An Author & His Book
It took me 41 years to write a book.
There were lots of false starts, a score of half- started, half-baked ideas. While fun at times, writing is damn hard. Life itself can be exhausting and it's easier to play a video game, watch some tv, or read something someone else already wrote.
The story and world of “An Oath Sworn,” and my vague notions about what the rest of the series will bring, coalesced from a deep desire I had for content and storytelling that no media was really fulfilling. I wanted more dwarf-based stuff. More beards. More mining. More underground craziness and wondrous feats of metal working and fantasy engineering.
So, I decided to make it myself.
I read somewhere that when a statue is carved, great artists can see the figure they wish to create lying deep within the stone. The work of art isn’t “created”, so much as “revealed”. But the blank page isn’t the authors block of stone. The first draft is. That’s what makes writing a first draft so brutal at times. From nothing one must create the raw stuff of story and trust yourself that somewhere, deep down is a story worth telling.
I am, and always have been, a discovery writer. I used to call myself a ‘pantser’ but the more I’ve studied and learned about the craft of writing, the less accurate that feels. I do type blindly into the darkness. I ruminate and imagine, playing out scenes in my head the same way I have since I was kid. At the start, I knew I had big story beats I wanted to write and the general direction for the story. I didn’t really know what the book was about, or what my ending would truly be, until I hit about the halfway mark.
Before this, I had only ever really written short stories. Writing an 80,000-100,000 words novel was a daunting task. I decided to take it one step at a time and go chapter by chapter, scene by scene. It was taking my main character, putting them somewhere, and giving them something to do. Then I started to fill in the blank spaces around the character with other people, decorations, and plot points. Limiting the scope of the narrative to what things the main character thinks and cares about. The elements of the world the MC interacts with directly helped keep my world building at a pace I could manage. One that didn’t overwhelm the narrative and would ground readers in the main character’s journey.
In my basement office, I toiled for hours each day. I’d write all morning. Break for lunch, while I contemplated all I had done that day, and either fixed stuff or keep going. I aimed for at least a thousand words a day, but at my most productive I wrote three-thousand, five-hundred words. General wisdom says you shouldn’t edit as you write, but I can’t help myself. If a sentence doesn’t express an idea properly, or some bit of important detail is missing, or even if I don’t like the sound of a sentence, I need to correct it before I can move on. It feels like building a tower of blocks on the floor for my daughter. If the base is not square and stable, once the tower is nice and high it will topple over from its own weight.
I finished the first draft and then polished that turd until it shone. Then and ONLY then did I send it out to external readers whose opinions and utter honesty I knew I could trust. Note: my wife was my first reader; her initial thumbs up that told me I wasn’t fooling myself, that the manuscript I produced was actually good. My additional readers gave me great feedback, and not all praise. They drew my attention to points that didn’t make sense to them, scenes they had trouble with, sections of the book that felt slow or bored them. When I got the same comment more than once, I took note of it. When I didn’t agree, when my heart rebelled, I didn’t.
In the end I wrote a book that after a dozen rereads still delights me. It is not only the start of the Stone King’s saga, but my own as well.
