Let's Talk | Writing A Book

A year ago, my friend Shania and I decided to start writing a book. We chose to start this project, because we have always loved reading and felt the urge to write what we had never read before. During this process, I came across some things I felt that were really special to me, and I would like to share this with everyone. Of course, every author’s experience writing a book is different.

The Beginning

The idea we first came up with was completely different from the actual story we are writing. First, we wanted to write a book in the horror genre, our idea was to let the cast of characters we came up with experience terrible things. After writing the first four chapters, we realized that the idea we came up with was not very original and that we wouldn’t enjoy writing this. Another reason why we decided to change up the idea was that we felt really connected to our characters and didn’t want them to experience horrible fates.

Shania and I sat down and did some brainstorming. After hours of thinking, went back to the genre we both love the most: fantasy.  This was when the story started to evolve rapidly. We kept coming up with good ideas for future events and soon the entire book and a set up. We were incredibly excited due to the fact that we had overcome the hurdle of creating a better story line. This made us so enthusiastic that we directly started to write everything down

Creating Aessolyn and its citizen

When we got to chapter 8, we came across another problem: the World. This would be the chapter our beloved characters finally got to the world we had been longing to write about. Soon we realized that we hadn’t spent much time on World building, so before continuing we had to develop our world further.

And so we sat down again and spent days on world building. We made a map to help us visualize it better and came up with cities and towns for our characters to travel to. We also dove further into the history of the great families of Aessolyn (our world) and events that happened to these families in the past that brought them to where they are now. Besides all of this, we also worked on the history of our world: why is the King like he is now and how did he get the powers he has?

It also seemed fun for us to throw in some special days for the citizen of Aessolyn to celebrate. This is when we developed the Elves and their traditions further. The biggest question we came across was: How do the Elves get their immortality? After some research, we still didn’t quite understand how exactly Elves aged, because they aren’t all babies, so they do age, but they are immortal. This raised a lot of questions for us so we decided to come up with our own idea: Elves earn immortality by doing something truly good, because they mean it. We came up with the story of Gaeadir and Luthriel, the first Elven King and Queen, who united the different races of Elves as one. Their beloved Queen was taken by a filthy mundane King and tortured to death. After the tragic of losing his mate, Gaeadir took his own life. His spirit now blesses every Elf who does something good and brave from the heart with the gift of immortality.

After finishing the Wold building and the creating of more characters, we could finally continue on with our story. More and more ideas were coming out of us and we started to make a set up for what we wanted to happen in the second book, because there is no way the entire story is going to fit in one novel.

The weirdest part

When we weren’t writing, I actually found myself wondering what was going to happen next in the book and wanted to continue reading. This was the weirdest part for me, because Shania and I were the ones actually deciding what was going to happen next. This was when I realized, that even though we made a big setup for the book, the smaller details and events in the stories were actually not decided by us, the writers, but by the characters in the book. This is their story, we only write it down. I don’t even know if this makes sense, but this is the way I experienced it.

It’s very strange that you create a cast of characters that, for you, actually come to life. We don’t think about what we want to happen next, we write down what our characters would do. It’s bizarre that we know these fictional characters so well that we know the decisions they would make with all their different personalities, without needing us to decide what happens next. To me, this is the most beautiful part about writing.

The Writing Block

We recently came across something every author experiences: A writing block. Currently, we are in the middle of a massive battle between the Dark Elves and the Humans that we have been working towards for a while and we have no idea how to wrap it up. Because of this, I noticed that we started writing less every day and when we had time to write in class or at home, we were doing anything but write. I think the best thing to do in this case is just leave your story alone for a while, you will eventually find yourself wanting to write again.

During this break from writing I came up with an idea I really liked for a different book and shared this with Shania. She was just as excited as I was and we started the setup for the story. Since we learned a lot from the process of writing The Nameless, we immediately started with creating a well structured cast of characters and did the World building before we actually started the story. This book is still in very early stage and we only wrote the Prologue so far, but we are just as excited about this book as we were about The Nameless.
Update: We have BEAT our writing block and are back to writing every day again! :)

While we were working on the setup of this new book, we also started to get new ideas for our first book and this is how we beat our writing block. I don’t know how many and what kind of problems we are going to face in the future, but the most important part I learned about this whole experience: Never give up on your story.

Editing and the final chapters
Our story is now 108.000 words long and we are about to write the final chapters, the epic finale of this first novel. It's so strange to me, finishing this project we have been working on for almost a year now. I have grown so fond of the characters we created and all I want is for the world to experience their journey. We have already made a set up for the second book, since there is no way we can fit the tale we want to tell the world into one novel.
Besides the writing, editing is also a huge part of an authors work. I have spend the past week editing what we have written so far and already added about 5000 words to the story. You come past so many stupid mistakes or bad grammar when rereading your first draft and sometimes I find myself thinking: did we really write this shit? Luckily editing only makes it better, even though it's a lot of work and a huge pain in the ass. 

When we finish the first novel and the editing, we're off finding a literary agent and a publisher who wants to give us the opportunity sharing our work with all the readers out there. It's everything I've ever dreamt of.

Check the book here! :)   
Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/41792207-the-nameless
Fiction Press: https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3265164/1/The-Nameless

~ Amber