The Fantasy genre is intimidating!

It takes a lot to get good at writing, and several writers talk about the importance of scrapping their first novel or two or three. Even the successful first-book stories often leave out the fifteen times the story was reworked before it was ready.

You're 30,000 words into a story. Keep going with them. Scratch them. For whatever reason you want. The truth is, it's a very early step for you in the process of becoming a writer, and what matters isn't the word count or the quality of that first story but the writing process and skillset that you're developing. Focus on that. When you're a better writer you can decide whether the story you're working on has any merit and the best way to tap into it. In the meantime, focus on that process.

 

I think there may be an official rule that states if you don't at one point or another think your writing stinks and should be burned to save humanity from it, then you can't call yourself a writer.

Originality doesn't lie in the ideas. Originality lies in the execution. What I mean by that is what makes a story original is you, the person. Your life experiences, your views on the world, they're uniquely yours, and that's where the originality comes from.

Let's take the tried and true tale of Romeo and Juliet. How many times has that story been retold? Look at Westside Story. Romeo and Juliet in New York with gangs instead of families. Look and the Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DeCaprio. They set it in modern time between Mafia Empires, with guns, but kept the Shakespearean dialogue.

Every idea has been used many times over. If you put up an idea for people to critique, it's almost 100% assured someone will say, "Oh yeah, that's like X." So if you intend to find that original idea, good luck. It'll be a long time coming, and you'll never write anything EVER.

In addition, originality IMHO is overrated. There's nothing wrong with a well told story that's not all that original. People like the familiar. They're drawn to similar things. Look at James Cameron's Avatar. The story isn't all that original, but it was well told, and millions flocked to watch it.

For me, I worry about writing a good story, original or not, and let everything else fall where it may. Because as long as I'm glad I get to find out what happened, then it was worth writing.

 

I began writing in 2001 and I didn't have a "golden idea" but rather a need to fill hours of boredom at work with something to make me look busy. I wrote. A lot. I wrote ten novels over the next ten years, and honestly, looking at them now, the first three should never EVER be read by anyone. But they weren't a waste of my time. They taught me to write and to care about writing, and I just honestly never worried about whether they were "readable" because no one was reading them but me. The thing is, it's YOUR story, and it doesn't matter if you're writing the most overdone cliche or whether you have a completely original idea that no one's ever written before.

Just write and work as hard as you can. That's all you can do. Confidence is hard-won. It doesn't come easy. Writing is honestly the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

Anxiety and self-criticism are natural responses. After all, stories are meant to be shared. I didn't worry because I wasn't writing to share. I wrote to entertain myself. I'd encourage you to do the same. Write for YOU. And the worst thing that can happen at the end of that, is that you don't love the story you wrote, and you begin something new.

There is no harm in writing even a truly awful story. If you don't share it, no one will ever know. But what if you finish this story, and you learn how to put those writing tools to good use? What if the story is entertaining, exciting, and fresh? That, honestly, comes more from the voice and style of a piece, and less from the concept that began the inspiration.

There are many great threads here that can help advise you HOW to write, but really, that's a tricky place to begin. This article pretty much sums up why. Writing With Confidence

The thing is, it takes time to build confidence, and the best way to do that is to not care. If you care too deeply about the story you're writing, it hurts when you feel like you got something wrong. That's the fear voice in your head that says, "Oh, that's not good. You have to do better or people won't like it." I mean...the first time I submitted a story to an agent, the first thing I did was cut all the sex and violence out because I was...wait for it...afraid I might offend someone. I was afraid of offending ANYONE. I was so worried that even a single person disliking my work would mean it was crap. Looking back, I realize how silly that was. But at the time, I just didn't know. So I wrote a very bland edit, and sent that off, and it was rejected...um, because it was boring and horrible.

We've all come here to learn more, to engage with other writers, to find support. You're in good company. I think most of us have felt as you do.

Don't listen to the demons in your head. They want you to fail. Don't engage in what I call "fear-writing" where you make choices in your work just because you worry someone will hate it if you use your own voice, use a cliche, make the love story sappy, write a gay character, don't have all the answers, mix genres, have a bittersweet ending, etc. etc.. Don't listen to that voice in your head that's telling you you can't do it. Know that you CAN do it. IN fact, this article may help you get past those things you aren't good at and focus on the things you think you're really good at: One Letter Every Writer Should Write

And if it's too hard to work on the project that's causing the anxiety, please try writing something you don't care so deeply about. Enter one of our challenges, start a journal and write things you see every day that maybe aren't amazing to others, but inspire you to think and feel. Write anything you can. Call it practice or whatever you need to, to allow yourself free rein. Even the nest writers in the world have these feelings.

