Your writing strength. Are you consistent?

This question is as much for experienced writers as it is for novices. I think few stories are perfect from beginning to end. I thought parts of Lord of the Rings dragged. I thought parts of Naria were weak. That said, a great story doesn't mean there is a flawless work. Perhaps the longer the work, the greater the chance for muddy moments. And I used epic fantasy to illustrate this point, which is a higher degree of difficulty write to begin with. Some Genres are harder to mess up!

The smiles and frowns on my face give away that sometimes writing is like a rollercoaster. It's all uphill and othertimes it's a straight shot down.

I put aside a WIP for a time, and when I went back to it I was all smiles and frowns. Some parts seemed brilliant, others made me fell like chucking the whole thing. And since I was editing as I went, my hopes would dwindle and rekindle from day to day.

How many of you have these extremes of emotions when you write? You look at some things and wonder how you could have written it! And you look at others and wonder how you could have written it? Sure that sounds the same, but if you know what I mean, you'll get what I mean. Sometimes you say this in humble awe of what you put on paper, and other times as in horror!

Jamesaritchie said:

Well, I actually think epic fantasy has perhaps the lowest degree of difficulty to write, but that aside, I never have had a rollercoaster ride where my writing is concerned.

I don't think I've ever looked at something I wrote, good or bad, and wondered how I could have written it. I have, at times, written something and had the thought, "Now where on earth did that idea come from?"

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I've tried my hand at murder mysteries and such, and for me the Epic Fantasy was the hardest, but in some ways it was because of the scope and depth. It may well be that you are right, and I'm just not acquainted with enough Epic Fantasy to know the difference.

pconsidine said:

For me, it's less a matter of high and low points in a single work as much as it is the concepts that I thought were worth writing about when I was younger that make me cringe. I'm very glad to have outgrown my navel-gazing youth and to have matured enough to know when a story is worth writing about.

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Perhaps I'm not explaining my question very well. For me, its not about a good or bad story. In fact, the better the story, the more likely someone will run into a snag.

For instance, you might have the great mystery, and there might be a clunky chapter. The complexity of what you try to accomplish makes it the sweeter if you can pull it off.

Example, when you have wars in your novel, there is an art to being just right. Too little or too much, and you've ruined the whole thing. Now, there may be romance, suspense, and all sorts of wonderful characters in and out of your story, but there might be one necessary battle that you pine over, because you can't seem to make it work perfectly.

Maybe this is a unique kind of story. Others simply work or don't work as a piece, and its not like connected parcels where some parts seem to work well, and others seem a struggle.

storygirl said:

When I revist my backlog of material, I definitely go through the rollercoaster. I'm always amazed, either because it seems too brilliant for me, or because it's so boring when I thought it was intriguing while writting it. I really didn't know what my strengths were until I entered a contest and all three judges said that my handle on emotion is wonderful and I am a 'master' of dialouge. One (a published author) even went so far as to say she wished she could write dialouge as natural and flowing as mine. I nearly keeled over. I never thought of my dialouge as a strong point...never really thought anything about it to tell you the truth.

So when re-reading your work, remeber it's ok to kill your darlings, but if the whole book starts to feel boring and old, you might just need a break from it...if you're like me, it could be because you've already read the dang thing five times and are just getting sick of it.

The one constant for me...I'm never satisfied.

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When I write something, I may have an inspiring idea, but may have written it poorly. I don't know until I've reworked it a bit. It's like the poem "The Spider Inside Her" that I wrote on the Poetry page. It started out fine, but it wasn't perfect. With a little working, it gets better.

But when you multiply that times pages and chapters, you either read it bits and parts, and then as a whole, or you tend to be a little less critical.

One of the challenges I faced with this book was making it sound fast-paced, when writing in a mythological style.

There is an art in sounding ancient without using old english. For instance, you can't say, "Can't". You have to say, "He cannot..." And you have to weave in a great deal of metaphor. It can't read like a newspaper account. You can't say, "The beast grabbed him and ripped his limbs off." You have to say something like, "The wild beast's arm grew up around him like fast growing vine. It clung with a searing weight, ripping away flesh from his limb...

victoriastrauss said:

I don't have the "how could I have written it" reaction at either extreme--bad or good--because over the years I think I've acquired as solid a grasp of my weaknesses as of my strengths. I know where I tend to go wrong, and why, and how to recognize it; ditto for going right (on a scene-by-scene basis, that is; the big picture is harder to judge).

