Rant of Ferox

Detra stared into the glass bottle in her grasp. An air spirit glared back at her. It wrinkled up its small, furry  face as it glared. It looked rather like a mouse, except that its hind legs were much larger, as though it was designed to leap into the air, in order to give the feathered wings on its back a head start for flight. 

Spirits are one side of the magic system in the stories I write. They are effectively invisible and shapeless, until a special person who has been taught to see them comes along. Then these spirits must take a shape.

Usually they pick a shape coined from a medley of different things they have seen and like, with a bias towards whatever element they associate with.

To help me visualise and write, I would do little sketches. Recently I’ve tried to use computer graphics to help me along too, becuase I’m anything but an artist.

It didn’t turn out how I had it in my mind, but it’s not awful for a first try. I think the head is the wrong size, and perhaps the wings need to be a lot more obvious. The little guy should look able to take to the air at any moment.

This is the original sketch I had done when re-writing the first time. I really wish I was a better artist, my skills haven’t improved over the years.

First impressions count.

It’s true in real life and it’s true for all the characters you may create in any piece of writing. It can be difficult to introduce a new character in a story, especially when you’re trying to follow the ’show, don’t tell’ principle. Without having names for the character, it all gets too confusing. It reads like you’re floating around in a soup, switching points of view and struggling to make any sense.

I tried to follow good writing theory once and not use names that hadn’t been already revealed in conversation. It just ended up a mess.  You can read Before & After excerpts in the rest of this post. I’d love to know your thoughts and whether I’ve made any improvements. Read more…

I wrote this when I was about 16, and looking back now I still think it’s an okay piece. It’s surprising how well you can summarise an epic story in just a handfl of paragraphs. Please share your thoughts.

Sometimes I wonder why I started going on my big adventure. I suppose my memory is helped by the fact that I had written it down. I didn’t want to waste my like living on a farm doing nothing with my precious life, I wanted to make something, do something or be someone. That’s right, I wanted to be someone. I was good at writing, so I decided to write down my heroic adventures so that they would be never lost. So much for that idea, although if you’re reading this, perhaps they aren’t lost. Perhaps they’re found. If so then it must be a long time from now, and I doubt I’m still alive. If I am it’s a miracle, and in that case this page will probably be burnt, you draw your own conclusions, reader.

I wrote down my life, but I’d read enough books to know that it needed a plot. Sadly, growing up on the farm never gave me a plot. The worst villain that could be found was the chicken stealing fox, or the manure heap. So I left home in search of adventure.

It’s ironic, I found and lost friends on my journey, saw things die, saw things being created. In all that wonder and magic I still managed to get tired of it all, and my quest to find adventure away from home turned into me just trying to get back home, that’s all I want now. I want to be back home. By the sun and moon, I want to be back home.

This is it, maybe the last words I write. Maybe not, perhaps it’s true that heroes never die, although they do seem to disappear.

I pour my life into my words, for I am,

Ryter

A long time ago (not that long really), at the tender age of 13 I began to write a fantasy story. That year I wrote an 80,000 word book. In the next year I wrote four more books at 100,000 words each. The next year I started two more… and lost whatever muse it was that had been fueling me all that time.

Looking back on my five and two half-books with new eyes I can see who many things I would have done differently, or just don’t like. As they were written when I was 13, I’m not at all surprised, are you?

This is actually the third time I’ve started trying to re-write the first book. I tend to get bored or tired with the editing process after a while and stop. Consequently the first section is an almost totally different book to the last section. I’m almost ashamed of how badly it used to be written.

These are the things I have to change:

• Make the character’s older
• Remove the discman and replace it with an ipod.
• Use more adjectives
• Describe the characters
• Remove anything that’s pointless and does not develop a character or the plot, no matter how cool it is.
• Explain what I haven’t, especially the magic system.
• Less destiny, more character-driven devices.
• Stop typing accents for ‘local colour’ unless they’re really important.
• Focus more on having just one main character that the readers can identify with, not four.

And somehow I have to keep motivated with it!

Long ago, when I was thirteen, I was a prolific writer. I wrote fiev stories, each 100,000 words long and had started two more. They were alright, and certainly amused my friends, but I wouldn’t have considered them publishable.

For one thing, although they were Fantasy stories and insipred by my favourite authors at the time, they weren’t exactly like anything else I had read.

For another, I used a notoriously few amount of adjectives and descriptions for characters. This particularly vexed my more artistic friends.

Now that I am attempting to re-write these things (not for the first time either), I have to remember my previous faults and try to make these things publishable before I even consider showing them to anyone that might be able to get them published.

I’ve removed them from fictionpress.net, which fortunately for me was the only place they had ended up on the internet. I’ll publish samples here as I go through them, possibly with ‘before & after’ as I re-write them.

The first half of the first book reads very differently to the end of that book because I’ve started to re-write them so many times. It’s shameful how badly I was writing when I was thirteen, even though it’s amazing how much I actually managed to write.

And now I’m vanishing for two weeks. Cya when I get back.