For the first time since I was fifteen years old, I had written something!!! It had been thirteen long years, and it felt good to be back.

Reading authoritative books from cover-to-cover on stuff like writing and technique was really just a way of convincing myself I was serious about learning to write a novel. Yet, as I moved on, those very books were becoming more and more obsolete. They found themselves being pushed farther and farther away until they were clearly out of arm’s reach. In their place? Lots of novels.

After all was said and done, I felt they had served their purpose well:

1. They made published writers seem far more ‘human’ to me; their world more accessible.

2. Information on finding agents and publishers: very interesting! It would have taken me ages to learn all that stuff on my own. For example, I would have still not heard of the Writer’s Market.

3. It was inspiring to read about other writers who had taken their own unique paths on their way to the End of the Book (yes, I still capitalize EotB).

4. Remembering the techniques others had successfully used always seems to help me derive my own unique methods on the way to my End of the Book.

5. The truth is, I considered all of it research; necessary preparation for a huge project. That, and I was dying to know what buried treasures lay within their pages.

I’ll be honest – I ended up doing even more research. (I know, I know, don’t smack me!) Well, this time I took my search on-line. I wanted to know more about the process of constructing a good plot, and I wanted to hunt down what I could find out about the authors I grew to love.

My first stop was Neil Gaiman’s rather full-featured website. I was pleased to see he really enjoys interacting with his fans. He also hosts many essays he’s written on creative writing. Basically, they all amount to “Write, write, write.” I like that school of thought a lotbetter than “Read, read, read”. He also, rather brilliantly, compared dream logic to story logic, and recommended playing the “What if?” game with with every storyline that needed some fleshing out (more on this technique later, but it is just as it sounds). And fun literary surprises littered his site, such as The Dangerous Alphabet.

Another important author I felt I should study was the now late Robert Jordan. I came to love his interweaving storylines and style, and how his books tend to have wonderfully epic endings. So I read various interviews and started frequenting his on-line journal: Dragonmount. It turned out he was a historian and a civil war buff, which would explain his rich timelines and well thought-out battle scenes. A nice pearl of wisdom he had to offer was that he felt story-telling should ‘flow like a song’. That seemed like a good thing to keep in mind, too. He also spoke at length about the importance of high fantasy in today’s society.

Holly Lisle is an author who has a wonderful personal site devoted to helping writers with tips and tricks of the trade. You can even subscribe to her email groups and get updates on her novel progress as she writes them.

I had made a list of things to do based on what I learned:

1. Play the “What if” game with my storyline.
2. Create a map of the world.
3. Create a timeline based on the results of 1 and 2.

That seemed like a good enough list to get me started on the fine art of world building.

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