Writing A Story: Heir To The Gallery
I am a writer; this is a fact that I mention on my profile page, and tend to talk about a lot. Writing has been important to me for a good decade now, so I have had plenty of time to observe myself as a writer. I have recently finished a major story of mine, Heir To The Gallery, after eighteen months of work. It clocked in at about 321,000 words (about half the length of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy), with 275 entries (plus chapter markers and so forth). As I write this, I have not yet posted it all online; shortly after this goes up, the ending shall be revealed, and the completed story will be available (in a very rough format) for anyone to read online. Having finished it, though, gives me to pause a moment and consider the whole. The writing process.
Over the course of my writing career (for lack of a better term), I have started a very large number of stories, and have played with a very large number of ideas. Most of them don’t work out; I have the remains of dozens of started stories littering the archives and backups deep in the bowels of my computer. Only a few made it through to completion, and very few receive enough dedication for me to work on for a long time. Many stories ended because I lost interest—or at least, that’s how I’m remembering it.
So why did Heir To The Gallery survive? Why did I actually finish it to completion? These are questions I ask myself, because these are questions important to me: if I can figure them out, then my future projects can also learn from them.
Therefore, I have to go back. Back to middle school, when I first started trying to put pen to page (as it were)—but aside from hastily-completed school assignments, I never actually got anywhere. Plenty of starts, but no finishes. It wasn’t actually until high school that I was able to actually complete a story—a short story. They were pretty bad (I now realize), and more about me ranting at people for how poorly they treated me (in my view) than anything; they were much like my poetry: whiny, angsty, and good to be shut away for a very long time. But they were completed; in this case, largely because I could finish them in one sitting.
Then one evening in my senior year, I was tasked with driving some newspapers to the local pickup, for recycling. I did so, and as I drove, words and phrases came to my mind, even as I shoveled news into the bin. “I kept the notes because they told a story. I threw them over because it wasn’t mine.” “My friends were my friends for lack of a better term, and for lack of better people.”
I returned home, the swirls of inspiration in my head, and I took pencil to paper (for real) and wrote out a story—which was named Emily, after the character, and after the narrator. In a way, it was still my angst from school and my teenage years, but it was more refined. I had grown and matured, and so my writing had. It was a story I liked from when I wrote it; when I was given a chance to edit it and turn it in for my final English project, I practically jumped at the chance. I edited it over and over, mulling over words, thinking about phrases. I was proud of it when I turned it in.
And I got a nine out of ten for effort; apparently I hadn’t tried hard enough, despite putting more time into my story than (as near as I could tell) anyone else did into theirs. But no matter—it was still a triumph. I had gotten something significant under my belt, even if all the other stories had been tossed away, to compensate.
Those who know me well, and have been following me well, will know that I missed something here: Axiemstory. You see, the summer after my sophomore year, I began writing a story about a man named Axiem (my typical pseudonym on the Internet), in a multiverse I had been playing with since middle school (see, you knew that had to come in somehow, right?). It started as just a diversion, but it grew into something greater—something I now call the Dimensional Continuum (or Continuum for short, which is what I usually call it).
There was a trick to Axiemstory, though: Axiem’s life paralleled my own. As I had issues with friends in high school, so Axiem would have issues with their analogues. My friends all got names and characters, and a plot built around it. A roman à clef is the proper name, though I didn’t know it at the time. It took me nine months, but I wrote out what amounted to a year of history for me, and I completed it. It was a triumph.
Back to life after Emily. Inspired by my ability to actually complete something, I began working on Eliza, a novella. This dragged itself into college, and after Eliza, I moved on to Tomorrow’s Children, and a couple of abortive plays (as I ignore the one I wrote in high school), and a few other things. I then started Adrigen, an attempt at a “mecha” novel. But it died.
Instead, Axiem found himself once again roused, and for essentially the first four years of college, I wrote the continuing stories of Axiem, and his interactions with friends, and with politics in general. I had a decent readership—after all, who doesn’t like reading about themselves? It was therapeutic in a way: I was able to write about people without writing about people. And I kept writing it. I tried ending it several times, but it kept coming back to haunt me.
Continuum was a success, though I have no idea how much I wrote. At some point, I want to go back and catalogue it all and put it up for people to read, but my laziness tends to get in the way. I even have a domain for it, which sits largely unused.
But in time, I decided that it was hurting my other stories—because it was. As I wrote Continuum, I had no time for anything else. I wanted to do short stories, but this long, continuing story kept getting in the way. I even tried doing other stories in the multiverse, about different people, but they, too, failed.
Then I finally put my foot down and said I would stop. I had other stories to tell, and Continuum was being done to death. Less than a month later, I was writing Heir To The Gallery. And we all know how that went.
