Latest / Mixed Perspectives Podcast / How to Start a Novel - Worldbuilding, Plotting & Writing Your First Draft | Ep 5
Transcript
- speaker-0: So the books I usually don't finish are fast food. They're not well written. The characters are not well developed. It's just they had an I it was it's content. Like I don't care about your content, content fills your walls. Like speaker-1: Is this why you never finish my books? That's one reason why I actually enjoy the Hobbit more than Lord of the Rings, as much sacrilegious as it is, because the Hobbit just gets to the point. Yeah. speaker-0: I mean, I disagree with everything you're saying. I know, I know. She wrote a book called The Left Handed Darkness, which is like speaker-1: Is the second one the right hand of darkness? Welcome everybody to our podcast, Mixed Perspectives. I am your host, Aaron, and this is. speaker-0: Manual speaker-1: And we are just two fro bros talking about writing, reading, and all nerdy things. last podcast we talked about writing, and we're gonna continue on that. Hopefully we don't ramble on too much. But we just want to talk about the writing process, whether it's world building that we like or outlining, winging it, all that stuff. We'll we'll just see. We'll just jump on on board and we'll find out what we're talking about. speaker-0: Alright, so Aaron, what when you have an idea for a story, what's your process? 'Cause nobody just I think this is the thing where it's some people maybe are afraid of writing, they have an idea they want to write. but then where do you start? 'Cause like when you pick up when you go to the library or go to a bookstore and you see, you know, something that's this thick, it's pretty intimidating. So can't be what's your process to de intimidize it? Intimidate that word up. speaker-1: Yeah. Well, we're writers, we can do whatever you want. speaker-0: yeah, sure. speaker-1: Well, one of the things I do is like I if you have an idea, well, usually I have an idea and then I'm like, okay, because we're writers, so we see like a movie or something, and some guy has some superpower or something. Like, that'd be cool, and just twist it. Like my my main book that I finished, the first one I ever finished was like two hundred something thousand words, my Maladin Remnants. I saw the Chronicles of Riddick with the main bad guy. And he like he has this power where he can like, you know, his ghost version goes one way and then he follows. And I thought that was really cool, but I like, Well, I can't just rip that off. And I thought, well, what if 'cause usually it's always like teleportation, like your ghosty self goes first. And so like, well, it was inverted. And then so I came up with that magic system and reverted you have to like think like if you want to go close to a wall, you have to make sure you stop because you're physically can't go through it unless like you have that ability. Or if you put your hand on someone, your physical person pushes them. So I just thought that was a fun play. and then I remember I had that world in magic system and some of the characters, and I just could not for the life of me come up with a plot. Like I just like so I'll just think about a plot and then that one I actually I fell I went to sleep and I woke up and I had the entire first and second book dreamed. Like I dreamed the entire thing. So I woke up and I just wrote on my phone and like I'd I'd wrote I think like fifteen pages on the Word document on my phone about the entire plot. and it stays pretty pretty true to it. so what I do is I have I have an idea and then I have my characters and then I say, okay, I have to have a plot. I don't need all the religions or races or all that jazz. I just need the main plot and the main characters and the magic system like semi-figured out. I I usually find out and my magic systems usually again are like combat or harder harder magics. I always find out when I discover them is when I write a fight scene. So sometimes I'll write a book with a certain magic and then I'll do the I'll write a fight scene first, like before anything. It doesn't even need to be canon. I just write it to see how it actually like plays out. And then that's how I kinda just discover the rules and like I like this, I don't like that. so that's really what I do. I'm I'm not an outliner or some people some people like, you know, like wanna have the whole thing outlined, blah, blah, blah. And and that's mostly because like, you know, that's how our mind structures work. I mean, there's Stephen King, who's a madman who doesn't outline anything and he just does it. But then like what I find is like those people who just wing it, which is like I'm like fifty fifty, if you just wing it, their endings usually sometimes are like the it ends with a big alien thing and a monster in a sewer somehow. You know, like it's just random stuff. But then if you outline, you usually have it more structured, but then you run in the problem of like you gonna get your outline perfect and so There's that fear and stuff. So I found there's a healthy medium. What I do is I get a I get a usually a magic system comes first or character idea. I come up with a plot