Every author has their own particular way of approaching a new story; some make a meticulous outline and stick to it. Others have only the vaguest idea of what’s going to happen and just strap in and find out as the characters drive.
Mine sits somewhere in between: I tend to know the ultimate outcome of the story, often a scene in considerable detail in my head, and usually I have a few other scenes that serve as something like known waypoints, and I write towards those points. By itself, that’s not terribly unusual.
What is unusual is that the way this works for me: it ends up making there be only one draft of most books, because I am constantly, while writing, checking what I’m writing now with what I will be writing at the end (and the waypoints). This amounts to real-time consistency checking and editing, so that while occasionally I may take a “wrong turn” in writing, I fix that turn before anyone but me could see it – during the same writing session. I’ve been doing this all my life, to the point that I had to encounter other authors, long after I was an adult, before I realized that the “make a first draft, a second draft, a final draft” was not, in fact, a make-work thing invented by teachers to take up class time.
But that process relies on those waypoints staying the same. Every once in a while, I run into a different situation, most recently when writing a Jason Wood urban fantasy adventure, “Feet on the Ground”.
I had long envisioned (as in, since around 2002) the final confrontation in that story, both how it would have to take place, what Jason would have to do in order to be able to stop his opponent, and where it would happen, with quite detailed set-pieces in that vision. It was to be a confrontation at the Schenectady County Airport, which flies C-130s out for the local reserve forces.
And then my universe threw a wrench in the works. Because the paramount thing for my writing is consistency – consistency of the characters (how they act, respond, believe, etc.), and consistency of the world’s construction and behavior. Unfortunately for “Feet on the Ground”, the facts that I had brought out in-world in prior stories told me that Jason’s opponent would first have to appear in the area of Cape Cod. Which meant that for it to reach the Capital District of New York, it would have to cover a couple hundred miles without drawing attention, or Jason would be alerted to it way earlier.
For a short time, I considered methods by which the thing (connected to an earth elemental, in a way) could get to the target area without being seen, but that ended up conflicting with the basic nature of the being; it was essentially a juggernaut, a destructive force that moved towards its target and really didn’t notice, let alone care about, things in between. It couldn’t be subtle. That was the whole point, a terrifying, unstoppable opponent that seemed untouchable.
So I had to repurpose the entire plot by re-envisioning the scene – first researching if there was an airbase on Cape Cod, then finding out what aircraft it could fly out, and then figuring out just how to get its true target – Verne Domingo, Jason’s vampire-earth priest ally – all the way out there in a reasonable way, and – most annoying of all – figuring out where on Cape Cod Jason would find the one key material he would need to defeat it: a piece of meteorite. I’d set up that part of the ending for the original decades ago, when I had him given a sword forged of meteorite metal by some close friends, but that sword wasn’t something Jason would bring with him all the way out there.
Once I had all those put together – only once I had all those things figured out – I could actually start putting words on virtual paper, and watch “Feet on the Ground” go from an idea to a complete story in the forthcoming sequel to Paradigms Lost, titled Light of Reason. Because, for me, the story is only as strong as the world it’s built on.
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Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Ryk (rhymes with “like”) E. Spoor and his family moved around the country several times in his childhood. As an effort-induced asthmatic, he was often confined to the house and spent the majority of his time reading science, fantasy, and SF of various flavors. and, as time went on, writing (getting those first million words out of the way early!). In high school he discovered computers and roleplaying games which influenced him greatly.
Eventually, Ryk achieved his ambition to be an SF writer when Baen Books published his first novel, Digital Knight. Since then, he has published over 25 novels, with the most recent being Choosing the Players, the first book in the Spirit Warriors trilogy, and the hard-SF novel Fenrir.
Ryk now lives in Troy, NY, with his wife Kathleen, four children, a bunch of chickens, and a large dog.
Your process of refining as you go so that your final product encompasses what would be all of your possible drafts is similar to the way I write. I also appreciate your need to get the world supporting your premises right. Thanks for blogging today.