I know what you mean about the love-it-one-moment, chuck-it-the-next response, though. I don't know if every writer goes through this, but I certainly do. There are things in all my books that make me cringe--I hate reading page proofs, because at that point you can't really change anything. However, I've learned to trust that many of the things I obsess over are invisible to the reader, who is reading the text much differently than I am. All I can do is to try and do my best. And there's always the next book to do better!

- Victoria

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I'm growing as a writer, which is probably caused by re-reading. So, my standards keep changing. One day I thought, "Either I was deluded and stunk, or I'm becoming much better?" I'd go over past writing and thought of a better way to say everthing.

Someday I hope to be at that point where I can nail it the first time the pen hits the paper. The funny part is that people liked my first drafts, which I am now mortified to show.

As far as the complexity of Epic Fantasy, I think it depends on the approach. Narnia was simple. Lord of the Rings was hard. The Silmarillion is the gold standard in my mind, but it was hard to read, and probably a nightmare to write. It took a lifetime.

E.G. Gammon said:

I was about to ask the same thing. I assumed that an epic fantasy was one of the HARDEST to write, because you are creating an entire world, with MANY characters, new rules, new principles and values, new creatures/beings even... And more often than not, the story told in the novel(s) has depth, is multi-layered and complex - EPIC. That's why most epic fantasies turn out to be either 800 page door-stoppers, trilogies, or an extensive novel series. The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter definitely weren't written overnight.

My unfinished 5-novel epic fantasy series has taken me almost eight years just to fully develop the plot and its 80+ characters... Please explain why you think epic fantasy has the lowest degree of difficulty to write.

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I'm glad I have company. What people don't realize is that a change in an Epic Fantasy is always major. In a Romance, I can change one chapter and that's that. Or I can change a name of a character. But in a fantasy where you have inter-related plots weaving through a series, you have to sometimes do massive re-writes.

In the "Tell All"- hopes that someday comes- I will explain some of the nightmares that happened along the way.

I had finished books one and two entirely, and was midway through book three. I had a pro editor look at book one before I anticipated sending it out, and got her recommendations at the same time an agent asked for a partial. She recommended adding a strong female character. There was one, but she was not human. Still, I thought, "The editor is a female with a Ph.D in Medieval lit. Most readers are female. Now that I'm leaning toward the YA bin, a higher percentage will be female. She's right...a strong female is a smart idea..."

I had a deadline to make a drastic change. In two days I added over ten thousand pages to the book including a few relative characters, and shipped it out. Since they only wanted several chapters, I threw this character into the front end and made her the catalyst of the story.

aruna said:

Same here! I am good at dialogue and characterization, emotion and creating empathy - immaterial things. Making the reader feel, even draw tears. I am worst at description. I absolutely hate having to describe anything - whether it's the way someone looks, a landscape, a room, a tree... I just don't like dealing with factual things.

That's because words can never adequately put across what I see.
However, I do believe that they don't have to create an exact replica in the reader's mind. I believe that if the writer knows is very clear and confident about her own vision, somehow the words she uses will create pictures in the reader's mind, summoning up images from his own subconscious so that a new picture is cretaed. It probably isn't the same as the writer's but what the heck!
Yet still, I am always dissatisfied. That's why I took only 2 months to write my WIP, but 9 months to revise it!

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Try writing in mythological style. Metaphors and Allegories oh my!

"His eyes were white hot with anger, kindled by a flaming lust for vengeance that possessed his heart and would not be quenched..."

"She drank from the poisoned wells of bitterness...and a thought flew into her heart, as cold and calculating as a raven standing over a fallen carcass"

Jamesaritchie said:

For exactly the reasons you state. In epic fantasy, you get to make up the world and the rules. This makes it very difficult for anyone to say you got them wrong. Of all the genres I read, fantasy is the one where, to me, the writing can be poor, and often is, the story can be a barely disguised Tolkien clone, and the book can still be published.

It strikes me that what epic fantasy writers need isn't exceptional writing skills so much as a triple dose of imagination. I think the hard part of epic fantasy is not the writing, but being able to conceive a world and characters that are both unique and entertaining.

With the exception of two or three writers, I've pretty much given up reading fantasy novels because I can rarely tell one from another, either in style or substance. I like novels wherein a can read a page or two at random, and know from those pages who wrote it. I also like novels wherein I find something new, something that hasn't been done before, either in character or plot. I rarely find either of these things in epic fantasy.