and I figure out the genre. Like Emmanuel actually helped me with my one I'm writing currently, which is like a fantasy western steampunk. And originally I thought of it maybe sci-fi, and I remember asking him, I'm like, I just trying to think of this. And E Man was more like, Just trust your heart, bro. So it wasn't really super helpful. But speaker-0: Take it wisdom. speaker-1: Yeah. But then I just I I found that and I found the genre. I found the thing. I'm like, awesome, let's just go. I'll outline a rough plot and it's a hundred percent can be scrapped. I give my pre like I give myself permission. I can scrap this if I want to, but I just give it like a a plot. So like character A introduced, character B, the crews meet, they go to this main heist. I don't have to know all the details, I just have to know a plot and have a idea of an end. And then I just go. So and I found like you know me and Emmanuel were just talking. We have a buddy who has all these ideas in writing and stuff. And then like he he's never written yet. He's like, I gotta do this outline. And and that for me personally just frustrates me where I'm just like, just do it, man. But I like, you know, it's just one of those. So that's my process. what's what's your process? speaker-0: My process is usually I have a scene or I'll have a phrase or I'll have a first line in a chapter. That's often how it is. I also dream a lot. and a lot of my dreams have become story ideas. So for me, it's usually a scene or a statement or a line of dialogue. That's usually how a whole world will come. Or or like concept art's a big one for me. So like I'll see Yeah. some of my earliest memories, I I don't know where I got it, and I don't know what happened to it, which I'm very sad about, but I had the concept art book for Return of the Jedi and it was the guy who did all the spaceship designs. Mm-hmm. And I would just I just I mean, I would just we used to drive from Indiana to Massachusetts and back when I was I don't know, you probably don't remember those days. speaker-1: We taught. No, I d I don't remember it. We were born I was born in Massachusetts and my brother and you were born in Massachusetts. You were born I speaker-0: I was born in Connecticut. speaker-1: always forget that. We we lived there for a second. speaker-0: Yeah. but w so when we were, I mean, you were we before we actually moved to Indiana, we would we would take we would drive from Massachusetts to Indiana, which is I think probably eight or ten hours. Sounds right. I remember one of those drives, I would just look at the concept art of this I just had this, it was this thick book, Return of Jedi, it had all these really cool images. But there's something about, at least for me, a visual that a whole world can snap into place. Like there's I'm thinking right now, there's a there's a concept artist, sh. She's Chinese and I can't pronounce her name. Maybe we can find the show notes and I could put it in the show notes. But speaker-1: It's right here. speaker-0: she just does these really they're almost like sketch style drawings of imaginary worlds. And anytime like, but there's something about that art that just there's something about the visual, seeing a visual of that art, I can see characters in a world like that. And for me, it's okay, what kind of life would happen in a world like this? And that's basically how I come up with the story. Or at least the world of a story. and then trying to figure out what would characters do within that world and then then the hard part is like, okay, what would they what's an actual s interesting story in that world? And then for me then it becomes outlining it. Try and at least have an ending. I think that's really important. Having an ending to kind of aim all your activity towards 'cause otherwise at least for me, I've tried to write without having a strong ending and it just I just write a lot of words that don't go anywhere. speaker-1: I'm at ninety thousand words and nothing is happening. speaker-0: happened done that many times. Dude. And then also a big thing for me is and part of this is because of screenwriting, learning the structure of what stories need to be actually a real story, opposed to just a bunch of things that happen. So like what's the inciting incident, what's the point of no return? Like okay, what's my sec what's happening in the second act, which is always the hardest act. books often will even have more than three acts. They may have five or six or seven. but having a good understanding of what's hap what are the main beats in each act to get to the end. And then like you, like I think there is a moment where you have to choose between, okay, do I follow the plot that's already been written. But now that I know the characters, okay, the character actually wouldn't do that. So do I change the character, do I change the plot? How could I, you know, still have the catharsis of the ending I want, but change the plot so the character feels true. And then it's just writ it's just for me it's writing scenes that I r enjoy. Like I I think that's always helpful. speaker-1: Skip around? Do you like skip around or you just go through one dude? speaker-0: Skip around. I didn't used to do that, but I've found that that's helps me feel like I have momentum. speaker-1: Do you find that sometimes though if you skip around you don't have anything to look forward to? 