I usually bill myself as a high fantasy author on the web. More specifically, an ‘aspiring author of the high-fantasy kind’. By the time I’d plotted the final book of my trilogy, I realized I probably had an epic high fantasy on my hands.

Some people say the terms epic fantasy and high fantasy are interchangeable. And I can understand that; it’s tricky to pin them down and define them. The meanings evolve on a daily basis.

At this current juncture, I’d define a high fantasy as a story that features a world with different rule-sets from our own that is threatened by a malevolent evil.

And an epic fantasy, in my opinion, has everything to do with scope (although the classic definition has to do with cycles). So what is scope, exactly, when it comes to writing novels? Read the rest of this entry »

I finally got done with “Big Blue”, a short story written from a woman’s perspective and heavy on the dialogue. It packs some emotional punch, but it’s not high fantasy. It’s present day stuff.

Still, I might enter it somewhere and see how well it performs. If anybody would like to give my first draft a read, I’d love whatever criticism you can offer. And if anybody knows of a good writing contest, that would be most helpful as well.

Oh, by the way, I’m still waiting to hear back on “En Prise” the short story I submitted late last year. :P

My fingers are growing sick of being crossed all the time.

Later, taters.

As I’ve been writing scenes and posting wordcounts, I’ve gotten away from something important: How did I come up with this stuff, anyway?
After all, wasn’t the whole point of this blog to share the creative writing process?

“Where is your story supposed to start, really?” is one of the toughest questions to answer. Some people try to oversimplify the answer.

Holly Lisle is one of those people. “Beginnings are endings,” she says. She believes that beginnings always present the protagonists with problems they are ill-equipped to handle. The ending should be just like the beginning, only the protagonists should’ve learned over the course of the story how to properly deal with those exact same problems. If that’s not the case, she suggests you might’ve started at the wrong place. Makes sense, right?

But I don’t buy it. My favorite stories usually raise the stakes until the protagonists are faced with much more difficult problems than they could’ve ever imagined at the beginning. Characters change. Emotionally, mentally, and physically.

While they’re travelling, the world around them shouldn’t stay static, either. It changes and grows.

Imagine a story where a boy, who gets kicked around by a bully, stumbles through a portal in his school locker to a magical land where he learns how to fight and stand up for himself. Then, when he returns back to his world all ready to kick some butt, it turns out the bully slipped on soap in the shower and died. lol. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s so many words. Sooo many. I come across words I’m not 100% sure of the meaning of every day. It’s kind of pathetic — I pick up a book, I read a few lines, then I have to put down the book in order to look up a word or phrase I wasn’t sure of.

I mean, sure, I might’ve heard these words before, but I can’t rely solely on context clues to define words I might have to use when I write. Guesswork could end up making me look like a total idiot.

Some words are just silly — words that end up making the author sound stupid, like he’s trying too hard to sound scholarly, or like he’s exploiting the built-in thesaurus feature in Microsoft Word. Fortunately, I can tell the difference, and I can do without those. Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, I was feeling down. But I tried to turn a negative into something positive by making a goal-oriented checklist that day.

Now, I’m feeling much better. So let’s see how I did:

X – Challenge 1: Argue with that little voice inside my head that keeps telling me I’ve no business writing a novel.

I haven’t been feeling insecure about my writing at all. In fact, I keep surprising myself with what’s pouring from my fingertips.

X – Challenge 2: Find time for my book. My free time just isn’t cutting it. Not even close. Whenever I get geared up for writing, something always seems to come up that demands my immediate attention. So I suppose I have to make time by sacrificing something, somehow.

While I still don’t have much time for my book, it’s true that I tend to squander my time if I have a lot of it, whereas I make the most of my time when I don’t have much. Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! probably says it best. Read the rest of this entry »

Prologue-

1. a preliminary discourse; a preface or introductory part of a discourse, poem, or novel.
2. an introductory speech, often in verse, calling attention to the theme of a play.
3. the actor or actress who delivers this.
4. an introductory scene, preceding the first act of a play, opera, etc.
5. any introductory proceeding, event, etc.: Appetizing delicacies were the prologue to a long dinner.
–verb (used with object) 6. to introduce with or as if with a prologue. Read the rest of this entry »

(Yay! This is my 60th post. We’re also on the threshold of 5,000 hits. What a milestone on both counts. Thanks, all! ^_^)

Before I get too much further with writing scenes, I’d like to talk a little bit more about plot structure.

The plot is an unruly beast. There are many theories as to why a story works, or how to combine various elements to make the “ultimate plot combination”. The number of possible plot types is hotly debated, but it’s a growing list. We’re not talking about some sacred list that only adds a new plot once every 1000 years; Something like sixteen more have been added just within the last 100 years. So don’t listen to those old codgers that claim ‘everything under the sun has been done’, just like how inventors in the past always managed to invent new things, despite their stuffy compatriots claiming everything under the sun had already been invented. You CAN write something new.

Anyway, I feel lucky to have stumbled upon what I feel is a cool trick to writing good plots. (If it’s widely known info, forgive me. It’s definitely not widely known at my on-line stomping grounds, nor is it mentioned in any of my ‘how-to’ reading materials.)

But before I talk about that, I want to reiterate something->
I’m sure you’ve all seen Syd Field’s three-act plot structure. But just in case you haven’t, here they are (in my own words): Read the rest of this entry »