There’s always a mixture of joy and trepidation when throwing myself into a new story. I tend to spend at least a couple weeks developing a world, with all its magic, characters and plot until I feel comfortable enough to start working steadily on the chapters and scenes. However, because I have such a bulk of information at my fingertips and running through my head, my biggest challenge is avoiding explaining everything right away, or over-expounding on all the intricacies of the world I’ve dreamed up. It’s fun to be in the middle of the world-building process, discovering how things work and why this landmark exists and when this city was founded. But that kind of information, if not crucial to the story, quickly bogs the reader down if it starts popping up in the text. For me, however, the timelines, calendars, religious organizations and economic systems are all really neat stuff that I spent a while lining up, and I want them to have a chance to appear in the story. So I have to hold myself back from going on and on about this person’s genealogy and that person’s secret contract that might form a betrayal later on.
This is the tough part. Because on my end, everything makes some sort of sense since I can step back and see the story as a whole. But for the reader, if every answer was known as soon as the question appeared in the book, that’d make for a pretty boring adventure. Nothing to discover? Why waste the time? I’ve tried to teach myself to leave trails of dialogue and observations, snippets of scene and action that lead the reader on until something becomes clear through the process of finishing the story. I basically want to tease the reader as much as possible, and hope that the final denouement is satisfying enough that they feel it was worth the effort to understand. But if I have a character look at a building and then give several paragraphs on the particular construction of that building, which is just a nifty thing I came up with and wanted to showcase it…I don’t believe that’s going to be terribly engaging for the reader.
There is a lot of enjoyment to be had, however, in writing a first scene (in very, very rough format, of course) and then coming back to it the next day and thinking, “This has the potential to not suck.” That’s a good feeling.
I see that smile.