One Small Step for Me, One Giant Leap for My Book

Sometimes you need to step back in order to take a flying leap.





If you've been watching the news over at facebook.com/danieldydek.author, you'll know that premier fantasy agent Josh Bilmes of JABberwocky recently turned down my manuscript. No biggie: I'm a new, young writer and he represents the likes of Elizabeth Moon and Brandon Sanderson. I shot for the stars, and I'll never regret that.

But something else has been going on -- behind-the-scenes, like -- in my personal writing life. A little bit of reading, and a little bit of thinking. And now, a whole lot of changing.
I have to admit, for a guy who loves structure, I get all Harold Green when someone tries to impose too much structure on my novel. So when I started reading K.M. Weiland's 12-part series on story structure (http://wordplay-kmweiland.blogspot.com/2012/05/secrets-of-story-structure-pt-12-your.html  At the bottom of the post, you can click back through all her previous posts) I, honestly, mostly skimmed. Sure, I'd spend a few seconds thinking: "Does my story have that? Yeah, kind of: right there. Okay, good enough." But I didn't really adopt her position with heart-felt agreement.

So it wasn't because Josh rejected my story that I looked at changing it: it's because Josh rejected my story that I admitted that Ms. Weiland is right, and my book is not. I started thinking more comprehensively about books I had read, and it was fascinating how well they all fit the mold she had revealed. I would go further and say that probably the books I love most are the ones that hide that structure, even though upon reflection the structure is most clearly there.

I have also spent some time wondering if I might just write my books in a different order. The short answer is, no I cannot. The good news is, I'm still only 26, and I've written 107,000 words in 5 months before, and I believe I can do it again.

So what's happening, I hear your mind wondering? I'm taking my book back to the basics: who are the characters, what are the conflicts and themes, and what story should be built around the structure so recently revealed to me. Instead of trying to warp my existing plot into the structure, and re-writing bits and pieces to try to make it fit, I'm chucking the whole thing.

And I have to tell you, after two days of brainstorming, I am getting intensely excited about the plot that's developing.

I'll have an excerpt coming up, and before that I'm going to answer a few other questions that may be popping around.

See you later.