'Cause sometimes that's like you know, you you just you find 'cause okay. 'Cause sometimes I'll I'll have a scene that I really want to get to, but like I'll like, you know, scene chapter ten is an awesome fight scene between these two guys. And like I'll sometimes I will say, I'm not gonna write it yet and I just I go through the slog to get there. And that way it's motivation. I think I used to skip around more when I was like on my other chapters. I'd write a school fight scene, I'd write this scene, and sometimes I still will. But I did find like sometimes I just discipline myself of like, nope, you gotta earn it. You know, and I don't know. It it's either here or there. I was just curious 'cause some people like Stephen King, the reason that he doesn't outline is 'cause he says like he already feels that he's written it then, if he's on the outline. So it's no more like creative fun. So I was just curious if it was like for you 'cause I'm like I'm like not all the way there, it's like a little bit. If I skip around too much, I already know this cool scene's done, I don't have as much motivation to get to like this cool battle scene if you know I've already written it. So speaker-0: Yeah, I mean you can always go back and finesse it 'cause by the time you get there. Yeah. And especially for screenplays, because you're doing something that's ninety pages y opposed to you know speaker-1: So for for those who don't know anything about screenplays, when it comes to like each each how many pages is ha actually how many minutes. So can you explain that real quick? 'Cause some people might not know speaker-0: that. Yeah, so the structure of a screenplay is very specific and very precise. So the way that the math works is every page on your screenplay equals a minute of finished film. So usually you're trying to write a screenplay that's like ninety pages 'cause that means it's about ninety minutes. And that's usually about an hour and half is the standard length, the standard minimum length of a movie. Unless you're writing like the Lord of the Rings and you got like a three or four hour movie and they're writing that's it's wild. But it's also tough 'cause you wanna be as disciplined as you can. And there becomes a moment, especially in bigger productions where you have a budget of two hundred fifty thousand dollars mil two thousand dollars. Two hundred and fifty million dollars. Well they'll start I mean, they'll start filming before they have a finish screenplay, but they have the money and the time to kind of force it into shape. But yeah, there's a discipline that needs to happen, which has helped me a lot as a writer. 'cause I used to just kind of write like when it was I was writing more novel type of Mediums. It was more just flowing. But I think writing screenplays and then being able to apply that to the way I structure a novel has been really helpful to kind of feel because I'm gonna be honest, most books I don't finish. Like as far as like when I'm reading, speaker-1: Yeah, you just DNF it? speaker-0: I just I'm done. Like if if a book is not gonna grab me in the first few chapters with either good character, good plot, or good world or good writing. If it has phenomenal writing. Great prose, but the world is okay or the characters are okay, I'll usually stick with it. But if it doesn't have those if it doesn't have any of that, there's no there's I'm forty two, I'm not gonna waste my life raising stuff that's garbage. So speaker-1: I think we all get to a certain spot where it's like 'cause I used to not really DNF a whole lot, which that means for you people it's do not finish. speaker-0: People. speaker-1: for you people don't know, I don't know. You people. yeah, and some people like feel bad because they already either they already bought it or if it's a library, obviously not bad. but like, you know, I've done Audible, which is how I do ninety nine percent of my reading nowadays, which I've already talked about. but like yeah, I'll I used to not f I used to always try to finish it, but now it's one of those like I just I have other things to go on and so but it's one of those it's like you're definitely more I feel like you're more of a I was thinking about this earlier, 'cause you're all more like the purple pros and all that fun stuff. Like you find that really speaker-0: Purple pros? speaker-1: purple pros. I think I got that from Sanderson. it's very like, you know like a a good way to describe it would be looking through a stained glass or looking through a regular window, right? Like Tolkien, Lord of Rings, very stained glass. Everything is super, you know, the the trees and the sky and the wind and the blah blah blah. Like very like, okay, get to the point. Aragon standing. Or it's one of those like Aragon walks in the room and then he looks right. Other purple poses, Aragon looks in the room and it smokes like blah blah blah and it blah blah blah. So and neither one's neither here or there. But I actually