First time novel writing experiences · 3:07am May 24th, 2016
Guys! I wrote a novel! :O
I know this is FiMfiction and there are novel writers everywhere, but it's downright strange to have an actual novel under my belt. So what did I actually learn from this once-in-a-lifetime experience?
Lesson Learned #1: Writing is hard
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For further details, consult: The War of Art.
Inner Critic: That is not a good explanation. Start over and rewrite.
Yeah. I umm... yeah. Writing. It's like, hard, man. And stuff.
Inner Critic: Riveting blogpost you got here, man. Keep it up.
*cough*
Okay, past me had the hardest time writing this novel. And current me can only stare at 50k words and be like: "Past me did what?" Luckily, I saved that blog post past-me had deleted from FiMfiction. Let's see how October 2014 me handled writing a novel.
I went walking with a friend of mine recently on a nice calm, fall, Sunday afternoon. I was trying to explain to him that despite how nice the day was I could not relax because of how stressed out I was due to a friggin’ story.
It won’t go away, every break I get, every time I put my headphones on, when I’m trying so desperately hard to focus on what’s important like school and work all I can think of is my story. It wanders there, nagging for a conclusion, demanding a happy ending. I keep writing and writing at the end of the day but all of my ideas don’t convey onto the words at all. And when I reread it, all I can think of is how messed up and weird it all sounds. I should understand that economically all I’ve written so far could be categorized as a “sunk cost” and I should move on. But I can't stop.
The thing that keeps me going are Neil Gaiman’s words: "No one will read your first draft," which is both comforting by helping to keep me writing, and also awful because of how much help my story will need to make the words move into the better position they need to be in before I can so much as contemplate sharing it with a prereader.
I counted it up the other day and I have over 60,000 unpublished words across four stories. None of it “done.” None of it I would feel comfortable with sharing. Perhaps none of it I will ever feel comfortable sharing. It’s a milestone that feels so empty and hallow compared to actually finishing something. You learn things by finishing them, not by thinking them to death. But it’s so difficult to put things into words.
Steven Pressfield would call this “resistance.” It’s a good term, and there’s so much in the book The War of Art that speaks to me, but even though I understand what resistance is, doesn’t mean I like confronting it. I wanted writing to be a means of getting ideas to go away… but now all I can think of are stories. It wouldn’t be so bad if more stories didn’t fill the void in the rare moments I’m not concentrating on what I’m currently writing.
Is this what being a writer is? Having stories that demand to be told so much that you drop everything to write them down? And the only reason you’re a writer is because more keep coming and you can never keep up?
I can’t drop everything; I can’t drop anything. I would be okay with writing if I could get my creative side to stop when I need to be doing real work that will actually help get me a job someday.
When I told all of that to my friend, he told me something that I don’t think I could have thought up myself and was exactly what I needed to hear.
“You’re feeling a lot of stress about this story, but I’m not sure if you should want it to go away. It means you care a lot about it.”
I do care about it a lot. I shouldn’t want it to go away… but can it just leave me alone when I’m not writing? And why does the inspiration stop the second I do have actual breathing time to write?
Man, me-from-the-past knew how to write :/
Writing right now feels a bit like picking up and old musical instrument and trying to use it again. I know I could do this at one point or another but now I'm so rusty at it. And understanding that past version of myself that was in the throes of novel writing feels practically alien. How did I do that? And what did I really learn now that it's over?
I was halfway through writing "A Place for Pinkie" when I started writing the epilogue for it. It was just a conversation between Accord and Galaxia. And it was the most fascinating thing I've ever experienced. There were these characters I had written just going at it arguing and being surprised at each other. It felt like two separate parts of my personality had stumbled into each other and now they were trying to reconcile that they existed inside the same mind. It was a novel experience. (Is that why we call them novels?)
I somehow decided that idea was "too weird" and set it aside. Then I tried to write something else: a griffon slice-of-life story. It wasn't well received. And while I was still trying to overcome my own depression towards the griffon story, I got an idea.
A really, really good idea.
