Writing: The Creation Process

For Writers everywhere

(Author's Note: I put this up on Tumblr first, so it is kind of a repeat)

Writing is always billed as something to do that is completely easy. You put your pen to your sheet of paper and then the words pour out, spilling onto your page like so many black tears falling from your soul. But in reality, it is a lot harder than that. You put your pen to your paper with your first thoughts that might turn into a poem or begin your novel and you start to write and then, blam. Dead end. Or you begin to write something you do not like, or your rythym falls all to hell and then you are left with a crappy half a paragraph that starts out kind of Tolkienesque and then winds up sounding like it should be in a book a kindergartner would be trying to read.

So, then you start to write again, and again, and again. Sometimes you get almost to the end of your first 200 pages and realize that it is all shit, or most of it is, so you go into rewrites, and more rewrites. And then you realize that your characters are not well written. 

My point is that writing is hard. Reading, the part most of us love, is so easy that it makes writing seem easy. For those of us who have tried out our hand at writing, we find that this is not the case. And so it was with me, when I first put pen to paper and began to write what would become the world of my story, it was all the way back in 2008, a long time ago. And still it is not finished. But in that time I have re-written it several times. And upon realizing that my story line was messing up, or that my back story was too flimsy, I followed in Tolkien’s footsteps, I rewrote all of it. And when that did not work, I stepped back further, looked at my original maps (I draw them out by hand or on paint) and then came up with a better back story.

I looked at what I had written and the world that I had started to create and thought, how would they sound, what would their descendants look like? I’ve been drafting up “languages” ever since my childhood, the earliest started out as codes, but this time I delved deep. I pulled out words that sounded cool, had that special ring to them, cut out letters of the alphabet, came up with a phonetic system (I will write more about that later) and began to draft the language of the world. This all sounds kind of easy in retrospect, but it was most definitely not. 

In order to create a language for your world, you have to first think about the back story, the history you want your world to have, is it fiction, sci-fi, fantasy? What are the people like? Come up with these and then start thinking, if they are like A, then what is a real world example that sounds like that? I followed a little bit in the footsteps of the Welsh, the Norse and slightly in the elvish tongue, and began to draft a set of runes for writing, and then broke down a phonetic alphabet, followed by words from an older “language of the ancients” which was me kind of cheating and saying “This sounds cool so let’s make this mean this.” But if you are the author, well, you can do pretty much whatever you damn well please.

So, once you finish this, come up with a mythology (I find that this helps to solidify things more and further bring the people to life). I started late on this last part, especially the in-depth character/race descriptions and psychological profiles.

Overall, the most important part of all of this is the same as everyone will tel you, just write, the more you write the better you will get. Read a lot as well, reading is the writer's bench press. Carry a journal with you, or a notepad or some scrap paper, so that when you get an idea you can jot it down rather than forget it later. The ideas you forget are always your best ones!

Hopefully, someone can find this helpful. If anyone wants some advice on character, world or language creation they can email me at anonadream@gmail.com or check out these books (which are very helpful.)  Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Dr. Linda Edelstein and How to Build A Fictional World by Patricia Gilliam, both are excellent and will point you in the right path.