Up to a week ago, I thought novels weren't my thing. Over the years I've started writing three novels and haven't managed to finish even one complete draft.
The first novel I tried to write was based on a Dungeons & Dragons game I ran for my three brothers. Well, when I say "based on", I mean pretty much a transcription of the D&D game with some adjustments here and there. If I recall correctly, and I may not, I had probably a hundred and thirty typed letter-size pages - about a hundred thousand words - when I deleted the whole thing off the family PC.
This was back in high school. It was the first D&D game I'd ever run, if you don't count the aborted single-session game where I realized after an hour or two that we all needed to read the rulebook again. My brothers had fun with the game, which obviously meant I was a good dungeon master, and maybe this story is worth writing down!
One hundred thousand words in, after showing what I had to my parents and a couple of relatives, I had an epiphany: I wasn't a very good writer. I was in high school and had no real practice or training in writing fiction. When compared to real novels, like The Lord of the Rings or the Thrawn trilogy (Star Wars), my story was formulaic, full of old tropes that I hadn't thought to dress up or disguise. An ancient evil has returned, the characters have to collect four MacGuffins hidden in four dungeons to unlock the dungeon where the weapons that can destroy the ancient evil are hidden. Yawn. So I deleted it.
(sidebar: I don't mean to say I was a horrible dungeon master and writer who shouldn't dungeon master or write things. There were some good ideas in there. I was a new dungeon master and writer who still had a lot to learn. The next D&D game I ran, which I called Ravenshore, was a lot better in almost every way. When I had another couple of years of experience I ran Ravenshore for a new group of players in university, better than the first time. With feedback from that run, and experience from several more campaigns, I have more improvements in mind and want to run it a third time in the future... but that's a story for another blog.)
The second novel I tried to write was based on a concept of a man stuck in two different times, switching between them each time he goes to sleep, holding himself together by building nearly identical lives in both eras but desperately yearning for a way to break his "problem" and live only one life. The story introduced the concept of the time-split life, then jumped into a shake-up: he met an identical man in both times, a man who seemed to be watching him. In the end he'd have to choose which of his two families he'd abandon.
I wanted to write it as a sci-fi noir mystery story, and I quickly banged out a strong beginning and end, but I had no middle. I introduced the core concept, then I introduced the hook for the mystery, and then jumped straight to the conclusion with no idea what to put in between. I think the problem was that I hadn't seen enough mystery stories to have any idea how to build up the complexity I'd need for a full novel. A little later I decided the ending was sickeningly positive and preachy and changed it, but may have swung too far in the opposite direction. I still had no plans for a middle so I shelved the idea after about twenty pages of writing.
The third novel I tried to write was going to be a sci-fi adventure epic of a ship's crew on a mission to remap and rebuild the fringes of a human civilization that had gone dark sixty years ago when all faster-than-light communication technology failed. I mapped out systems and planets, and even came up with some reasonably plausible scientific explanations for how the ships' weapons, shields, gravity, and drive systems worked (or at least, a friend studying space engineering didn't tell me any of it was blatantly terribly wrong).
This time the problem was that all my efforts went into the setting, and the "characters" did only what was necessary to get the reader to the next bit of worldbuilding. I pushed the main character arc too hard and too fast, and tried too had to make the future seem progressive about gender. I ended up writing an introductory adventure and putting the whole thing aside because I ran out of steam without any ideas for a major story arc or characters that actually seemed like people instead of plot devices.
At this point I decided I just wasn't a novel guy - I could write good short stories and video game reviews and D&D campaigns, but not novels. That was fine, lots of good writers don't write novels. I kept doing my other stuff.
Recently I decided that when writing D&D I shouldn't just focus on one core idea - the more I toss in, the richer and more complex each world would be. With that in mind, I was going over some of my dozen or so half-baked D&D world ideas. One of them was for a setting where there was the mortal world and a parallel ethereal world where souls went after death, with all kinds of specifics on how various types of ghosts and undead worked. This is exactly what I'd been thinking about: a world that could be interesting, but could be a lot more interesting with even more stuff going on. So I tossed in even more stuff.
Where it really took off was when it occurred to me that this setting would be way cooler if I skipped the standard D&D fantasy ideas and instead had a strong 1940s/1950s noir theme alongside parallel worlds of ghosts, spirits, and dreams. That combination suggested some possible characters, which suggested a possible story and meaning, which in turn suggested more worldbuilding and history, and so on and so forth.
All of a sudden I feel like I've got the full package tumbling around in my head: a three-dimensional protagonist with complex motivations and relationships, a rich world with tons of room for exploration and expansion, and a long-term story arc and antagonist with personal connections to the protagonist that will allow for change and growth, with some actual meaning to boot.
And before I know it my word count is over nine thousand.
I'm starting to suspect I might finally have a real potential novel.
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