It was the scene with Pinkie confronting her past lives with the fate of Equestria on how she reacts to it. And it was so utterly fascinating that on the day I got that idea, I wrote the first 8,000 words of Re|Im.
Can I just revel in how fun it is to start a story? Before there was nothing, and now there's something!
But I couldn't keep up the steady pace for writing a novel without a good goal in mind. I had finished reading Stephen King's: "On Writing," a few weeks before and the "2000 words a day" goal he demanded was intriguing. In order to keep myself going, I made a goal of 1000 words per day and decided to put my wordcount on Twitter as a form of motivation.
It worked really well. Mostly because my 1000 words a day were the best part of my day. I would spend so much time (too much time) daydreaming about where the story would go next. And my writing time at the end of the day let me get out all that pent up creativity.
I probably went overboard on the creativity. There’s a bajillion ideas in Re|Im. It helps that: “What would be a really really good book in the Library of Babel?” is one of the most fascinating writing prompts of all time and led my imagination to some mind bending locations. It was so much fun to write. But also more than a little disturbing. My mind went to some strange places trying to understand the duration of eternity.
In "On Writing," Stephen King emphasized so strongly about not letting anyone see your novel until it was done. In hindsight, that probably wasn't very good advice for me. Every writer is different. There is no set in stone rule that you must or must not do anything. And in my case, having someone else read a chapter at a time as I was writing it would have helped settle my anxieties about writing it in the first place.
I ended up finishing the first draft Dec. 31, 2014. And then I just kind of... sat on it.
For a year.
Yeah...
And then the story ended up coming out anyway. No, not Re|Im, but Everypony Lives. I got the idea for that story and just started writing it and was done before I even realized just how much of it directly paralleled Re|Im. Is this the moral of writing stories? No matter how hard you try to avoid them, they're just going to come back up again in a different form?
A worse form. Yikes. I was in a panic for the entire duration that story was at the top of the feature box. I did not expect the response. And it only made me more anxious for what people would think if they read Re|Im.
Books are strange things. They're more than just written by people, they are people. The author is in every word and sentence and idea. And Re|Im is filled with a lot of me. And I wasn't sure if I really want all of that 'me' influencing others.
Eventually, after several friends told me to just publish it (and many months of unnecessary angst), I finally did.
And it wasn't the end of the world.
In fact, after all that worry, the final outcome was rather anti-climactic. But well... at least it's over. 
Neil Gaiman is no longer standing over my should telling me: You have to finish things. It's done. Phew 
The rest of this post is devoted to my thoughts on what I got right and wrong with the process of starting and finishing Re|Im.
Hit: Writing goal
1000 words a day, and setting aside time to write were invaluable tools.
Hit: Using Twitter to announce my writing progress
It was nice to have a number to report at the end of the day. I felt really motivated to say my progress everyday because there are people I like that noticed.
Hit: Holy frickin’ crap this is a cool story
You probably didn’t read it. But that’s okay. I probably haven’t read your stuff either and I feel pretty guilty about it. But you don’t need to feel guilty. Life is hard enough without having My Little Pony fanfiction making you feel guilty about not reading.
But man, this story has a lot going on.
Hit: I used way, way too many ideas. But that just made it funner.
I got to be on an episode of Writing Excuses the other week. It was their Question and Answer episode on Ideas and my question popped up at 11:36. “How do you avoid using too many ideas?” Their answer was pretty much: “You don’t.” I didn’t know they would say that. But past-me had followed that advice anyway. Thanks past-me.
If there was an award for "Most original alien races described in a single My Little Pony fanfiction" I’m pretty sure I’d win it.
And after all the serious philosophical drama of the first half, there’s a lot of hilarious parts that had me laughing for a long time. Like the conversation between Accord and a dragon that had just eaten a now immortal griffon. It had me simultaneously howling with laughter writing it, and feeling really poignant by the end of the vignette. (Control-F “Let him out” on this chapter to read just that section)
Is this what it feels like to write things? You just feel so clever all of the time? And you just keep laughing and despairing with your characters as you write them?