personally I find myself always more like when it comes to like really elegant writing, I'm just like it's cool, you have ability that I can't do, but get to the freaking point. You know, like like so that's one of the reasons why I actually enjoy the Hobbit More than Lord of Rings, as much sacrilegious as it is, 'cause the Hobbit just gets to the point. And like the Lord of Rings he just, you know, does all this nice and flowery stuff. Writing I can't do, can't touch. But I'm just like, just go up the hill and talk to the king, bro. Like, you know? So speaker-0: Yeah, I mean I disagree with everything you're saying. I know. speaker-1: I know. And it's one of those like I know I know all the snobby riders and stuff will be like, Well, technically well like this is what I was saying. I feel like you're one of those like wine clients who's like, Well, this has a hint of wa speaker-0: I mean I am a snob when it comes to speaker-1: Coffee. speaker-0: coffee and as many things as I can try to be. I'm not a wine snob, unfortunately. I just can't I can't I can't find I don't drink. I can't find it. I've been trying to I I not can't I can't find wine. My office is actually above a winery. Like wine? Yeah, so two floors below me I have a wine shop. I don't have the palette. I'm just I'm just unfortunately not refined enough. But when it comes so here's I was thinking about this earlier, actually. So pros And we all have our own we all we have we all have there's a range of like what how much prose people love versus just, you know, cut and dry, blah blah. I do think though, prose and prose being like the intentionality bit in the poetry of writing, I do think that is what makes a story last. So I do so it's almost like fast food versus a good restaurant. Like most that's the so the books I usually don't finish are fast food. Like They're not well written, the characters are not well developed. It's just they had night it was it's content. Like I don't care about your content, content fills your walls. Like speaker-1: That's why you never finish my books? I know. speaker-0: I finished your book. And you d you have you write better than I think you think you do, but you have more prose than I think you realize. But I think so like Lord of the Rings I also Lord of the Rings was written almost a hundred years ago. People don't write that way anymore. Like if you read, you know, some of this old the older stuff, it just has more people just weren't as rushed to get through things. So I think that's that's an element. But I do think like when you're and this is kind of like I don't know, it just depends on why you write. I want to write stuff or I find the that I have a desire to write stuff that feels like it can last, like it has some stability. not that I'm that great of a writer, but th when I write like I was talking about The Last Unicorn a couple podcasts ago. reading that book, it's very prose. It's like, but it is absolutely beautiful. And what it does, what the prose does, and I think prose does this more than anything else is it takes you it's it takes you a step further than what the words are saying yeah face value. It's less it's less plot and more like I don't know philosophy I guess. So like and unless you read the book you're not gonna know what I'm talking about. But there's a there's a moment at the end of this book the last unicorn is looking for other unicorns is basically she's trying to figure out if she's the la literally the last unicorn. And there's a scene at the end and it's it's poetry. I don't know how else works it's it's it's haunting You don't know how to feel. You're left with there's not a lot of plot in the book. It's just a lot like some things that happen. You meet these interesting characters, beautiful imagery, but it sticks with you in a way that fast food books just don't. Like and it's just and I think about it all the time. Like it's just but I don't think that's necessarily how it's supposed to be or not supposed to be. I think people just prefer different things. But yes, getting back to what you're saying, I do like prose. I'm reading a book. We're reading two books right now. One is by Ursula Le Guin, one of the best writers of all time in the in the genre. speaker-1: What is what is the main series that she does? I know the name, I can't I can't think of a book. speaker-0: so she did a few she's done a few series. Wizard of Earthsea quartet is like one of hers. she also does the shoot, I think it's called like the Hainish Chronicles. She wrote a book called The Left Handed Darkness, which is like a speaker-1: Is the second one the right hand of darkness? If not, there is a missed opportunity. I'm just saying. speaker-0: There's I don't think it's enough. So basically it's a it's really clever. So basically she wrote all these science fiction. Some of them are short stories. So I have this one right here called the The The Worlds of Exile in Illusion. My wife got for me for for my birthday. but it's basically a book of short stories or novellas. Yeah, the Hainish series. And so the Hainish series is this. far future where humanity is colonized as stars but gotten disconnected from each other. Okay. And