Swordsmaster Update: The Long and the Short of It and What Rules There Be (and coupon news, of course)

Last week I crossed the 20,000 word mark (out of novelette and into novella territory) on the first draft of Swordsmaster. This being my first attempt at novel length fiction (well, first attempt in over 30 years, but who’s counting? Besides, it’s the same story. I can just see the blurb online now: SWORDSMASTER! OVER 30 YEARS IN THE MAKING!), I thought I’d have another go at sharing what I’m learning about the process – or more specifically, MY process.

You see, there is no approved methodology for creating art – at least not art that’s created by an individual. Collaborations have to be built some sort of organization that the collaborators agree to or nothing will get done, but there are as many ways to create a story as there are authors – more really, because even for one author (at least me, so that’s one author) there are differences between how each of my individual stories make it to term.

There are also no hard and fast rules in writing. There are guidelines and there are costs (Magic has a price, dearie!) You learn what the rules are so that you can evaluate how much you can break them without totally torpedoing your project. And we all break some of them – if we didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between us. If you want to stand out, you break different ones in different ways, and you hope that you did just enough to catch the reader’s attention, but not enough to make them stop reading.

There is definitely a difference between writing short and long fiction. When writing short, I write a first draft in my chosen writing tool – I use MS Word and take advantage of color highlighting and side comments to keep notes of various things I know I will have to come back and shore up. On a short story, there is so little going on (because it is SHORT), I may need a couple of character or place names, research whether a weapon might work a particular way, but generally there isn’t that much I have to check into, and I’ve already put in almost all the details before I finish the first draft. After this, I make a pass looking for inconsistencies, fill in names, and catch grammar and other mundane issues. I then pass it on to my reader (if I have a reader, that is), or wait 3 weeks or so and make another pass. That’s three drafts total to get to a finished product.

I know there are going to be MANY, MANY passes in writing this novel. I’m pretty good at STORY – it seems to just spill out as I write, but because there is SO MUCH MORE going on, I have decided that I can’t afford to slow down the story in the first pass filling in details. I can see from the notes I’m making so far that completing the first draft is NOT going to mean that I’m almost done. After the first draft, I will have to make a pass to make sure that the story itself works. Multiple passes to fill in details (for example, I can visualize sword-play just fine, but now I will have to describe it with more varied words. All my descriptions will be have to be redone to avoid common word repetition.

There will be passes to make sure that the WAY each individual character speaks and behaves is consistent throughout (possibly a pass for every character who is mentioned more than half a dozen times.) And there’s even the VOICE of the story to check for consistency. This isn’t a problem on a short piece of fiction that I wrote over a couple of weeks – but it will take me at least half a year to make it through the first draft of Swordsmaster; I suspect the VOICE will change multiple times along the way, and I’ll have to pull it all back together.

When I set my goal to write a novel this year, I really didn’t think it through beyond the increase in word count. Well, we live and we learn (or die trying J.)

Just saying…

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William’s 5^th collection of speculative short fiction (Yet Still Even More Things I Could Get OUT OF MY MIND) is still available with a coupon on Smashwords. (Just saying…) Here’s the link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/548456?ref=NoTimeToThink

Use coupon code XW25A to save 50% off the list price at check out on smashwords. The coupon is good through Sunday, June 21^st. Enjoy!

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William Mangieri’s writing can be found in many places, including:

• His Amazon Author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B008O8CBDY
• Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/william-mangieri?store=book&keyword=william+mangieri
• Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/NoTimeToThink
• Createspace: https://www.createspace.com/pub/simplesitesearch.search.do?sitesearch_query=william+mangieri&sitesearch_type=STORE

Connect with him, go to “William Mangieri’s Writing Page” on Facebook (and LIKE and FOLLOW), at: http://www.facebook.com/NoTimeToThink

Or on his Goodreads author page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6893616.William_Mangieri