn is, he they fended off that apple that that ambush. Lady Asterisk is dying because Finn was mortally wounded in that combat, and she assumed Finn's wounds, and now they are all in this cave that actually leads to an underground catacomb system, and they're trying to find a way to get out. And just describing that scenario to you makes me a lot more excited than talking about how the story has been going on for for a while now, to be perfectly honest with you. And I think that part of the problem was that the amount of the amount of characters that were present um in a given scene for a very long time. I had my my characters like traveling around in like this very big group, and I usually have a hard time handling those groups because I don't know who to focus my attention on. But splitting Finnegan off from the greater group into like a smaller party, this has allowed me to sort of zero in on a lot of much-needed character development, and ironically, it it feels like a lot of these characters are starting to come into their own in what feels like a lot, a much later portion of the story. But, you know, when you're an author, you gotta make do with what you're doing. But the important thing is that I'm having fun, I feel that I'm reaching the end of the first draft, and uh it's been a good it's been a good while. So, you know, ask yourself if you're writing anything and you're unsatisfied with it, embrace the roller coaster, just go with it, trust that if it's uh, you know, I've had occasions where I spend way too much time not enjoying the roller coaster at all. And uh, as I said in one of the very early episodes, if you're not daydreaming about a story, if if you if at one point you just stop daydreaming completely about a story, that's probably a sign that you can drop it and nothing will have been lost. But when when a story comes back to you, and this one did come back to me, it's a sign that whatever pain, whatever agony you're experiencing in the process of writing, it's just temporary and you just gotta go with it. But that was Rider Wander, keep wondering.