When I do, it makes for wonderful reading, but it just doesn't happen very often in epic fantasy.

Personally, I think good science fiction is far harder to write than epic fantasy. You still need the imagination, you don't get to invent you own rules, and the writing demands are just plain tough. I think the old platitude that states "If you can write science fiction that sells, you can write anything" is absolutely true.

Now, I don't think writing pubishable fiction in any genre is easy, but for my taste, at least, epic fantasy is where I see the most bland writing, the most "sameness" in story and character, and the biggest lack of original ideas.

I do like quite a bit of fantasy outside the epic sector, but I really have given up on epic fantasy.

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You make a good argument. And perhaps it's only a matter of which way you look at it. Fantasy clones are a problem in the industry. People buy them, so they exist. I suppose it would be much easier to follow a formula, then I wouldn't see it the way I do.

Elf meets dwarf. Slays dragon. Turns into a vampire. Saves the world.

So, perhaps you are right. But I generally like the roots and not the branches. And if you look at the "first" of anything as a root, then creating a root-Epic Fantasy vs a branch-Epic Fantasy, is different.

My life would be so much easier if I placed everything in the fifth age of Arda. It would be easier to use "Elves", but it would be like star trek. It was cutting edge to a point, until you ended with the Klingon Extreme Makeover episodes.
So now that I've coined my own language, a Root-Epic is a hard task. I had to write an entire book and add it to the front end of the story. That added a year to the project.

Jamesaritchie said:

You may be right, but at least from my persepctive, the writing quality in most published epic fantasy is pretty darned low, and so much of it all sounds alike.

There are certainly difficult aspects to writing any type of fiction, but the overall quality of the writing itself seems lowest in epic fantasy. It strikes me as more a genre of the imagination, rather than a genre where being able to write well is important.

This may, indeed, be no more than my taste in writing, but it still strikes me this way.

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It's a very love it/hate it genre. I call my story a Fantasy* but maybe it is something else?

In truth, I love Mythology blended with Fairy Tales more than what is called pure fantasy. There are fantasy formulas. And that detracts from the whole thing for me. I don't like "Kid wakes up, finds out he has a call and super powers. He screws up, then figures things out and saves the world."

And if you are going to write another chapter of Lord of the Rings, it had better be a chapter worthy of the story, and not "The day the Elves hit vegas." I say that in the sense that you fast forward a generation and just make up some new reason for a war, or conquest.

victoriastrauss said:

IMO, writing epic fantasy is very similar to writing historical fiction, and presents very similar challenges and difficulties.

Besides, what novelist writing about the "real" world doesn't also to some degree invent his/her setting and the rules that go with it?

- Victoria

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I'd say that the degree of difficulty is in that there are just many more places to screw up. Most stories fit a single person's lifetime. So, you don't have to create a sense of history, or a sense that there are a thousand other stories tucked away along the road.

You have to have a basic structure, and rules. But they can't sound contrived. And so, to do it well, you have to present reasons for things without an info dump the size of a city block.

Now add a love story, a murder mystery, secret lifes, and make someone care about the whole thing.

I absolutely see why people "borrow". It saves so much in explanations. But I took a risk and didn't borrow. I had to explain the races, why there were super-races, and small races, and such. It would be so much easier to go with Elves are like this. Dwarves are like this. You can build on what is already there. Tolkien at least used some of the common legends to build upon, although he changed the "picture" of Elves. He gave the Dwarves a history, but they are very much like Dwarves of the legends.

Contrary to popular opinion, Tolkien and C.S Lewis were not unique. They were just very good at gleaning all that went before them, and blending them into new stories. They were unique in that the myths and legends of the past were dormant and nobody else was seeing their relevence.

However, if you look at the Ainur/ Valar- they are a blend of angels and norse and greek gods. If you are well read in mythology, and the Bible, you can see where many of his stories came from. Turin's dilema was from mythology. The fall of Numenor was a combination of the destruction of the pre-deluvian Noachian world, blended with Atlantis and other ancient stories.

Heck, Lewis doesn't even veil his story, because there are no central theological points, like the "rings". In his stories, the kids are the thread that run through the story of Narnia. He just throws in every mythical creature from history, and doesn't even put his own spin on them, expect perhaps the Monopods.