I have managed to keep up the pace of writing every day. Now that school is over, for the most part, I hope to write a lot more in the next few weeks. I am leaving soon for my biking trip but I have a spot in my story in mind that I want to reach before I go. I'm guessing that will be about five to ten thousand more words but often I completely over or underestimate these things so it's not set in stone.
I am also very excited because Brandon Sanderson is coming out with more videos on his writing classes. He had some posted from before but he is now re-filming them. He explains more on this in his blog post. I hope to be able to watch them so that I can edit and develop my story with his advice since I am at a point where many things can still be changed. His books are fantastic so this can only help my story.
Lately I have been mulling over the other companion books that I want in my series. I have often thought about having these companions also be standalone books, but when they are all read it develops a larger story line. This is assuming that my first book is received well enough that I can write all of them.
But before I get to the final stages of this book, Kingdom of Sand, I want to have a rough outline from those books completed so that I can weave in important information that can foreshadow later events. I never properly outlined this book before I started writing it, I kind of had events that I wanted to happen and I invented the rest along the way so I am excited to try my hand at true, detailed outlining.
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There seems to be an unwritten rule that all books must start in "medias res" or in the middle of the action. Every action movie always begins with the main character finishing an important mission or in a chase scene. This draws in the reader and makes them want to keep going. It's a great hook.
But eventually the action sequence will end and now the writer has to give some sort of exposition. I'm not talking about info dumping. You have to pick and choose what is important for the plot to move the story along. There is nothing more boring than reading a full chapter on the history of the town or something else just as dry.
Every book is going to have varying degrees of learning while reading. Some books, mostly contemporary, require very little extra knowledge on the reader's part whereas a fantasy will require them to remember many more names and terms. In each genre there can also be varying levels of difficulty. For example, one of the most well known fantasy books for being difficult to read is Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. I have read it and I can confirm that he does not hesitate to throw you into an ongoing war and force you to scramble your way to understanding what is going on. It can be frustrating, but also more satisfying when it all finally clicks in your head.
This can also be a turn off for most readers. They are there to read a fun story that takes them away from real life. They don't want to have to learn pages upon pages of backstory before they are finally allowed to read the story. This isn't history class. Older books tend to have these long descriptions at the beginning detailing how the class structure came to be or the different species across the land. A culprit of this is Fellowship of the Ring. While it is an amazing book, the long expositonal prologue at the beginning was dry. I have to admit that I skipped over it because I just wanted to read the book and I didn't feel like it took away from my experience at all.
I personally try to find a balance between the two. I don't like reading paragraphs of exposition so I don't write that. Neither do I like being too confused as to what is happening so I like to drop hints along the way so that it is always clear what the main characters are up to. While the setting is not fully revealed, the main character's motivations are clearly displayed.
If there absolutely needs to be some information relayed to the reader and there doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it, the easiest trick is to put it into dialogue. That does not mean have one character tell another character everything there is to know in huge chunks of dialogue. Neither does it mean that you have two characters fighting "like they have done a million times before" where they tell each other the exact conflict there is between them and how it came to be. But there are ways to slip it in by using humour. Perhaps one character is making fun of another character's obsession or a previous incident. The idea is to be subtle.
Another example is if the main character's mother died when they were younger, never to be seen again. Perhaps they take a moment to remember her every morning as part of their routine. Give the reader just enough information that they understand the situation but don't bog down the story with info dumps.
A trick I found online to see if there is too much exposition, is to highlight on every page of the manuscript the sections that are description, narrative, dialogue, exposition, etc. and then you can easily identify if there is too much of one thing or too little of another. I'm never really worried about that kind of stuff (and I haven't started to thoroughly edit my story) so I haven't had a chance to use this tip. But it seemed like a good idea so I wanted to pass it along.
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