Entry 2, it’s turtles all the way down.

Where last I left off, I explained how Project Paisley had a faulty start. The idea behind the project was burning brightly, but I lacked the fuel to keep the fire going. The solution I came to was easier said than done: don’t surrender an idea just because it’s become difficult to navigate. Pull back, regroup, assess the situation, and start preparing for the second try. {read Storytelling 1, here}

I set the original start of Project Paisley aside and let it rest while I prepared for my college graduation. I had a lot on my plate back then, but I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a friend. I told her that with distance from Paisley, I felt as if the world I wanted to explore was too large, too empty, too colorless. I specifically recall using the phrase “it’s too big, I think I need to think smaller.”

That was my problem. And it was a big problem. Like Matryoshka dolls, further issues nested within the larger problem.

The world felt monochrome with no distinct cultures, flavors, or religions. Without a world to shape them, my characters were the generic adventuring party seen the world over. And because my characters were generic and boring, I wasn’t interested in them. Interest for the author is paramount. If you’re bored, so is every one else. [Note, this isn’t strictly true. Not everyone is as interested in 15^th century Florentine politics like me.]

With this revelation finally admitted I was able to address it.

My first order of business was to figure out what kind of world I wanted to build. From there I could mold my characters around the cultures they came from.

I spent my last semester in college reading dozens upon dozens of medieval history books. When I had exhausted my public library, I delved into the poetry and narratives of the same period. I made a laborious study of the Divine Comedy which has endowed me with a deep reverence and appreciation for Dante and his works. As I learned more about the man himself, things started pulling themselves together.

Stupidly, I never dated my notes, but as I graduated and settled in to life outside of school, I wrote my first set of notes that would become the background and backbone of P1.

P1 was never my intention. Or, I should say, P1 was meant to be a short foray into a small, condensed version of the world I originally intended for my failed prototype. For this short story, I had two things in mind; the quasi-erotic, spiritually rich relationship between Dante Alighieri and Beatrice; and the doomed, overtly sexual relationship of Tristan and Isolde.

What I ended up producing was a courtly romance with the symbology of Tristan and the philosophy of Dante.

But that was a future realization because the first thing I worked on was written on a piece of plain white printer paper. On it, I wrote two cities, London and Paris. From those two cities, I made notes about the things I liked about them. I liked the idea of an ancient city with multiple former masters out to make it on its own, I recycled a name from an unfinished D&D campaign. That in and of itself was a lesson in keeping notes. Even failed ideas are great fertilizer. I keep what I’ve previously written, even if its terrible.

The way I tell this story makes it seem as if these thoughts happened independently of each other or in sequence, but all of these thoughts and ideas were cooking at the same time. As I thought about the city, I thought about what kind of people would live in it.

I began the first part of P1 in the summer of 2017, nothing serious, just some scenarios. I didn’t yet have an actual plot. Mostly, I wanted to get a feel for the world. I still had blanks to fill in, the major deity didn’t have name, none of the counties really had names, I wasn’t certain what shape religious worship took, or how it would affect the daily life of people living in the world.

To this day, when I begin a project, I draft certain scenes or events I want to occur. It’s usually a climatic or tense moment. I find that the scenes are typically dialogue heavy or action oriented, either way, it’s a pressure scene. By placing the characters under immediate pressure, I find that I get a feel for their basic stress reactions. I’m able to determine personalities from there.

I conceived two characters for P1, E and R. The more I learned about E the more I understood about R. I’m not going to sugar coat anything and play the will-they-won’t-they card here. E and R were made for each other. I lampshade this almost immediately.

As I said in my last entry, when I conceived this idea, I was a virulent anti-plotter. I never worked out a true timeline or plotted the events as I would inevitably do in the future. But I did try some new things.

I drew something like a flow chart. I wrote E at the top of the page and drew lines connecting thoughts, wishes, and ideas to various traits or backstory events. Not everything I wrote on the chart made it into the story, per se, but it helped me set certain personality expectations. I was able to use this chart and come to basic conclusions about how E would respond to different scenarios.

Writing is an organic process. Inevitably, what you start with is not what you finish with.

Again, what was meant to be a short story turned into a multipart fantasy with a wide variety of characters and stakes that seemed to rise with each passing chapter. I worked on P1 from mid-2017 through 2018 and finished the first draft in August of 2019.

At P1’s completion I came upon a new set of issues. It was enormously long and it had a narrative thread that, while it was cohesive, meandered in some places. But I had done it. I had written a full-length novel. It wasn’t my first (I completed one in high school for National Novel Writing Month), but it was—to date—my best.

However, finishing a novel brings a lot of things to light. Now I had to shift focus, I needed to swap my writing hat for my editor’s cap. That was a tall order for someone who, up to that point, hadn’t done any serious editing outside of term papers.

