six months later, I return...

...because my latest habit of rambling on in my writing journal instead of, oh, writing, is not a good one. Commence wittering here!

First, this post explains just why you don't want to say "...and I have ten novels under my bed, too!" when you're writing a query letter. This is golden advice. Treasure it close to your bosom, next to the viper. If the viper gets jealous, tough.

Tangent: This is why I love Blogger. I feel all intellectual, so I can throw in ridiculous extended metaphors that have nothing to do with the topic and feel only minimal shame as a result. It's like college, in a way.

Back to the original topic: The less fun part about that post is the comment trail. There are two warring factions: 'Those ten novels are not a mark of a good writer, because those books are not published' vs. 'So I had a longer learning curve! So what?' I fall into the latter camp, mostly by virtue of writing on and off for the past...Jesus, it's almost nine years by now. (On another tangent: According to this link, I only have one year to go before I am Srs Writer. Does this render all my previous fool attempts at writing invalid, allowing me to start again with a clean slate, no previous novels, and a clear conscience in the eyes of the 'These ten novels...' camp?)

Here's the thing: To return to my tangential point about John Scalzi, is there something inherently wrong about taking ten books to develop your writing?

For argument's sake, let's say each book totals about 75k, and takes a year to write. Laying aside editing and polishing, that is 750k words spanning ten years. In that 750k, even if you receive no outside critique, your technical mastery of English likely improves. If you do receive outside critique (and heed it), then it almost certainly improves. Factor in the ten years of reading books and otherwise developing your vocabulary by flailing around with a thesaurus, dictionary, and your hapless acquaintances trying to find the perfect word. Result: you probably have become a better writer.

In that ten years, you may well have grown as a person. (At least, I certainly hope that you have.) You probably cringe at the memory of yourself ten years ago, and happily look forward to cringing at yourself in another ten years. This probably influences how you design characters, how you design settings, and how you describe these settings. You might have a better idea of what readers need to know about your story and what they don't, and so will provide with different details than you might have ten years ago. You might have (and here I look at myself and laugh. LAUGH.) developed the courage to fling yourself on the mercy of a really savage crit group. Anything could happen in those ten years, and it'll probably change the way you write.

Third, you have written ten books. Hence, you have written ten plot arcs. Possibly you have written ten different settings. Even if they all take place in the same setting, there is likely a slightly different take on the setting in each book relative to how the plot affects the setting, or vice versa. Writing out a plot arc and carrying it through ten times is decent practice, I think. (I hope, or I've been fooling myself all this time that I was doing something vaguely productive.)

Finally, you may well have edited ten books. Editing is not easy. However, if you've done it ten times, you've got an idea for how it works. If you've done it well ten times (put it away for a month, come back to it, leave it, come back and shred it again, or however you prefer to Edit For Serious Consumption), more power to you.

I haven't even done this much. I have five shameful books in a series to my credit tucked away on some floppy discs somewhere. I have three plots in the process of being kicked into shape for The Dreaded First Draft. I have a fourth and fifth plot bouncing around in my head. (attn brain: I don't know who Alexander is, what he does, or what his story is about. Please stop tormenting me with him.)

I borrow characters liberally from my old plots, however. I borrow settings liberally from each other. When I cut a scene from a story, I throw it in my 'extras' file if I like the concept but just can't make it work in that plot. I'm a dirty, dirty scavenger from my own work. I have character concepts, plot concepts, and settings lying around all over the place. I keep them on my (private) wiki for reference if I ever say, Aha! Character [x]'s qualities are just what I need here! Time to take hir out of five-year-cold-storage, shake hir out, fix hir up, and stick hir into a story! It's a very satisfying feeling. (This is an understatement. I put on techno music and dance.)

This is just my style, I'm afraid. I envy the writers who can whip out a first draft with just an outline, but I tried that between the ages of ten and fifteen. Call me biased, but I wasn't churning out High Literature then. I'm going to stick to this new process I'm using, at least for one book. So if taking your time to whip your writing into shape is wrong, I don't want to be right. (Well, I do, because that would mean I was the awesomest writer ever to awesomesauce, but I'm not.)

(Hooray for parentheses!)

Damn it, I was trying to be restrained.

Obviously, somewhere along the line, my restraint failed. This is a sad day, but not unlikely. Since this budding little thing has few, if any, ties to my normal Internet presence, I feel I can securely go off the deep end without fear of repercussion. You know, I came out as a poli sci major on my LJ in a bit of a backhanded way, and suddenly everyone's hating on the poli sci. Okay, fine, you may hate politics and the man and all they stand for, but have I ever been the marked emblem of the Antichrist? Have I?

