Scribblejitters

[verlaine]

The good point is raised by purple_pen that if I can't bear the thought of being a historian (because I wouldn't be able to just make stuff up), then maybe I should try my hand at some historical or pseudo-historical fiction.

I am, as it so happens, doing a spot of writing at the moment. And the question of what to write is enormous, and paralyzing.

Comments

[ravenblack]

Fantasy world is easy, especially these days. Don't build a world, make it up as you go along, and then when you near the end of the book-length, make up a stupid cliffhanger that doesn't make any sense with what went before, and then when you write a sequel don't explain it.

At least, that's how it works for TV serieses, and people seem to eat it up. Maybe book audiences are different.

[verlaine]

Is that lots of TV serieses, or is it mostly Doctor Who? I still have End of Time on the brain at the moment...

I guess Lost is another exemplar of the "promises to make sense but inevitably won't" school. I gave up after just a few episodes of that though.

[ravenblack]

Yeah, Doctor Who, Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica.

Jury's still out on White Collar but it's certainly open to going that way.

[ravenblack]

Oh fffff... I hadn't seen End of Time when you posted this, and am just watching it now from the DVR. Magical leaping superhero skullface Master! That sure is true to the spirit of Doctor Who!

[_kent]

You can always pull the trick that Iain Banks, Alex Garland and Flann O'Brien pulled, and explicitly or implicitly set your novel in a near-realistic dreamworld. That way, you have all the fun of the fantasy writer, with an implicit permission to be inconsistent at any time.

[hater_of_sheep]

The ending of Inglourious Basterds was fun indeed!

I have no worthy advice, except to say that it might be helpful to you to start much smaller than the thousand-hour-long book. Maybe a short story, or three? You could try one in each of the settings you're considering, just to see which you enjoyed more..

[vardebedian]

Just borrow one of the many existing consistent fantasy worlds, or all of them. The number of high fantasies that may as well have been set in Middle Earth but for a tweak of the names (Feist, Brookes etc) is ridiculous, and the benefit to the reader of having the names tweaked seems pretty nominal. If you're going to write elves and orcs and dwarves you might as well stick with a recognisble starting point rather than pretend you've made something new up.

[verlaine]

True, true, the bad-fantasy-as-comfort-food genre has reached the stage where the parameters are so well defined and understood that hack writers can probably write that stuff in their sleep. It makes my eyes bleed to read it though, I hope I never stoop to writing it!

[mrlloyd]

You could always set your masterpiece in a very tightly constrained environment. Such as a prison, or a laboratory, or a space ship, or for that matter, a run of the mill floating ship.

[verlaine]

A very sound idea. My favourite book(s) of all, the Gormenghast Trilogy, are obviously largely set in an expansive but tightly closed environment. It's when Titus ventures out into the bigger world that people tend to think that Mervyn Peake lost the plot...