Uncomfortable Truths

A few days ago I let a new friend read the first part of my fantasy story. She doesn't really read fantasy, but she was interested, and I was curious about what someone who isn't a fan might say. Besides. I thought it was pretty good, if I did say so myself.

You can probably tell where this is going.

She went to great lengths to praise my imagination, and my writing skill in and of itself. Not many people can do this, she said, which is true enough. She even apologized a day later for being brutally honest.

But she thought the description undercut the action, the characters were unmemorable and that the story was kind of cliché.

Ouch.

After some thought, I decided she was right about the description. The solution there was simple: excision and concision. Cut more and write less. Maybe I didn't make the main characters distinctive enough - that's debatable. But it's not like they stay the same anyway. The story changes them. That's what's supposed to happen. And about the story being cliché...

Okay. That one's spot on. 

My story used to have elves in it. I cut those because they were cliché. But after doing some research, I realize there are still a lot more clichés that I either didn't recognize, or had convinced myself could be allowed to slip by because of the story's brilliance overall.

Uh, yeah. Probably not gonna happen.

I'm already putting together a plan to address this. I'm cutting my prologue, for instance. That hurts. The whole point of the thing was to set up a major plot twist around two-thirds of the way through. But it's more important for people to want to read the book in the first place. That's less likely if they open the first page to yet another prologue set xxx years before the main storyline, at the end of which, you guessed it, the POV character dies.

It's not so much that I got a bad review. It's that I got a bad review that was right. My story isn't as good as I thought it was. I'm not the first person to overestimate the quality of their work. I certainly won't be the last. 

But my faith, such as it is, is shaken.

See...I don't have a lot of dreams.

Aspirations, I should say. I am neither driven nor ambitious. I admire people with vivid dreams, and the talent and willpower to accomplish them. But I myself have only two.

One of those I'll keep to myself, thank you very much. We all have our secrets. And the other one you should have guessed by now.

It's to be a successful author.

But in order to succeed, all dreams require a dose of reality.

I've mentioned before that I was inspired to do this by the Wheel of Time. But that series began almost thirty years ago. By today's standards, it is very, very cliché. A few of those I vowed long ago to never use. I will never write prophecies, for instance. My hero is not the Chosen One. There will be absolutely no wise old wizards.

But what about the perfect best friend? The enchanted sword? The fact that I was considering playing up my hero's parentage?

It's hard to be imaginative these days.

Of course, literary success can be fickle. A very, very few books become famous, from the well-deserved - Harry Potter; to the undeserved - Twilight; to the 'Oh my God, how did this become popular?' - Fifty Shades of Grey. 

What many people don't realize is, beneath these few bright stars toil multitudes in obscurity.

Conservative estimates put the number of unpublished writers either writing or trying to publish their first novel at over 250,000 in the United States alone. Ignoring the odds is crucial. The people who say 'f*** it' and do it anyway are the ones who succeed, because they persevere.

But there's a difference between being smart, or just stubborn. Some authors advise not even trying to sell your first novel because it's your dream book, the one that got you started. The logic is that all that effort and emotion renders you blind to its flaws.  

And you can't afford to be blind in this industry - because it is an industry. For all the love you've poured into it, you're creating a product here. It has to be fresh, intriguing, able to stand against all that competition. It has to be marketable.

Which means removing any element, no matter how beloved, that won't sell. You need to be ruthless. Murder your darlings.

What's annoying is that I already did. I finished my first draft ages ago, let it sit for a year, went back and realized it sucked. So I started over. I made changes. Now I see that wasn't good enough; I need to make more changes. There isn't any way around that. 

Either that or take whatever experience I've gleaned from this, the book of my dreams, and go write something else.

It's things like this that make me want to just give up in frustration. Unfortunately, that's normal. Writing is frustrating. 

*sighs* Okay, rant over. Time to start editing.

Time to get back to work.