Black Gate

We’re all familiar with heroes. They claim the central role in most fantasy stories. They are, well, heroic — usually noble, brave, and good. They are often the kind of people we wish we could be in real life. Superman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America are iconic heroes. So is Luke Skywalker. The good guys.

Antiheroes are also the leading characters in their stories, but they lack some (or all) of those traditional heroic traits. They have flawed personalities. The new Dark Knight and Wolverine are comic book antiheroes. In Star Wars, Han Solo is the antihero, always looking out for himself (until he finds love and changes his ways).

In fantasy, we have been treated to a plethora of both kinds of heroes. For every Conan, there is an Elric of Melnibone. For every Rand al’thor, there is a Thomas Covenant. Heck, The Black Company by Glen Cook features antiheroes almost exclusively.

When I begin preparing to write a new book, one of the first things I do is decide who my main character will be. In that process, I work out whether I’m going to feature a hero or an antihero. And it’s a big decision. Massive, in fact, because it affects every other aspect of the story.

The main character in Shadow’s Son is an assassin. I gave him some heroic traits—physical courage and stamina — but he’s not a nice guy. Instead of brooding about his life as a professional killer, he accepts it. As a result, we see more of the underbelly of society in that series, from Caim’s perspective.

Whereas if I had chosen an idealistic young knight or captain of the guard as the main character, the entire series would have been portrayed in a different light. Indeed, in the later books I use just such a character (Josephine) as a counter-balance to Caim’s story.

So which is better, the hero or antihero?

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For those who regularly read articles and blogs about writing, this is probably a question you’ve seen raised before. Can a person be taught how to write well, or is it an inborn talent? Good old nature-vs-nurture.

Once upon a time, I firmly believed you’re either born with writing talent or you’re not, and I was afraid my own skills were only mediocre. Oh, I could spin out some decent prose and even a little poetry, but I didn’t feel I was a good storyteller and that meant I never would be.

Mainly that was because I’m a self-made author. I took a couple creative writing courses in college, but they didn’t help much, and so I kept on believing that writers were born, not made.

This view changed slowly, reflecting my own path. It took me almost twenty years to go from bright-eyed kid writer to published author with a multi-book contract, and often that progress was hard for me to see. But the difference between my first attempted novel and my first published novel, almost two decades later, is like night and day. Somewhere along the line, I had learned how to tell a complete story, and well enough for someone to pay me to publish it.

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Hello everyone. I’m Jon Sprunk and I’m an outline-a-holic.

I used to be a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants – or pantser – once upon a time. After many false starts, I even managed to finally complete a novel manuscript with that method, although it took me nearly four years to revise it into something I could submit.

So that’s my first reason. Outlining has greatly cut down on my revision time. When I was pantsing it, I never had much idea about where the story was going beyond a vague notion about the main characters and their basic conflict. And so, after the first draft I had a huge pile of… well, stuff… and my next job was to sift through it for a coherent and consistent story. I had many scenes I couldn’t use, at least not in their original form, and many spots where I needed to go back and write new scenes to fill crucial gaps in the story. Not that I don’t still need to do those things as an outliner, but far less often.

The second reason is work ethic. Part of the reason it took me so long to finish projects as a pantser was that I’m the type of person who needs a plan in order to stay on-task. When I was just winging it, it was too easy to blow off the writing on any given day because it felt like an endless project. I need to see my progress, and word count is too abstract when I have no idea if my story would end up being 50,000 words or 500,000.

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Novels can depict events that take place over a span of generations or just a couple hours. Yet no matter how long a time period your story covers, there is always something that came before it. Those events that impact the storyline are called backstory.

Many aspects of backstory can be inferred by the reader. For example, if your main character is a cop, most readers will understand that she knows police procedure, the laws of her jurisdiction, and how to handle a firearm. You don’t need to walk us through every day of her academy training to tell us this (although writers will happily do so). However, the more of a character’s past that you tell your readers, the more they can identify with her.

Backstory is one of those things that, when done right, is almost seamless. You don’t even notice it. But when it’s done with a clumsy hand… well, it can be obnoxious.

The flow of information from the writer to the reader is like a dance. A striptease, actually. Of course, the reader wants to see the goods right away, but on some level they also want to be teased, to have it parceled out in little bits that leave them wanting more.

