Getting past chapter one: Why a story explodes.

[elfs]

As is typical of my writing habits, Princess Jera wouldn't leave me alone so I wrote her first chapter, and after two days ended up with 5,414 words. Not too bad. Two somewhat innocuous sex scenes (as this is in my fantasy pornoverse) that Jera and consequently the reader get to read about.

Which puts my story in the same category as that of the first Aimee novel: two stories told side-by-side, in the past a rise from crisis to victory, in the present a slow descent into horror. In this case, the scenarios are reversed: the story in the past is the slow descent into horror, the story in the present is one of discovery followed by crisis, but there is the twist: the story in the past has no happy ending. It is an object lesson from which Jera must learn what *not to do* to survive her own predicament which, in chapter one, she barely perceives or understands.

I wrote enough to allow me set the story aside, at least for a while. But as I wrote it, I realized that I had a problem: the story in the past is *easy*. It is not so easy to write Jera's story, because as a Princess of a major empire she has courtiers, hangers-on, her own proto-court wagering on her ascending to the throne, overseers to guard her purity, armsmen to protect her from the commoners, teachers and instructors, all of whom encroach on her privacy. There's also the daily, weekly, and seasonal responsibilities of a princess, with its attendent religious duties, festivals and appearances, not to mention that in two years the yentas will be getting their knives out for one another over Jera's courting-- and as rumors of Jera's newfound talents break out, things are gonna get ugly.

I just can't yet imagine how ugly.

This is why a lot of people "who want to write" stop at chapter one. The responsibility a writer has to the reader-- to tell a good story-- and to the characters-- to get it right-- becomes overwhelming.

Comments

[taerin.livejournal.com]

This is exactly why I keep grinding to a halt on many of my projects, feeling like my hands are tied. For me, it tends to come down to the complexity of world building, everything from the biology of living things to the weather to social development, etc etc. I don't have to discuss it all in the story, but as the author I have to get it right or what I say won't ring true. And there's just so much I don't know.

For example, if you create a specific creature living on another planet, it will likely help mold your development of the world it lives in, because you'll need an environment that produced that creature. What does it eat? What eats it? How does it live? Is it used by sentients as a resource? The questions go on and on, and that's just for a single creature! We haven't even gotten into what effects the creature's interactions with other things might have.

Granted, it doesn't all matter in every story, and that's how I'm trying to adjust my thinking. Only figure out what matters, and take a strict view of what actually qualifies as mattering.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The problem then becomes, "What matters?"

For example, in a writers' circle I participate in, one of the writers said, "I have a world where cloth is money, but I can't figure out how much a loaf of bread would cost."

I asked her what cloth was money. "All of them. Velvet is worth two silks, and silk is worth two cottons or two leathers, and cotton and leather are worth two wools."

I pointed out that this won't work: different cloths have different utilities, so cotton would more valuable than leather in the warmer part of her empire, and leather's value would skyrocket during war, and silk and velvet would rise in value during festivals, and so on. Even if the value was So Ordered By The King (as she insisted), the citizens would ignore it: they always have and always will valued items by their utility first and their nominal representative value second.

She got very huffy about it. "I wanted you to tell me the price of bread, not tell me that my system won't work! I'm the writer, it will work because I say it does."

Ah, well.

[taerin.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly! In our world, as in any world with sentient beings, things have value for a reason. You can't just decide that something normally of low value will be used as money without crafting a logical supporty for why. Example - American money is mostly paper and pixels, but that paper used to be certificates tied to a specific resource. Of course, it's a little more complex than that now, but we can at least trace back to see why a specific kind of paper is money.

And along those same lines, you can't make arbitrary decisions without getting into what effect they will have. Shrink a planet's moon by half, and what does that mean to the tides? Change the tides, and what effect does it have on everything from the development of seafaring to seasons to geology?

I just need to get better at narrowing focus, and keeping myself to only researching what I need to know for a particular piece of the story (and not following down every interesting track I come across while doing that research.)