I recently checked out an audiobook from the library. Bud by Bird, by Ann Lamott. I highly recommend that. Try to get the audio book. It is 3 hours long, and i think it's excellent. She goes over all this stuff, and puts in a way that makes it really accessible to expert or beginner alike. She'll make sure you don't feel alone in this self doubt, for sure! Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life: Anne Lamott: 9780385480017: Amazon.com: Books

Best wishes. Hang in there. You must either choose to listen to the voices, or tell them to f*** off, and keep writing! Here's two songs I play before I sit down to write a scene that has me terrified.

Eli Young Band; Even if it Breaks Your Heart [ON-SCREEN LYRICS] - YouTube

Brave - Sara Bareilles (Lyrics) - YouTube

 

To springboard off this a bit. A few years ago just a little before Game of Thrones came on TV, I had this idea for a story and the world. All the known lands were surrounded by a wall and there were tales about what lay beyond the wall, beings known as the Others. Sound familiar?

I'd never read Game of Thrones before that. A friend had been urging me to do so for ages, but I never did. When the TV show became I hit. I decided to check it out, and discovered what GRRM did around ten years before.

This was my reaction.



After that I had two choices, give up or go on. I went on. My story was different than what GRRM did and was doing. It just had similar elements. I finished the story and I'm glad I did. I'm still editing it, but if I get it right, I think it'll be a great story, original or not.

 

Yeah . . . . I personally feel that the discussion about ideas and execution is completely misleading. You've got ideas on every page of a book. In fact every sentence expresses an idea. I think the notion that creativity pales behind execution misses the fact that creativity is part of your execution. It's one of the skills you should be developing as a writer.

I mean, sure, we tend to focus on the story concept, and not the little micro-uses of creativity that you need to employ as you write. That is, in some ways it's worse - we talk about "ideas" too much, but we don't even learn much about ideation or how to employ good ideas consistently throughout your story.

Instead, we repeat that ideas are cheap, and that they don't matter, because execution - execution something or other, which is just another way of hiding from the tougher discussions.

Last week I picked up a book on creativity - Idea Stormers by Bryan Mattimore - and one thing that was immediately apparent while reading through it: The genre advice on creativity is extraordinarily lacking. We write fantasy. We could literally write about anything. And we don't even discuss how we can explore those possibilities, let alone ways to be creative later in the work, long after we decide on the concepts.

 

So, "ideation" is a word they use in business and academic circles for the creation of new ideas. They use it because "brainstorming" has a specific old meaning in the literature, where a group of people just shout out whatever they can think of as they go. Brainstorming really isn't effective.

I'm not very far into Idea Stormers, but the core concepts so far are all very familiar to me. It's all about finding and changing the triggers you're using to inspire the ideas you're getting (something I've been talking about for a long while now). The book is written for groups in business, so I'm not going to get into it the specifics.

But taking a few of the principles and applying them to writing fantasy . . . .

Just for instance - seriously - make a list of the things you think of when somebody says . . . . ohh, I don't know, "Orc."

- Evil / Aggressive
- Big
- Teethy
- Green
- Slave Warriors
- Infighting
- Tough

^ These are some of the things you might think of when you're writing about orcs. What, to me, is the central or defining part? I'm going to pick Slave Warriors. I want a group of slave warriors who feel unique. I'm going to develop them by changing the triggers.

- Evil / Aggressive = Cautious, Strategic
- Big = Non-Humanoid
- Teethy = Handsy
- Green = Camouflaged
- Infighting = Submissive/Loyal
- Tough = Determined

Using these new notions as my prompts, I can start to think of a very different kind of slave warriors. For instance, trying to reconcile loyalty and slavery, I might develop a system where the creatures have an "Alpha" that has led them into slavery. Thinking about "non-humanoid" and "handsy," I might develop them as insects, or as 4-armed centaurs, or as gorillas who carry extra weapons in their feet and tails. Thinking about camouflaged and strategic, perhaps they have a way of surrounding you before you realize they're even there.

Putting it all together gives me a type of wolf-chimp-hybrid that fights in packs, attacks from the treetops, shows fierce loyalty to an alpha that volunteered them as slaves, and terrorizes a countryside without ever presenting a single army to destroy.

By changing the triggers, I've just taken a massive leap in developing the Slave Warriors for a story.

The skill, of course, is in identifying the right triggers, finding the best way to change them, and then drawing more from them. And, y'know, doing it quickly in your head as you write so you don't feel like an obsessive planning person.

 

If anyone is interested I'll start a thread on it later this evening.