Welcome

Welcome to Rain Symphony, phoenix's weblog/personal site. Here you will find my thoughts about life, as well as whatever other random knickknacks I decide to put on here. Enjoy your stay.



Progress Report

Started writing Draft 2 of EK I. Now that I've made a list of things that should be changed, my editing process involves a lot of cutting and pasting from the original, but also a fair amount of rewriting. Particularly as my sloppy first draft writing methods means that a lot of characters and plot points changed while I was writing the draft, so all inconsistencies have to be fixed.

I've discovered that I enjoy language editing. There's something very satisfying about smoothing about the language and dialogue, and figuring what works and what sounds nice on a micro level.

Tags: writing

phoenix on January 27, 2012 ~ Comment?

Even More Ramblings

So. I've been thinking a lot lately about the second draft of EK I, and I've come up with a list of plot edits. The first draft (or draft 1.5, as I call it) grew to 53,000 words after some tinkering I did, but after I figured out the problems I mentioned in my last entry, I realized a lot of those words would probably have to be scrapped and rewritten.

(Yo ho, yo ho, a writer's life for me...)

Some days I do feel slightly depressed, because I feel woefully unprolific compared to a lot of other writers (particularly unpublished teen writers). I guess I also had the expectation that after working on EK I for two years (ish), I would end up with something more polished, plot-wise. But then again, I have to remind myself that I'm still very inexperienced when it comes to writing novels, and I always end up starting absurdly ambitious projects. Plus, EK is something I put a lot of myself into--which doesn't always happen when I write, and which might be why I'm a little more neurotic about getting this story "perfect" than with something else.

Other than that, I think I've remained pretty optimistic about EK. REN 1, on the other hand... It's weird, because I feel like my writing for REN is much more polished than for EK, but I just. Have. So many problems. With. The plot.

So far, it hasn't been like EK, which I have issues with but still manage to bulldoze my way through out of sheer stubbornness and wild optimism. But then again, REN is a much younger project than EK (only came up with the idea for it last August/September; the first incarnation of EK came to me maybe four or five years ago!). That still doesn't explain the fact that I tend to work on REN 1 for a little bit, run into a plot roadblock, and become totally stymied. It's not that it doesn't have a plot; it's just that I feel the plot is rather shallow, melodramatic, and soap-opera-esque. Maybe it's because I'm not sure of what the message of the story is supposed to be...?

(I do love the characters, though, which is one of the only reasons why I haven't dropped the project yet.)

Usually, I consider myself pretty bad at writing short stories, or anything shorter than a novel, because if I get really passionate about an idea, it just sort of...mushrooms into a novel on its own. But I found an old short story of mine that I really liked (and also had amazingly polished writing for a first draft--I thought to myself, "Did I really write this?"), and I like the novella I wrote last summer, too. Even though it probably also has problems with the plot. But it had a lot of scenes that I quite liked. Maybe I should just write more short stories? ...Nah, that probably won't happen.

Tags: writing

phoenix on January 26, 2012 ~ Comment?

Chuggin' Along

The semester started. Whoo. I have a light headache today (that's what I get for going to bed late), so I don't feel like doing anything, even though I actually have quite a bit of reading to do...

Anyway, I did the first draft read-through of EK I, and...yeah, I've got a long way to go. The plot kind of has to be overhauled. Specifically, I realized there are quite a few structural flaws--and I'm not sure how they escaped me the first time around:

1) A horrible realization struck me as I was reading, which was...the protagonist isn't all that active. He's not the one moving the story; the story is moving him. Which was quite a terrible epiphany for me.

2) The entire story is supposed to be about his character transformation and his emotional journey. But as I was reading, I realized...it's not at all clear there is a transformation! And here I thought I was good at writing internal conflicts...

So...yes. I'm sure that the Boring Plot Problem (urk) is at least partly due to the fact that the story is supposed to involve a lot of political intrigue, and I'm totally inexperienced when it comes to writing political intrigue. Moreover, I think this is a natural result of Start of Darkness stories. When I was reading K. J. Taylor's The Dark Griffin, one thing that really irked me was the sheer number of misfortunes that befell main character Arren in order to forcibly turn him from hero to villain. As one reviewer phrased it, it was as though he spent the entire book walking around with a permanent "Kick Me" sign on his back. We're meant to feel sorry for him, because none of what happens is technically his fault, but in the end you can't help feeling somewhat annoyed.

It's understandable why this happens, of course. This may be a hero who becomes a villain, but the author can't help sympathizing completely with the protagonist. Because of this, the author is hesitant to lay all the blame on the protagonist's shoulders. The author has the urge to present the villain protagonist as essentially a good person, just on the wrong side.

I found myself having to fight this urge while writing EK I. In the story, the protagonist grows increasingly violent, but initially I found myself unwilling to write him as a violent character. In real life, I hate violence. I'm terrified of guns; I get queasy at the sight of blood; I can't watch R-rated movies with lots of gore, and even written descriptions of excessive violence will squick me out. Without giving too much away, the climactic scene of EK I involves the protagonist doing something I consider so terrible, in any other story, he would have been the absolute Face of Evil, undeserving of any sympathy.

