Control: Making Progress

I, Dalton Lewis, have made writing progress in the last two months. Why? It’s simple, really. I have started to write three hours a day, and it has helped my writing career enormously.

How?

How is it better? How, you might ask, is my writing career getting better?

There’s progress: I have had seventy-five copies or so of V Max One bought or borrowed. That’s a lot more than zero. That’s real progress. I don’t have seventy-five friends or family buying or borrowing my books so I am getting the word out. People are listening. The next step? Write something that people say is a masterpiece, one that people really love. I have people giving my writing works a chance. Next step is to write something that they love and swear by.

The reality may not be selling millions of copies, but I certainly can sell a thousand. I’ve had five hundred people borrow my books. I can certainly handle a thousand. This is happening. This is real.

In years previous I would write a couple times a week — or for half an hour here and there. I didn’t have the motivation to work hard enough for enough hours to create a solid work of literature. That has changed.

When I wrote A Worship of the Dark Gods I didn’t write every day — not nearly every day. The story wouldn’t track from scene to scene. I think that one needs to reread one’s story over and over, day after day, and work on it day after day in order to create a story that is memorable and combines to create a story that truly resonates with an audience. I had a transgender character with someone pretending to like her, I had a serial killer killing people, I had a black man locked up wrongfully, and I just didn’t have enough of a combined story. They didn’t correlate and combine into anything. The central concept — people worship aliens — didn’t turn out to be much of the story at all. The aliens certainly didn’t seem like enough of a god for people to worship them.

I did better with V Max One — I wrote the entirety of the first draft during National Novel Writing Month last year and then spent nine months rewriting it. I am proud of the final result. I tracked the story better. The central concept — a terror group of unhappy men creating terror threats — was a good one. The central character being a friend of those people was a strong point for the story. The characters — the good and the bad — being similar was a strong selling point for the story.

I’m outlining the next one: a horror fantasy procedural with high fantasy elements. I don’t want low fantasy, gritty stories about individual people in a magic-rare environment. I appreciate the brilliance of George R. R. Martin but don’t want to write the same thing as him. People learn the wrong lessons from his stories, anyway — they kill off their main character halfway through instead of showing a difficult and broken reality in which no one is safe because, let’s face it, life isn’t safe.

Characters matter. Creating interesting and unforgettable people in one’s stories paves the way towards success. Also description matters: world-building can make some stories unforgettable. Those are two of the keys to an impressive fantasy setting, and I plan to do my best to nail those in my next novel — when I start it in two days. We’ll see if I can make something unforgettable and unique.

Thanks, and take care, friends.