so then each book follows a I forget what they're called, but basically there's like a central group of humans who've rediscovered how to travel the stars and they're trying to reconnect all the different groups. But everyone has become they're still kind they're still human, but they've all evolved to be like different. and so each book kind of and it's It's her way of exploring a lot of different topics. like the one I'm reading right now is you follow it's like a world with like three or four different races, and it's all about like there's a warrior race, but this group comes in and basically eradicates war, but the warrior race, their whole society is built around war, so they don't know how to be a society anymore, so they're collapsing. It's really fascinating, but that's cool. All that's to say it's very Her her prose is is just it just gets you. It just grabs you. some other stuff, like I'm reading another one right now, which I won't name because I don't want to throw the writer under the bus, but it's just like it's I probably what I shouldn't do is read Ursula Le Guin and anybody else the same time. It's just not fair. It's not fair to the other writer. It's a it's an interesting I think it's might could be an interesting world, so maybe I'll pause. Yeah. But but it's a lot easier and quicker to get through simpler writing than it is prose writing. so I don't know. I mean I'm I'm rambling, but when it comes to the way I I want to write and the way that I think of story, I'm trying to think through like how do I not just like what's happening from a plot standpoint, but like is there a deeper way of communicating this? Can I attempt certain fun prose approaches? I do anything with the subtext. speaker-1: Like that's one thing that I think books can do that movies cannot. Like movies have things on books that like, you know, you can visually you have a score. A score alone can just like I mean you hear like the Shire doo doo doo doo doo man I tell you just instant. It's I had that as my alarm clock for like two years. And every morning I just woke up happy. It was it was great. It's brilliant. speaker-0: that's a brilliant idea. speaker-1: It was during high school, I think, and I just like let's do this front of kind of thing. but they have so they have that kind of going for them, but then like The the pros and stuff, you can one, you can get into depth of a character more than any book. I mean any movie, but they have pros, like you can just like be poetry and then mean so much into like, you know, so many words. So it does definitely have its if its place and stuff. It's one of those things too where it's like, I feel like I mean, for everything, especially everything nerdy, there's always a gatekeepers where they're like, Well, if you don't actually read this and you're not like this, which is kind of like our first podcast where people didn't consider fantasy like literature. Kind of the same thing, just it's not the gatekeepers. And so I d I just still personally I still enjoy books I guess that are just like there for the story and stuff. like I don't really care about I I I I enjoy and I can appreciate stained glass. But a lot of times I just wanna see the trees. You know? Like I just wanna and that that was purpley too. See, I can do it. But But I mean like sometimes I just wanna get the story. And so I think so Brendan Sanderson, for instance, he some people like bash on him for like not doing really purpley prose, but like I never find it not like I still find you know beautiful things it's not like Tolkien or anything and I find like real time for instance he's probably the most in depth of what people are wearing and what this looks like and what this like that's like as high as I can go without getting like annoyed. Like Tolkien I I again I love Tolkien and stuff but it's one of those like I reread it recently and I'm like dude just get to the point man like and again it's one of those like it's and yeah it's me, not him, whatever. but I do find like I can appreciate pros. I like pros. I try to write I know I can't write to their level at all. So like I don't even try to like attempt to be that kind of person. I just write when I want to write and get the scene and then like go back and try to flower it up a little bit. I mean, I know we we talked about pros a lot. Sorry for those people who don't care about pros whatsoever. before we go on to the next episode, I kinda wanna talk a little bit about when do you find the best time to do like quick revisions? Do you like write? And then revise at the same time? Like sometimes, like, for instance, I'll write a chapter and then sometimes I'll go back and then reread it and stuff and then go on. Or if I'm in a hurry or I have a great like just idea I want to get out, you just keep on writing and then go back like later. Which one do you find yourself? And same thing with like when you do screenplays, do you like do you go back and edit it as you go, or do you just get it done and then go back and fix stuff? speaker-0: Like I'm mean I've played around with this a lot. independence phase of life. So when I was doing when I was doing a lot of writing before having kids, I would write in the morning, create just the creative writing part, and then in the evening I would edit. speaker-1: free time. speaker-0: I know and I don't have those that time anywhere. So usually what I'll do now is I will as much as I can not revise in the same session I'm trying to do creative, like yeah, fresh stuff. 