At this time in my life I started a new job, I met a boy, and I was dabbling in philosophy that would soon point me to Holy Mother Church. It was a time for change. I was older, more mature. I wasn’t afraid to ask for help. So, for the first time in my life I picked up a book that was supposed to help me become a better writer by teaching me to edit.

I took its advice and shelved P1 for a while to gain some distance. I turned my attention to actual short stories, which is a different topic entirely.

Now that I’m able to properly look back on that part of my life, I see more clearly the lesson learned. P1 was a massive detour and it was going to take some time to fit it into my original intentions for Project Paisley. But it was worth it. I returned from that trip as a better writer. I still lacked discipline, I still needed to pick up a new set of skills, but I had climbed the first mountain in this range of madness.

From this experience I learned:

Trust your instincts. Just because the solution presented is contrary to the writer’s intentions, doesn’t mean that it should be ignored. Following that string might lead to something greater.

Above: Korean water dropper in shape of a turtle, Koryo dynasty, 12th-13th century, porcelain with molded and incised design under celadon glaze, Dayton Art Institute.

Entry 1, an invitation to the madness.

I’ve been going back and forth on this for a while. To show or not to show? Would anyone be interested in what goes on behind the curtain? I mean, some people must be, “on writing” is basically its own how-to genre.

So, it’s decided. I’m going to tell you a really weird story. It’ll be disjointed and messy, my leaps of logic will probably shock you, and most likely you’ll be annoyed at how thick I can be. But, I promise it will be interesting. Calling this is a journal isn’t exactly correct. I think it’s more like a travel log. I want to take you on a journey between my ears. My hope is that as writers (or readers) you can peek into the writing process. If you see my creative struggles and see how I’ve surmounted them (or even how I backed away in defeat), it’ll make your creative struggles easier.

Writers face their own personal battles when it comes to the creative process. Each one is as different as the writer and the work they’re enslaved too. The shared experience of the creative skirmish proves it a natural part of the process. Not only that, the unique ways we navigate various creative dilemmas show that there is no issue that can’t be overcome.

To start, here’s a couple of ground rules. My stories will be referred to by “Project Name.” Next, I will refer to my characters by their first Initial, unless that initial is shared. And finally, I will be deliberately vague when it comes to specific events/plotlines. I want this adventure to be about the nuts and bolts of writing as it is my fervent intention to see these works published. So, please forgive my imprecision.

The Master Work

My current Master Project, codenamed Project Paisley, is a piece of epic/high fantasy fiction. I intend to see it through seven books. I use a rotating third person limited POV. The first two works can actually stand on their own but are best enjoyed in relation to the other five.

The first work, called P1, is completely drafted. P1 is currently in it’s 4^th draft and is facing some extensive rewrites because my writing from now to when I started P1 is just that much better. But we’re going to get into that at a later date. The second work, P2, has been outlined and the first initial draft begun. P3-P7 have been “wishlisted” with the goal of outlining P3 by the end of 2023.

The process highlighted here makes it seem like my writing method sprung fully formed out of my forehead, but the difficulty getting to this point has been a near decade long process. When I started Project Paisley, I was an undisciplined anti-plotter convinced that constraining my ambition would stifle my creative process.  

The issues I faced with Project Paisley changed my perspective on writing as a craft, forced me to adapt my writing methods, disciplined my thought process, and even drove me into the arms of Holy Mother Church.

I’m being a little overdramatic on that last point, but saying that Project Paisley wasn’t a factor would be lying.

It’s difficult to describe an evolving process as I believe that no one ever stops developing in their craft. There is always a higher peak to climb. I learned this extremely important lesson from Dante—there is no plateau in writing, there is only progression or regression.

Writing, like ethics, is a habit of excellence. Climb the mountain and you look back with triumph. You’ve accomplished something only madmen dare to try and it is worthy of celebration. But once you look forward and see another, taller, wider mountain, you realize there’s more to do. You go down into the valley, still armed with the skills learned from the last mountain but end up feeling like crap, seeing yourself and your work as worthless, your time wasted. Then, something clicks into place and you realize that you’re getting better. Slowly and gradually, but you’re getting better.  

This is what happens to me. I think it happens to a lot of us.  

How it started

It was sometime between 2014 and 2015. I made the leap from city college to university, Dragon Age Inquisition was released, I was completing my second (or third, I can’t remember) reading of the Song of Ice and Fire series, and I was dipping my toe into medieval history.

Ideas are strange things and they can come upon us in strange and various ways. I don’t always know how they come to me. Sometimes it’s an image from a dream, other times it’s a single phrase that becomes the outline of character’s personality, it can even be the glimmer of a philosophical concept I want to explore.

C.S. Lewis relayed in his essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say What’s Best to Be Said” that his stories often begin with images but the mental pictures go nowhere unless accompanied by a longing for a form, that is, prose, or verse, or short story, etc. He goes on to say “when these two things click you have the author’s impulse complete. It is now a thing inside him pawing to get out.”

