Perils of the Writer: The Horrors of the Trunked Novels

I like to remind people that getting to the point where I am, with two novels coming out next year with a major publisher, was a journey.  Before I even wrote the first draft of Thorn of Dentonhill, I wrote two other novels.  Two novels which should never see the light of day.

So let's talk about them.

The Fifty Year War was a very bad attempt to emulate something akin to Isaac Asimov's Foundation, where the key events of a multi-generational war is told through a series of novelette-length vignettes.  Because nine 10k-ish novelettes equals one novel, right? 

Except not so much.  Let alone that there isn't so much a "plot" as there is "stuff that happens".  There isn't anything for readers to hook into.  The closest to a "main" character is an officer named Benton who has a key role in three or four of the sections, and then a minor cameo later.  The only other bit of recurring involves the various generations of a soldier family who keep getting killed in key battles.  That was my way of highlighting the toll on the 'average' man in this war: killing off pikemen named Weaver. 

When it comes down to it, Fifty Year War is essentially a chunk of Druth history that I had already worked out, setting the stage for the "real" time I wanted to write in.  So in a lot of ways, it comes off as a prequel to something that didn't exist, filled with the obvious piece-setting that prequels have, but making zero sense to anyone but myself.

So I would fix those mistakes with Crown of Druthal.  There I had a set cast of characters, so the readers would have main people to grab onto.  And I would have them... do... plot-like things? 

Yeah, not quite.

First problem with Crown comes down to the same challenge a lot of fantasy-worldbuilders face: I've made this whole world, and now I'm going to show it ALL TO YOU.  ALL OF IT.  It was literally a travelogue with absolutely no McGuffin to chase from country to country.  The characters were the crew of a diplomatic ship more or less assigned to go on a world tour.  They were to go to each country so I could show you each country.  I totally had a whole multi-book series planned, and by "planned" that meant I knew which countries they would go to.  Which was a huge part of the problem, especially with Crown, the book I actually wrote.  I had to jam a series of events from "stuff that happens in country A" and "stuff that happens in country B" into something that looked like a plot for a single book.  But since I was far more interested in just touring both countries, the plot takes a good long while to get going.

The other problem is the story is loaded with characters who are essentially there to be set decoration.  I had a ship full of people, with different specialties and jobs, and most of them served absolutely no purpose in the story.  I did some logistical contortions to give most of them a toehold in the climax-- so a combination of telepathy, magic and celestial navigation is used to determine where my main character was being held captive, so then the guys with swords could mount a rescue. 

There are bits in Crown that I'm fond of, but it's mired in long sections where characters are more or less hanging out, taking at least half the book before the plot proper actually gets going.  And the plot itself?  Kind of a long way to drive to get a gallon of milk.

But in the process of writing these two trunked novels, I learned plenty about how to write a novel, how to structure character arcs and plots.  So: they're bad, they'll stay in the archives for all time, but they were vital to the process of eventually writing Thorn of Dentonhill and A Murder of Mages. 

Path to Publication, Part IV: Further Flailing And False Starts

All right, so, NaNo 2003 proved one thing: I can finish a novel, right?  So I'm all set and can just charge forth with this novel-writing thing.  Right?

Yeah, not so much.  The next few years were dire.

I attempted to throw a lot of stuff at the wall, and have a handful of failed manuscript beginnings based on that. A big manuscript graveyard. There was, for example, Long Night of the Pieman, a non-genre attempt to turn my experiences as a late-night pizza delivery guy into a kind of shaggy-dog novel.  Because, I mean, I have stories from those nights, and that would totally work as a novel.  Right?

Never quite came together. Attempting that as a NaNo was a failure as well.

So I also decided to really move forward with the fantasy stuff.  I had Fifty Year War after all, right?  So I kept editing that, and then reworked that diplomatic-outpost idea to a traveling ship.   Some of the same characters, but I was so pleased with myself because I was making them active, having them go places instead of having stuff happen in their orbit.  This was the real start of Crown of Druthal. 

But yet it wasn't coming together.

So I tried to force myself, this time with my Space Opera idea.  I set up a website (that doesn't exist anymore, and was so off-road in terms of traffic, I doubt it was even archived), with the idea that every week I would post up 3,000-5,000 words worth of a serialized USS Banshee.  After all, if I'm doing that, and there's an audience expecting it, I can't let them down, can I?

Of course, the audience never came, and that was a hot mess of a story.  Those two things are likely connected.

Then in 2005 I went to the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop, using the first chapter of Crown as my submission.

Friends, I was so damn cocky about that first chapter.  I honestly felt I would go in and get solid notes, but essentially praise, thumbs up, and pats on the back.  That is not what happened.  AT ALL.

And it totally deserved that.  Because it was a mess.  My writing was a mess, flat out.  I needed to get it together.

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT:  Well, in a way, I kind of did try with the USS Banshee project.  I mean, I just put it out there, no gatekeepers, and let the people find it, with word of mouth and stuff?  Right?  Yeah, except it was a mess.  No one found it, or if they did, they certainly didn't talk about it.  And why would they?  The most charitable thing you could say about it was that it was a charming hang-out story with a handful of lower-deck characters on a starship, and the only thing that separate it from being mediocre Star Trek fanfiction was that it wasn't actually set in the Trek universe.  So there you have it: mediocre fanfiction of a setting no one else knew but me.  Yeah. 

