I'm 20, 21 in November and a few years back I had this fantasy dream that when I woke up I remembered every detail. It was so good that I had I repeated it over and over again in my head for days and before I slept I would walk myself through it, longing for my dream-state to show me what happens next. It did not, but I wasn't sad for that because it left my mind wandering on the many paths this little girl with her tiger companion traveled. Fast forward a few years and my life has led me through hard times and living in a place where I cannot dive into the entertainment and time filling place called the internet. So I sat there, without the books I left behind, without access to that place that filled my time with joy, sadness and hope (internet) I began to think, "What can I do?". It was then that I remembered that dream and the other dreams that were just as vivid and moving and I began to mold them, tweak them into coalescing into one story and thus a world came into mind. A fictional, magical world with many characters, plots and reasons. At first I had thought, what if I create a story that transcends the limitation of one book and is told from different viewpoints per book; so once you've read from one viewpoint, you would know the beginning and end from say, person A's viewpoint and reasons with some crossovers of characters. Now let's go to another book and from person B's viewpoint you would know the beginning and end of the main story, but person B's story would be different as that person travels down a different path. I soon decided to delay that idea for another scenario that would fit that type of writing and regress back to a multitude of books for many characters and plots. So I started. I'm now at sixteen thousand words of my first draft and I have realized that the feeling is alike the stories where some tragedy happens and then somehow the heroes and heroines all manage to survive in the definite end. Whereas there is nothing wrong with that and I enjoy those stories, I want my story to have a sense of what Game Of Thrones is. Every character has the possibility of death; the world is very real and dangerous and reasons for close escapes and brushes with death are rare or very thought out with logical reasons (for that world) for why that character survived or escaped. So each time I skim through the story in my head, or inspirations from loads of the various anime I watch and the stories the writers create for them alongside movies as well, my mind adds new ideas that change the story. It's gotten to the point where I don't feel I can write without some part of the story becoming obsolete and then having to fill a gap which would then influence all the chapters before that. Now you know this, my question is this: How do you do line out the full plot when ideas keep making themselves known? How do you build characters? Do you write a full story and then play god with it? Do you create character pages? How do you define the rules for the world and magic? Do you use pen and paper to create charts where you know the relationships of each character or do you use software to create it? I'm not going to write anymore questions or create anymore as they should be sufficient for what I need. Thank you for reading through all this and or answering my questions or giving me advice.
Hi, welcome to the forum. What it sounds like you are saying is, you have the ideas but don't know how to write them. That's where a lot of us started. As for the outline, just because you have an outline doesn't mean you're married to it. So write out your outline or draft and remember you can make changes. Then start writing the scenes, they don't need to be in order yet. Don't get hung up on the all important first chapter, for new writers that is a common road block. Then get feedback from people that know how to critique. And make an effort to learn writing techniques. Skim a bunch of how to write books and pick the ones that sound useful to you. Writing advice books are a dime a dozen, and often they are not better or worse, they just have different approaches. Then write some more and rewrite some more.
I have written the first few chapters, but as the ideas come, the next step changes and then changes further into the story change which change the ideas that came before so I would have to go back and change how that part went. So it feels like I can't write because I know that I would have to change that whole section later because of new ideas that will come from inspiration or thoughts.
Perhaps you should start with that outline. What is the story you are trying to tell? A novel is not usually a series of events but rather has a larger overall theme. If the ideas are coming requiring such major revisions, do you have different stories to tell?
I don't know that George R R Martin is the best author to emulate, if you've got a problem corraling your characters. He's been writing book after book, getting more and more complicated, killing off characters right left and centre (to the point that I stopped reading after the fourth book.) I think he's let his ideas and his plot run away from him, and now it's out of control. It's at the point where the makers of the series are already filming bits he hasn't written yet. They may very well 'finish' the series for him, because he's let it all get away. He seems stuck, and the books are coming less and less frequently. I think @GingerCoffee has the right idea. See if you can possibly make several stories out of your new ideas, rather than changing your ongoing story all the time to accomodate them. Follow one character's story to the finish of it. If other characters intrude too much or change constantly, make separate stories for the new ones or the changed ones, and finish with the original characters in place. I know it's a hard thing to do, but you'll need to pull it together at some point, if you want to finish a book. That's part of the discipline of writing.
I’m not trying to emulate George R. R. Martin in how many characters there are and how complex and the many plots and twists that are in his books. I just want to add a touch of reality and danger in my books that aren't present in other fantasy books. My story would follow 5-6 people who have barely any past to remember, bad pasts or have lived a sheltered life. Together they discover their potential and through some searching and conflicts along the way band together to create a group that deals with purging the world from the corrupt. This group was created ages back and disappeared later, far enough in the past for it to become a bed side story to reassure the young that no nightmares could harm them. This also leads to an idea to add another moral that all good things never last, but influence long after those times are gone. If I were to describe the theme or moral of the stories yet to be written, it would be that to fix, change or influence the world you live in for the better or worse then YOU yourself need to seize or grasp at whatever you can and start changing the world by using linchpins or methods instead of having to use armies that number in the hundreds of thousands and wasting life. A sub theme could be that, you can discover many things that are hidden or forgotten whether by design or not, if you only saw past what you were expected to see or looked deeper at everything you gazed at. I have created these characters, named and what they are and also their companions as the members of this group all have 'animal' companions that they are linked to and through them, the people are passively enhanced and are also able to use immense magic when they are given the gift of merging by the Seraph. This is way way into the story. I'm thinking two members of this group will die in harsh circumstances and would be replaced by characters that have already made their appearance whether in a good or bad way. Also, what would be more readable, very in-depth descriptions of places and action or follow the "Less is more" saying? But I guess it depends on the audience in that regard so let's change the question to: As I'm writing this story to share it with other people, I'm not trying to target a specific audience or age group and I'm not writing to make money. So should I try to target an audience or try and make the style universal so it appeals to everyone?