So how do we accomplish this? If you’ve spent any time around writers, writing courses, or online writing forums, you’ve no doubt heard of the dreaded information dump. Or infodump, for short. Big lumps of raw backstory dumped into the narrative are no longer in style (if they ever truly were). They bog down the narrative and distract from the main story. Today’s author must disguise the backstory within other techniques.

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Composing a new story, especially a novel, is a thrilling experience filled with highs and lows, slow days and fast ones, sweat and tears (and occasionally a little blood). In a lot of ways, the writing is the “fun part” of being an author. However, that wonderful time is always followed by the worst part of being a writer.

Revision.

All right, I’m being a little hyperbolic. Revision isn’t all bad. It’s certainly a challenge to take a pile of words and try to shape them into something that sort of resembles art, or at least an interesting story. But it’s also a lot of work. And, for me, the worst part is getting started.

Right after I finish the first draft of a manuscript, I put it away for a couple weeks. The goal is to forget what I wrote as much as possible so that when I sit down with it again, I can attempt to see it with fresh eyes. But here’s the problem. There is an immutable law of writing that first drafts always suck. Always. There was a time when I didn’t think so, when I thought my first drafts were pretty damned good. Yeah, I was too stupid to know better.

Now that my blissful ignorance has worn off, I approach these “first re-reads” of a manuscript with equal parts of excitement and dread. And the excitement part evaporates quickly after reading the first few pages, leaving me with only dread, growing over my head like a cloud of impenetrable darkness as I wade deeper and deeper in to the morass which I’d like to think has the potential to be a decent novel.

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There are a lot of things I love about writing: the fame, the fortune, the hordes of screaming fans… *cough.* Pardon me as I clean up the soft drink I just snorted through my nose.

Really, writing is both a wonderful and terrible choice for a career, but one of the best parts is an experience so sweet and pure that it truly rivals the other great pleasures in life. No, it’s not the first time you sign a book for your parents.

I’m talking about The Flow.

The Flow is that magical experience when the words come as naturally as breathing, popping into your head like fireworks that seem to type themselves across your screen. When you’re in The Flow, writing seems like the easiest, most blissful vocation on the planet.

I only wish it lasted.

I don’t know about you, but when I sit down to write, it usually takes me a little time to warm up. I don’t bother with pre-game exercises; I just dive in. I read back over the previous day’s work, maybe jot down a couple notes as I try to find the narrative moment where I left off. Within half an hour, I’m typically chugging away. Then comes the make-or-break period. Somewhere toward the end of the first hour, I’ll either snag The Flow and cruise through a productive session or the magic eludes me and I have to fight to make my daily quota.

That’s the magic and wonder of The Flow. It comes and goes. But is it possible to encourage that spark to visit and maybe stick around for a while? Drawing solely from my own experience, I say yes. Er, sorta.

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I’m often asked at book signings and other public events about the process of writing and publishing. How long does it take to write a novel and what happens after you’re done? In this blog, I’ll cover some of the different aspects of the process from my perspective. I’ll start at the beginning: the story seed.

How does the idea for a book begin? It could be anything, an interesting situation from real life, a scene from a movie that gets you thinking, a smell that reminds you of childhood summers, or maybe you read a book and thought to yourself, “I could do something like this.”

Once you have an idea for a story, the creation process begins. I’m not going to get into the specifics of how to write fiction or all the things people say you should do before you start your first novel. If you want lessons to hone your craft, there are roughly fourteen bajillion books about writing on the market. Some are helpful; others not so much. Or check out one of my earlier blogs here on Black Gate (Nobody Gets Out Alive: Writing Advice from the Cheap Seats).

So how does that initial spark transform into a living, breathing novel? For me, the first thing is to make sure I’ve got a viable story idea. You can write about almost any situation that humans (or nonhumans) find themselves in, but to hold a reader’s interest for three or four hundred pages is a tall order. Not every story idea can stand up to that. So I daydream. Yep. I sit at my desk and daydream about the idea. I wonder where would be the ideal setting for this story. What kinds of characters would play the lead roles? Most importantly, where’s my conflict? Is it a story about love, honor, war, spelling bees, or horse whispering? As the idea grows, I write everything down. Much of this will get tossed out at some point, but it’s important to record it all now before the magic of the idea wanes.

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