But then I realized: I had to write those scenes. They were hard for me; I grieved for my protagonist's fall on the inside. But the kind of story EK is demands that the protagonist be a deeply flawed person who makes mistakes and has to take responsibility for them, and I will never succeed in carrying that story out if I don't "murder my darlings."

Tags: writing

phoenix on January 24, 2012 ~ Comment?

Wonder of Wonders

The first draft of EK Part I is done.

It stands at 104 pages (in Microsoft Word) and 51,000 words. It's the longest single piece I've written to date.

Of course, my editing process always leads to expansion (I think both my novellas nearly doubled in length while I was editing them), so I'm not worried about length for now. And I've already started compiling a list of necessary edits for EK I, which needs some major restructuring. I expressly told myself this past week just to tie together loose ends ASAP so I can call it a draft.

But man...I think I'm still somewhat in shock. This is new for me. I've finished rough drafts of a few novellas, but never a novel, never something over 20,000 words.

I'm kind of afraid to read it over. In fact, I know I'll hate it. But to think that I may be able to start Part II soon; just to think that I've actually gotten somewhere with this story...it's exhilarating. As I've said before, and will probably say again, I love this story to death. It's been occupying my mind for about two years now (though admittedly not every single day of those two years). It's an immensely ambitious project--which probably begs the question of why I'm writing this as my "first" novel--but I've also learned a lot through writing it. I learned how to worldbuild, for one; before, I hated worldbuilding, and even though I'm still kind of sloppy at it, this is the first time I've genuinely fallen in love with the world I've created and voluntarily spend free time creating more details. This story also taught me how to create complex characters, whereas before I was stuck with relatively two-dimensional minor characters. And writing this story also made me think hard about how to represent the antagonist.

I know the battle is nowhere near done. I've found that I'm just as likely to abandon a project in the middle of editing it as during the writing of the first draft itself. Moreover, I'm dissatisfied with the opening of EK I, so unlike with past projects, I can't send the first chapter to a beta-reader while editing the rest. But I think I'll let EK I cool off for at least a few days before starting to edit it in earnest. I may go back and reread some of my old stuff; yesterday's reflection made me curious about my trunked project, "Artist of the Heart," and I think it might be time to dig "Snow Queen" out of the closet.

In the meantime, I've also been outlining and writing notes for Project Ren, my dabble in dystopian fiction. I still can't say when I'll start working on it; I'll have to decide between this and EK II (writing that sends a thrill down my spine). But I'm definitely excited for it, and I have the first book down pretty concretely. It's the rest of the trilogy that will take quite a bit more thinking.

That's all for now. Laterz!

Tags: writing

phoenix on January 13, 2012 ~ Comment?

Bits and Pieces

So, surprise of the decade, I got my grades back for last semester...and they were actually pretty good. There must have been some astronomical curving for Physics, because I did terribly in that class yet somehow got a good grade. Life is weird.

Also, EK I is so close to being finished! The first draft, I mean. Considering how messy the plot has become, it's going to need some seriously major overhauling. But still, I've broken all my previous records: EK I is over 100 pages and 50,000 words (the NaNoWriMo limit).

...Wow. It's kind of hard to believe. I'm really looking forward to editing, even though my editing process involves almost as much writing as my rough draft writing process. I think my editing process will involve several (semi-discrete) steps:

1. Plot editing: Make sure the story is structurally sound and has no contradictions. Make sure the narrative flows nicely. Make sure pacing is good, subplots are integrated well, and no plot threads are randomly dropped. This will, obviously, be the most time-consuming stage.

2. Descriptions: I tend to write first drafts with barely any description, so I'll have to go back and flesh out physical descriptions, as well as characters' reactions/emotions.

3. Micro language editing: Delete repetitions and overused phrases/words. Make sure language flows well. Smooth out the narrative stylistically.

4. Send to beta readers (may come after step 1 or 2).

Hm. Just thinking about it reminds me how far away I am from finishing EK Part I, even if the first draft is almost done. And that's not even taking into account Books II and III. But one step at a time! It'll be great if I could get a presentable draft of EK I by the end of the year (and think of a better title, hehheh); if I were to be really ambitious, I'd say I want to finish a presentable draft of EK I and a rough of EK II (which I think I should be able to finish more quickly than EK I, but then again, I think that about every new project I haven't started yet...).

I've got kind of a conundrum in that I want to finish a presentable draft of Renascence 1 and plot out the rest of the trilogy by the end of the year, because if anything, I'd prefer Renascence to be the first project I start querying and attempting to publish. But the problem is that EK is taking up so much "brain space" right now that I haven't been able to work on Renascence. To be fair, I've been thinking about EK for many years: the original idea came to me maybe five years ago, or earlier, and I've been working on EK "seriously" for about two years now. I love it to death, but it'll be nice to be able to get the story down on paper, finally, and work on other things.

Tags: writing, life

phoenix on January 10, 2012 ~ Comment?


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