While I was writing Heir To The Gallery, I tried other short stories, but they didn’t go anywhere. I even tried another continuing story, derived from Tomorrow’s Children, called Frozen Transparency—the reason I chose this as my blog was because I got rid of the story, and like the name. But they all failed. And so I ask myself why.
What I need to look at is what Heir To The Gallery and Continuum had in common. And what they had in common with Eliza and all the other things I once was able to complete. This was a hard question, but I have come to some conclusions.
For one, readership. I had a large base with Continuum, and it kept me writing. I knew that if I stopped, they would yell at me (in theory), so I kept going. My base knew about Continuum, knew about the characters, and were interested in it. As I said, people like to read about themselves, and in this case, they got to see how I viewed them. And how I viewed the things around me (usually overly political and filled with malicious intent). Heir To The Gallery also had some loyal readers for a time, though by the end they pretty much all dropped. Frozen Transparency didn’t quite have the reader base, nor did anything else. But neither did Eliza and so on when I wrote them—although at the time I tried to have a mailing list to send things to people.
The biggest factor seems to be inspiration. Those short stories in high school? I was inspired by my own emotions, as was Shades of Emotions (which was written around the Eliza era). I had a lot of internal inspiration for Eliza, and then Tomorrow’s Children—it was written as short stories, each inspired by particular events in my life. Zoë’s dispassionate analysis of patterns followed my own; Julie’s silence was derived from my own reticence. I was inspired.
Continuum was inspired, too: after all, it was my life. Music started getting drawn into it: I had particular songs that became associated in my mind with things. The song “In Your Mind” was when Axiem met with his Court (which was a parallel with internal discussions I was having about some topic). “Useless Chatting” for some other conversations. I even still listen to certain songs, such as “The Chemicals Between Us”, and cannot help but think of the Continuum scene that it inspired. Music drew things close, and made them personal. I did openings and endings, setting tone, giving myself something to work with.
It should come as little surprise that I did the same with Heir To The Gallery. I built up a soundtrack, which I played when I wrote. The songs inspired me, made me think of plot. In fact, a fair amount of the plot was inspired by songs that showed up as opening/ending themes; people who listen to the songs, knowing the plot, may see what I’m talking about. Quite a few scenes were simply as I was listening to songs, an idea came to mind, and I worked with it. Music gave me inspiration—I could listen to it, and be in the mood for writing. I could sit and listen, and ideas would come to me. I didn’t have that for Frozen Transparency. I don’t have that for a lot of stories.
Another thing is simply character love. I like Eliza as a character. I liked Zoë and Julie as characters. In the Continuum, I liked most of the characters. I’ve truly fallen in love with quite a few from Heir To The Gallery (Ami being my favorite character in the end, I think). I need to like my characters, and want to be my characters in some fashion. It gives me the push I need to write. After all, who wants to write about boring people?
It would seem that I can only have one major writing project at a time, though. That’s why this blog has been in such disrepair: Heir To The Gallery ate up so much time. I fear my next project shall do the same. But I’m changing the way I do things a little. I hope to keep this up, since I will be doing it merely weekly, assuming I keep up with it. My next project will also have regular weekly updates—probably opposite this.
Either way, Heir To The Gallery was a learning experience. It was my first long story that had a definite ending—even if I didn’t know it (the ending, that is) when I started. I want to turn my attention to other things, in time. And I want to work on this.
So I plan on writing here, about Heir To The Gallery. A series called “Writing a Story”, although in my tags I imagine it will be called “Writing HTTG”. I’m still working out those details. I want to talk about various trivia from Heir To The Gallery, and to share some of my thought process. I want to say where I drew certain inspiration from, and how certain characters found themselves woven into (or out of) the story. Needless to say, these entries will have spoilers from across the whole plot, but I will clearly mark them as such. I would like people to read the story, and it can be found either online, or you may purchase a hard copy in the case that you don’t want to read 321,000 words on a screen. The hard copy is cleaned up a little (in terms of typos), and yes, I make a little bit of profit off of it (about four dollars per copy, I think; the rest is Lulu.com fees and general printing costs). It takes me about an hour to write a thousand words, so that was about 350 hours of my life, after editing, formatting, and so on.
Mind, when I say I want people to read Heir To The Gallery, it’s not that I care to make money (hence why it’s all available online for free), it’s that I want to share, and because I know having readership makes me write more. I have some anxiety about letting people read the story—or about talking about it—because one’s writing always makes one vulnerable. There are a lot of things about myself buried in those words that I do not easily share, and I have plastered it online for the world to know. Yet, I want to share my craft, and perhaps to inspire others to take it up as well.
The story was great fun writing, in the end. And I hope to have as much fun elaborating on my thought process, and how things ended up the way they did. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I.
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