'Cause they're different parts of your brain. Your brain so that's why certain people write really well in the morning because your brain hasn't woken up fully. So like the part of your brain that makes judgment calls just isn't there. Or some people are that type of late late at night. So I used to be that person in the evening, like late at I would write, you know, or do any creative creative work. usually like between eleven and three AM I would I would do my writing or do whatever it was, whatever creative thing I was doing. Because that part of your brain, that judgment center that says this is a bad idea, just isn't that isn't either awake if you went it went to bed. But you need that judgment center to be able to look at stuff and go, okay, this doesn't make sense. I need to tweak this or whatever. So I usually try to separate those. I don't usually ever try to do ex Nilo fresh stuff while doing editing at the same time. And it always helps. I usually try to also I usually try to get as much done before editing as I can. I try to just get And the other thing I do This is a I don't know if it's a pro tip or a time waster, I'm not sure yet. I usually do my writing in a separate document. I do my sketch I call it a sketchwriting. So I am I have an Evernote. I use Evernote for everything. an Evernote, especially for screenwriting, I will write almost a whole scene. like free style. I don't worry about structure, I don't or I don't worry about screenwriting but speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Yeah, I'll just do the character's name, dialogue, character name dialogue, thing that happens, thing that happens, character name dialogue. and I'll get so that I can write really quickly that way, and it's really helpful for me to just get the idea out of my brain. But then the process of translating that Evernote to the actual screenplay software, I basically rewrite the whole thing. And that's almost like a revision process where I'm like, okay, I did this. Now that I'm writing, okay, that doesn't really make as much sense, so I can kind of tweak it. I've I find that process really helpful. Yeah, speaker-1: Sounds like it. speaker-0: because it's there's when you're writing a screenplay, there's just like this element of you're looking at the formatting so much. Way more than like it's just there's an extra there's like this extra step that you have, okay, I have this idea for this description, but okay, I to right now I've got one too many characters, it's going too long and now it's hanging over to the next line, which means it's gonna push the whole screenplay down a line, which means now I'm going into ninety two pages and not just this whole Bring it except for the team. It's a it's it's hard, man. I mean tough speaker-1: I don't do it. speaker-0: it's a tough format. but it's also it you still have to get the written word down. That's the only way to make yeah make anything visual. speaker-1: I do know when I was in college, I took like a sociology class and I I hated it. And so I actually had like, you know, notebooks and stuff. And so it looked like I was taking notes, but I was actually writing my story. And so like I wrote pages and pages of a story, and then I would take those and then put it on my laptop and then I transfer it onto the computer and stuff. and so that's something that's kind of like similar, where I would just do that and handwriting and handwriting like it also you one, you can't write as fast 'cause you physically unless you're amazing, like I can't write as fast. so you think more about like what's happening a bit more. So I actually found like my my first drafts is cleaner than if I wrote it on a like a keyboard like a typeboard. typeboard school on a keyboard. Yeah. Like I I find that like I mean my spelling's probably just the same. But I did find like it my I analyzed what was going on 'cause it's like, do I is this worth my pen stroke of doing this than just like so I know it's something similar. Mm-hmm. okay, this one's going a little long. So next time we're gonna talk more about writing and stuff, if that's interesting to you guys, and then we'll probably talk about books as well. I just challenge you guys if let us know what you guys do. If you have written, if you've not written, are you scared to write? If this process of, you know, are you an outliner, are you just a pantser or a winger? do you like coming up with all these ideas, or are you just like, let's just figure it out and let's have fun. And do you like purple pros? So you are you are you offended that I find Tolkien's Purple pros of Lord of Rings less appealing than the Hobbit? If so, come at me. Just give me be nice, okay? Okay. Until next time, everybody, we are Miss Perspectives Podcast, and I hope to see you soon. Like and share and subscribe, and we will see you next time. Peace out. Peace.