My first book was easy to write because it was all stuff that I had lived through, so it was all from memory. I didn’t study writing a memoir, I just started writing it on my own. I wrote and wrote and wrote until it was finished, then edited. It was a breeze. Fiction is one hundred times harder to write.
The fiction novel that I have wanted to write since 2002 about my gnome wizard character from EverQuest is easy in regards to creating characters and bios. The characters are mostly people I have actually played the game with and most of the people are really excited to be put in a book. A few others are real people, but they don’t exactly know they will be written about and I won’t be using their names. Since they never played the game, they won’t have character names so I will have to use a name generator. Creating the world isn’t going to be that difficult because I can create names for everything using a generator. I plan on creating maps from actual places; not states, but counties.
The hard part is the plot. I am reading this book Plot & Structure which is in the “Write Great Fiction” series. I had already written out my plot but have changed it several times while reading this book. I’m learning more and more as I go, but I’m also learning that the ideas that I had weren’t going to work. I created a new plot, then that one got deleted because it also didn’t work. I started to write another one, but what’s the point?
I’m not very far in this book, but what I have learned has stuck with me, which is a good thing considering I have a learning disability. That’s the one thing that has screwed me up my entire life. If I’m not interested in something, it will be more difficult to remember what I’ve learned, but if it’s something that I am passionate about, it stays with me forever. If something has impacted my life for the good or the bad, then I have a very good memory, too good in fact. I can remember things from so long ago that most people would never remember. Do you remember running around in a diaper? I do. Do you remember learning to use the potty? I vaguely do, but only bits and pieces, pun not intended.
Today we went to see the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. Well, before we went to the movies I read about prologues and how some writers use them. During the first few minutes of the movie I saw exactly when the prologue ended and where chapter 1 began. I’m watching movies in terms of writing now. Perhaps that will make writing a bit easier, who knows.
I still have a long way to go to read this book. There are only 240 pages and I can normally read about 100 pages a day, but this book requires me to take my time. If I rush through it then I won’t remember anything. I also spend a lot of time highlighting and writing notes in the book, which is a very good thing to do. It’s a lot easier since it’s a Nook book and not a paperback book lol. The reason for the highlights is because those are very specific lessons I will want to go back to. When I’ve finished reading the series and I am ready to start writing, I may have forgotten certain things, so I can look up only my highlights and notes and skim them to find what I’m looking for.
I’ve changed my plot several times, and I’m thinking that I may end up changing my characters by the time I get to the character book, so perhaps I should wait on creating anything until I have read all 5 books. I don’t want to waste too much time creating, only to end up scraping everything again and again. Who knows, by the time I finish this series, I might not want to write about this story, I may decide to go in another direction.
Who knew writing fiction would be this difficult?
Diary of a Gay Nerd 