Welcome, my friends, welcome! To this week's riveting installment of the The Art of The Storyteller! This week we have thrills, we have spills and we have opinion by the extra large bucket-load! Do you want to be a successful author? Read this and watch the attached video and you'll learn to write like I do (which does happen to be rather well, I know but come on!). Use what nuggets of wisdom and knowledge I provide to develop your own skills and style into something unique and precious which will actually make you successful because there are two factors (if we discount pure and unadulterated luck of course) which will make you successful; YOUR STORY and HOW YOU TELL IT.
One thing I have learned over the past few weeks with my Emerging Author Interviews of the Week series is this; my style is excellent for me and people who like to read it but there are more styles out there, more stories and they are doing rather well too. A poor author is one who does not READ and learn from that reading. Same applies in our world of self-publishing and new authors. We have chances that writer's before us did not. We have resources they lacked. Wed have self-publishing which they didn't. All the famous writers who proceeded us had The Traditional Route and that's it. We should be grateful for what we have and figure out a way to effectively use it!
There is one major hurdle we have to face that they, in some ways did not. Volume. Take a look on Amazon, Goodreads, Wattpad or your platform of choice and look in your genre. Take your time. How many did you find? Right? Quite a few isn't it? So; what can YOU do to make yourself stand out? Imagine one of those herds of wildebeast they love to show on nature programs on TV. You are one of those. So, HOW do you stand out and NOT get eaten by a lion or crocodile like those millions of mooing animals do? Ah....
So we come to this week's episode; The Evolution of The Story. How do you go from draft to edit, to draft two, to edit again and produce something not only completely new but something people will want to read and will tell their friends about?
Here's my background to this week; I am working currenly on two novels, each is part one of it's own trilogy. I am doing it concurrently which I have been told is insane and also wrong.
Lesson One; Who Made Those Rules Anyway? That's right, who decided that dialogue must be like this, that plot must follow this route. That your protagonist had to be this or that. That you must follow convention #1 to reach result so desired? Those famous people I spoke about earlier didn't have rules to follow. There's our fall down. We have so many resources and rules now that we actually don't know what to follow. We focus so hard on the rules that we don't actually write anything because we're too worried about the wrong things!
I have been, these past few weeks and months talking with some actual famous writers about their work and mine and they actually like it. I have been beta reading the new book of one of those folks because he's trying something completely new to him. Guess what? These men and women are just like we are, They started just like we did and were, at one time, convinced just like we are that their work was not good enough. Clearly it was because we've all read it.
Lesson Two; Your Work is Good Enough! If you put in the work to make it so. We all have that spark, that flame, that desire and need to write, to arrange perfectly ordinary words into an order which people will enjoy and will form a story they will read. That's the easy part. The hard part is doing it in a way people will want to part with money for.
Everyone I speak to, everyone I interview or give advice to will voice the same sentiment "I'm not sure I am good enough". Now, social anxiety and a bit of angst are par for the course for writers, it's that insecurity which first makes us take refuge in books and then awakens the desire to tell our own story and write one.
Lesson Three; Why Did You Start Writing? You had a reason, I am sure. You have a message you want to share, a story you wish to share, a thing you would like to change, a person you would like to be. Right?
One important point. If you're in this for popularity or money, STOP NOW because you are in the wrong place. If any of the above apply to you instead, then please carry on.
Whatever it was which made you want to write, that's your passion, your need, your motivation and your muse. These are those things which keep you in front of a keyboard for hours and hours on end, working with non-existent people and inventing stories, places and events which you hope will be read by other people one day. You need these things because, if you lose them, that's when you stop the crazy-writing time and hit our most deadly obstacle, our worst enemy; The Writer's Block!! This comes when you forget why and what for, when you stop believing.
Lesson Four; Write, Write and Just Keep Writing! That's the deepest, darkest secret of them all. If you stall and don't know how to continue, write something else.
I have told you my story over and over. I spent twenty years in the biggest writer's block of them all because I stopped believing and lost sight. The day I ignored all of they and just started writing a magical thing happened. One I started writing like a man possessed and could not stop. Two I solved the problem which had been holding me back for so long, how to make my story unique and actually work. What had been a group of disparate stories and fragments; even two distinct yet unfinishable (to my mind) projects turned into different aspects and viewpoints of the same story and universe and not only that but they became a coherant whole. They evolved...
Lesson Five; Let The Story Evolve. Here's my next and newest experience; I was working with my new collaboration partner, helping him with his writing in general and we played the Story Game. I wrote 400 words, he wrote 400 more. What happened? We created a totally self-contained and coherant story and tight story from just that little scene. From that exercise, the Enoch books emerged and we're about half way through Book One and getting some interest already.
To add to that and go on. I had my rough stories and my supposedly unsolveable problem. I had my moment of satori and those fragments morphed into the four Alexander Collections. Next I was inspired by what those become and the FIVE Alexander Novellas followed. Now I had the beginning to my novel. Chapter one of that novel is in the Member's Area right now. The Sons of Nemesis is a direct result of me deciding to stop worrying and believe. The rest took care of itself. Hard to believe? Try it...
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