When I look back at how Paisley started, I think it began with a philosophical concept. This was long before I read any actual philosophy and well before I became a medievalist, but I was enamored of the idea of fate and prophecy. I liked the idea of a story that explored this concept at all angles.

I worked on other projects while Paisley fermented. I read A Distant Mirror and became obsessed with the idea of a decadent empire groaning under it’s own weight so afraid of the oncoming cosmic shift that it would do anything to avoid it. That there exist people who would do anything to circumvent change. If wise men can see the tidal wave, what would they do to stop it, especially if they’re the kind who think they can?

Alright cool, but a million fantasies have been built on that very question, so it needed more time in the barrel.

Time went on and eventually I fell in love with the Plantagenets and Dungeons and Dragons. There’s a myth that says the House of Anjou were born of a devil and when your enemies are beating you, aren’t they all of the devil? I wanted a character so vicious they seemed like a villain, so ruthless the line between friend and foe was a constant blur, someone with a venomous nature who pulled the other characters into their orbit and only respected those who remained defiant in their wake.

M was born and I was smitten. I fleshed out M so well I still have the original hand written notes about their character. I was so convinced of their compelling personality that I wrote a homebrew D&D campaign around them just to see if I could enchant the Players to join M’s side. To my complete joy, they did. They loved M. I took notes from those sessions and incorporated them into M’s background.

But it was that campaign that made something about M extremely clear. M is not a main character and nothing I did made M work as the protagonist. For many writers, when characters become complete, rounded, almost human-like, they reach a stage where they can speak to us in our own voices. M was telling me; under no circumstance would they be my hero. M was a force of nature, a tidal wave, an object to be overcome but never moved and never changed.

I put everything back in the brewery. I must have worked on something in that time. I’ve always been a writer, working on little things here and there. But I doubt anything was of real worth, outside the utilitarian notion that all writing is exercise.

At some point, while M was still kicking around my mind, J came in. J was different from M in that they immediately marked themselves as a reluctant hero. Someone plucked from obscurity and placed on the “world stage.” J has still not reached their full potential, but when I began thinking in earnest about starting to write Project Paisley, J came to the forefront as did a large cast of rag-tag companions ranging from lofty lords to grizzled veterans and scruffy outcasts.

Everything about J and their friends was shaping into something typical.

In those early stages, this was disheartening. I don’t want to be a typical writer, playing puppets with the same old tropes. The world is filled with Tolkien imitators and oversaturated with Martin clones. While these two men certainly have influenced me, and deservedly so, falling into the carbon copy ocean feels like a fate worse than death.

With maturity I’ve come to realize that these tropes are more like guardrails. They aren’t there to ruin the view, they’re there to keep you from falling into the abyss. To use another metaphor, the clay molds don’t change the makeup of the clay and they don’t dictate the painter’s personal flair.

G is a character who seemed to come to me fully formed. I immediately understood their motivations for joining up with J. It’s almost novel to have a character so genuinely ordinary that you can easily latch onto them. G is an everyman, the perfectly ordinary character who probably won’t draw much attention from readers, but who will be the constant accessible anchor. They deserve more development, of course, and will get it when the time comes.   

C is a different story, even as I wrote them, another character came with them. D started out as a minor side character attached to C as a servant. They’ve become C’s other half. Whatever I had planned for C was derailed by the realization that D was more likely to act. C became the brain; D became the limbs. At the time, however, I forced D into the place I’d made for them.

During this initial process, I began to run out of steam. I would take long breaks (usually for school work) and then hammer out a few hundred more words every now and then. But it was clear that I was fed up with my slow progress.

I’ve always had this belief that if the idea is a good one, the words will come naturally. To quote David Bowie, I was “busting up my brains for the words.” I would sit in utter silence staring at my computer, begging for interest to resurrect itself.

Of course, I’ve divested myself of this childish notion. I lacked serious discipline and I was deeply committed to the idea of writing by the seat of my pants. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that method, but in order for me to make any use out of it, I need discipline. I hope to discuss this method in more detail later.

As I floundered in writer’s block, more characters revealed themselves to me. The grey bunch that surrounded J was slowly turning motley. But they remained stuck in my head as my writer’s block refused to budge.

I started losing all optimism around 2016. I felt like I was on the verge of abandoning the entire project. But it kept nagging at me. I believe in this idea. I couldn’t give up all that potential.

This was the first peak I had to overcome. As I looked up the slope, I began to realize that it wasn’t drive I was missing. I wanted to climb the mountain, that was clear. What I lacked was supplies, discipline, tools. I could make this climb, but I wasn’t ready yet. 

This was my first and probably my most important lesson:

Don’t surrender an idea just because it’s become difficult to navigate. Pull back, regroup, assess the situation, and start preparing for the second try.  

Above: A section of Four Doctors of the Church Represented with Attributes of the Four Evangelists. Pier-Francesco Sacchi (known active 1512–1520). Born in Pavia (Italy). Oil on wood. Housed in The Louvre.