Living in my head

My head is a nice place to live sometimes. I fall in love and get married over and over again, each time just as beautiful as the last. But there are also scary things in there, like basilisks that want to turn you to stone and scary shape-shifting half-humans that want to destroy the world. Balancing all of these disparate elements helps to inspire my work. It also keeps me motivated to continue world-building and writing because there are so many new stories that crop up.

I suppose this could be a humorous post, but I intend it more to be a post of advice to any other novice writers. I'm learning all the ins and outs of writing fantasy largely on my own. I do not belong to writers' groups, mainly because I have no idea how to go about finding such anomalies. I used to be in a writers' group, but that was years and years ago when I slaved* away as an intern for a manager at bookstore chain that shall remain nameless. It helped some, but I was even more naive then than I am now, if that were possible.

What I have learned as I've gone through these past few years world-building and writing, is that you really do need to have pages and pages of backstory for every location, every person, and every major event so that you know where the story you are telling right at this moment falls and how it is influenced by the past, how it will influence and change the future, and how it should be told.

You also need all this backstory so that when the time comes to write some sort of exposition passage or chapter, or a prologue should the need arise, you don't have to make something up and hope to heck and gone that you can make it mesh with what you have already told your readers.


Okay, that's enough of me rambling for today. I hope it helps someone out there. (And yes, I am vain enough to presume that someone has read my blog at some point. I do occasionally check the number of profile views on my profile. But only when I need to edit something in there and I happen to be on the page.)



*So I really didn't slave away as an intern. In fact, I loved my internship. And it got me my first part-time job, enabling me to beat the system.