That aside, I'm actually meaning to talk about Eragon. (There's just something about a more or less anonymous Blogger account, as opposed to LJ, that makes me feel that in fifty years, erudite people just might find me as the last surviving example of the human race before the ice caps melted and the East Coast washed away and whatnot. I feel clever.)

So, Eragon. That novel that everyone loves to hate. I've never read it. I've never read it? What am I doing here?

So my Eragon story starts...whenever it came out. Many moons ago. My mother brought it home from the library, explaining to me that it was written by a person of an age approximating mine, I ought to be at the very least interested in the fact that he had been published. I believe I looked at the cover, read the author's blurb, and ignored it for the duration of its three-week stay. Eventually it went back to the library, and I more or less forgot about it. I later found out that his parents basically managed the publishing deal for him, being High and Mighty in that field. I am still uncertain about how much of an influence his parents had on its publication, but it didn't seem that I could learn a lot by studying the author's career.

Flash forward to a few months ago. I hear through the grapevine that Eragon is being made into a movie. My reaction: "It was that popular?" Apparently, yes! A stunning hit in the preteen boy population, as I am now finding. And lo, movie rights and such came into play. I was mildly intrigued and inspired again, then remembered that this was the one with the High and Mighty parents, and lost interest and inspiration again. By this time, I had veered around to writing my own characters again, but not terribly successfully. Eragon was once again forgotten, since really, it never had much of a bearing on me as a person, as a writer, or as a reader.

Timeshift! Roughly a month ago, I, in the depths of boredom, begin delving pretty heavily into the world of fandom_wank and its sister groups, where no fandom escapes without a healthy dose of criticism in the midst of the wank. And, lo and behold, Eragon wank was surfacing. Simultaneously, my LJ friendslist was quietly exploding with the Eragon backlash. The general tone: disgust. Apparently Eragon was your basic young hero story with nothing overall to recommend it, and somehow it had finagled its way into being published with too-shiny movie to top it off. Heresy, I say! This continued on through the debut of said movie, which was slammed by what looked like every critic on the planet. Bashing Eragon was what the cool kids were doing, and try this beer, too.

This was all going down around NaNoWriMo. I'd steamrollered through over 30,000 words in about six days, finished early despite a late start and a week of writing apathy, and was just about set to finish, flesh out, and edit the finished product when I came down with a pretty severe case of stage fright. I felt I couldn't plot worth a damn, couldn't create dynamic characters even if my life was worth it, had too much dialogue, and all those lovely things. I have to say, this mindset wasn't the one I would have chosen to get me through my first college finals, but there it was.

So, in my depths of homework-avoidance, quickly flagging self-esteem as a writer, and many late nights on the Internet, something of a protest began to form in my head whenever I ran across these Eragon-bashings. It wasn't anywhere near coherent, as I opened many a comment window, tried to think how to articulate what I wanted to say, and consistently failed. "Masses of teenagers finagling their way into being published? Lead me to it!" was one of the main contenders, as was "On behalf of no one, I'd like to say that teenage writers aren't always that bad...wait, who the hell am I kidding? I've seen fanfiction.net."

After a few days of writer's block combined with some truly dramatic yet bleak despair, I realized four very important things:

a) The Intarwebs Are Not Srs Bizness
b) Being discouraged by Eragon, directly or indirectly, was just lame
c) I stand the same chance of being rejected for lousy writing as everyone else
d) I should probably apply myself to my finals first, though.

And lo, I applied myself to finals, and scraped my way through the end of my first college term! Rejoice, rejoice, the vacation has come! Eragon-the-movie also faded from the public eye, as all things that are not Harry Potter do, and life in general moved on. The Eragon saga has ended.

What do I take away from this? (I'm taking something away from this? It's Eragon.) Mostly the lesson that when in the depths of lack of writerly esteem, do not go to F_W to restore your faith in yourself or humanity, but instead remember that not only The Intarwebs, but Life is Not Srs Bizness Ok. In fact, taking yourself seriously? Fatal.

This has been my greatly belated weighing-in on Eragon, the book I knew about before it was popular but never actually read. It's been cathartic, and by that I mean fun. But also cathartic.

Statement of Purpose!

I have writer's block. Or writer's discouragement. Either way, I have decided to kill time and seek inspiration by making this thing.

So far, not inspired. Also, little time killed. I find this unfortunate.

Still have ambitious plans for extravagant plots. Still have not come to terms with the fact that since I am young and also otherwise occupied, extravagant plots probably a no-go. Necromantic antics possibly less extravagant per se but still highly ambitious in nature.

Further sentence-fragmenting pending.