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?:  Yes.  Characters at the center.  For better or worse, with both Banshee and Crown, I had gotten the core idea of coming up with having characters to anchor the story, and writing unique voices for those characters.  I still hadn't come up with things for them to do, or refrained from pointless worldbuilding or historical tangents.  For real, that first chapter I brought to the workshop?  In less than 5,000 words, I not only had extraneous paragraphs about wine or mustard, there is a nearly 2,000 word side-story about how and why the main character's uncle was elected to Parliament.  An Uncle who, I should point out, wasn't going to appear in the story beyond that first chapter of putting the main character on the ship.  So, with the workshop, I was starting to get the idea that not every bit of backstory needed to be told.

Path to Publication, Part III: The Terrible Dread of NaNoWriMo

OK, so, I've knocked on NaNoWriMo before.  I honestly think it's a good exercise, a way to learn your writing habits, figure out how to write a novel, and understand the way you work.

I don't think it's a good way to get great work.

This, of course, took first-hand learning.

The three years after the failed project fell apart involved several false starts for novels, most of which were connected to the worldbuilding work I had done in the fantasy setting.  I had done tons of detail work and history work-- work that still stands, as it is the world that Thorn and Mages is set in.  And I think a big part of the challenge I had to get over was understanding that just because I had done all that worldbuilding work, it didn't mean I had to share it all.

What I had kind of settled on was the idea of writing a series that was the proto-Crown of Druthal, though it was set in an embassy instead of a ship.  But the "Explain All The Things" part of my brain felt I had to properly set things up.  That readers would need to know the WHOLE STORY to make sense of things. 

I think this is a trap fantasy writers often fall into. 

Anyhow, this became the central idea behind what I would make my 2003 NaNoWriMo project: The Fifty Year War.  A novel which would flesh out the history of the war between Druthal and Poasia.  You know, the stuff that readers would be dying to know.

Now, I did succeed as a NaNoWriMo, writing around 53,000 words in November.  And the "finished" first draft was around 60K. 

But it was horrible.

It was a novel in which I had clearly absorbed all the wrong lessons from Isaac Asimov and David Weber.   It was a novel by the way of interconnected novellas, like Foundation, but unlike Foundation, there was no central theme or core to carry it through.  And certainly no core characters.  The closest thing to a central character wasn't a character, but a series of descendents in the same family who serve in the war.     It was a novel in which, like Weber's Honor Harrington books there are several meetings, in which people you never met before and won't meet again tell each other things that you don't care about. 

Fifty Year War was a book with no heart, no soul, and certainly nothing resembling a proper plot.   It comes across as a bad prequel to a thing that didn't exist yet, hitting the notes to set things up in a perfunctory way, without any sense that those set-ups existed for any organic reason beyond "set things where they needed to be".

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT:  At the time I really believed in Fifty Year War, though for the life of me I don't know why I thought that.  It isn't an interesting work, but if the means had been a bit more convenient at the time, I might have convinced myself it should be self-published.  And I would have been wrong, because it is awful.  Further revisions made it less awful, but it is such a mess at its core, no amount of editing could save the patient.  So, if I had put it out there, it would have failed, and it would have felt like a toxic albatross on my name and the world I had built. 

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: At this point, the main thing I had learned was-- roughly-- the discipline behind writing a novel, the level of planning that needed to go into getting it done.  But even then, I was still untempered.  I needed to figure out what a novel was beyond "a whole lot of writing".  But reaching the point of sitting down and writing a novel-like-object to completion was something of a milestone.

Perils of the Writer: The Importance of the Trunk Novel, and Recognizing it for What It Is.

I know a lot of people, if the reviews on Amazon are to be taken as a valuable sample, found David Eddings's The Rivan Codex a waste of time, but for me it was a vital and rare look under the hood of a writer's process.  One thing he said stands out:

"Write one million words.  Then throw it away.  Now you're ready to start actually writing."*

That one million words, almost without fail, boils down to a trunk novel or two. Or more.  So what is a trunk novel?

It's a novel you write that's never going to see the light of day.

This isn't an easy thing to do.  Writing a novel is a heart-and-soul exercise.  No one writes a novel with the intention of sticking it in a drawer and not selling it.  Why would anyone do that? 

Of course, you never write a trunk novel as a trunk novel.  When I wrote Fifty Year War, I had every intention, every belief that this was going to be the real deal.  Which it wasn't.  And then when I wrote Crown of Druthal-- spend YEARS on Crown, to be honest-- THEN I really thought THAT was going to be it.

Both works were messes in their own way, and it took me a while to see that.  But at what point do you say, "You know, this isn't working, this isn't going to work, and I need to move on."

When do you decide that you aren't going to fight the good fight anymore, because that fight isn't the "good fight"? 

For me, it was the realization that I wasn't really writing a proper novel.  Both were, essentially, worldbulding exercises in novel-like form (history and travelogue, respectively).  They weren't stories at all, so much as excuses for me to say, "This is the world I made, let me share it with you."

Once I realized that these works were inherently unpublishable, that they were fatally flawed at the core... I knew it was time to put them in the trunk.  I'm glad I wrote them, I don't consider the time invested in that as "wasted".  But it is work that isn't going anywhere besides my archives.  And that's really a good thing.  For everyone.



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*- This is not an exact quote because my copy is high up on one of my shelves and I'm