Bringing a Novel to Life: Phase One

Tags

Halftoe, Member, novel, stress, Writing

Recently, my good friend and trusty editor Shawn Urban, blogged about the editing process of my novel Sapling. His Blog
I certainly feel compelled to share the journey of how this novel came to light but it must be handled in phases.

Phase One: The original rough script

When I was completing my education degree at the University of Alberta, I found myself stressing out over the silliest things, like grade point averages and mentor teacher evaluations. I know, it sounds crazy. Why would I stress over things that would validate and empower any future I would have in the field of education?

So, in order to handle the pressure, my poor creative brain gave birth to Firah and her story of struggle against a near-indomitable foe. Certainly this was an type of things in my academic sojourn.

As an aside, I feel that creativity breeds creativity. As such my story likely was sired from multiple fathers. Clearly after reading various fictional works, spending too many hours in various story driven role-plays (electronic and non), and multiple dramatic/theater pursuits, my mind was prepared to create.

When I began, I drew some contextual ideas around a game I was playing at the time. However, I learned very quickly that Firah and her world were outgrowing the finite confines of the game. I was creating new places that did not exist and races that were hardly digitized. I made a choice at that time to break free of any obscure reference to existing fiction and thus Aeredia was born.

Speaking of new names, what a chore this turned out to be. You brainstorm and storm again, then you google search only to find some individual or several have already encountered the same weather system. So it’s back and forth until you manage to find the name. And what’s in a name? I would like to think that every one of them had significance to sound and structure, but alas, I was at the mercy of duplication all along.

Bear in mind, I am still very pleased with the results. As of the time of this blog, I can still only find one Firah of relative significance – that is the International Foundation of Applied Disability Research. I could be wrong here, but I would have thought it spelled IFADR, but FIRAH sounds so much cooler.

The last thing to mention about the Phase One was the critical involvement of my first audience, that is my wife. She was so patient and accommodating.

She admits she is not a Fantasy genre fan, but confesses that she enjoyed the general storyline. That is not the last time I heard that comment, which is very empowering, as the story is very much about the characters and less about world mechanics.

I should note that I had a faithful following with chapters that I would post online. The site I frequented has long since been removed, and likely for the best, for what a ghastly comparison the rough script would have been to Shawn’s amazing and sparkling edited version.

Some things should stay buried.

Tune in next week for the Phase Two: Friends who love you enough to hurt you