Miss: Recording edits on Twitter was annoying
Tweeting a wordcount is fun, but tweeting edits is kind of... not fun. Actually, editing at all was not fun. I still don't have a good metric for measuring edit count as easily as I can measure wordcount.
Miss: Complete and utter anxiety
There’s a lot of me in Re|Im. I was very tempted to just leave it as a private journal than a story to publish. I don’t do so well with crowds. And the internet feels like the largest crowd I could ever be a part of. Sometimes it just feels like I’m in the side room of some hotel talking to one or two people and at any moment a flood of thousands may come in and I’m expected to just keep talking as if there is no change in the dynamics of the room.
Miss: Being too patient
My criteria before publishing this was: Get one person who I wasn't already friends with to give me a yay/nay on the whole story. I just wanted to know I wasn’t about to psychologically scar people for life. And if the story was some kind of philosophical bioweapon, please tell me! I don’t have to publish it.
Miss: Not publishing the prequel sooner
Asking people to read 60k words no questions asked was rude. I’m sorry. I should have just published that friggin’ prequel sooner. That would have solved a lot of problems. I could have seen that it got little interest and then not worried about Re|Im so much.
Vague: Characters talking in my head is utterly exhausting.
There was a period of months at the end of 2014 where I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters. Accord and Hope kept arguing and arguing and the only way to shut ‘em up was to just write down their words and hope that’d be enough for them to leave me alone. If I reached my wordcount they would sometimes leave me alone. But if I was too busy to write they would fight for my attention at all hours of the day with their bickering.
I thought I was going schizophrenic. I didn’t feel wholly sane until a few months later when I read the 2nd Three Body Problem book. The protagonist in that story went through something similar when he started writing a book. He went to his doctor about it and the doctor was like: “Nothing to worry about. You’re a writer. This happens.” Note: I know taking psychological advice from a Sci-Fi novel isn’t the best.
Vague: It’s a fanfic
After getting all this done I feel a little saddened that the greatest strength of the story—how original it is—is also a huge weakness. It’s too original. That’s not really popular for fanfic.
I’m a pretty private person, so I don’t tell people I write things. And I especially don’t tell them I write My Little Pony fanfiction. So it’s just weird having something that’s affected so much of my life, be something I have to hide.
If I do more writing in the future, I just want to release some original stuff for free on Amazon. That way I don't feel like I have to hide it.
So basically ummm... worry less, publish more.
I thought you said only your old self was good at writing. That was great. I actually enjoyed reading a blog post.
that was strange, I liked to read a blog post..... I should probably do something else to distract my mind so it can fix itself. Maybe read Re|Im. Hmmmmmmm. Yep, I'm going to read it tomorrow.
Nice to ser that you finally published it! Despite my IRL instability not allowing me to be quite as dedicated in editing as I wish I could have been, it was a blast to help you with this one.
Also, this blog makes me feel like writing more. I have so many shelved projects, and I really should work in at least some of them.
3967555
Aw thanks!
Huh. That's funny. I pretty much read everyone's blog posts. I find people fascinating. But I can never seem to read their fanfic
Awesome!
Let me know if it's the philosophical equivalent of biological warfare.
3967688
SOOOOOOOOGE!!!! I love you man!
Awwwwwww....
I have a ton of shelved projects too. I keep thinking about assigning each story a number, and then rolling a dice. 24 hours after I roll the dice—ready or not—I have to publish the corresponding story.
That could be a great or a terrible idea. And I'm not quite sure.
Well I coulda told you that! :V
I didn't know you were writing an original. I could read it and give you feedback, if you're still open to polishing and possibly rewriting. Or better yet, if you hope to submit it somewhere for actual publishing. It's not like you have anything to lose for trying. If you paid me I'd even do a quick edit for you.
3968898
I'm contemplating writing original stuff. Which will probably lead to a book of some kind in the far flung future. I'll let you know :)
3968182
It's a lesson learned pretty quickly into the process :O
What's wrong with psychologically scarring people?
My life right here. I've grown used to it.