Potato is yum

One of the biggest issues I have when writing my book is well… writing the damn thing. I find myself drawing up character sheets and tweaking things that ultimately don’t matter. I sometimes need to remind myself that nobody will care about a world if there isn’t an engaging story set in it. Often, I find that I make some world building decision just to realize a year later that the choice make it difficult to write the story. So, let’s go over a few examples from my story Fool In Space that I ended up needing to throw away. A lot of these examples are actually published on Royal Road under my first book Wyrm In The Brain.

One of my biggest ideas was the idea that my main character would die 7 times and be revived with his life following one of the 7 deadly sins each time until the last life where all of his personalities would mix together to create one super being. It sounds so cool right? But that ideas was so big that it would only fit in the story by making some of the other ideas and the theme take up a much smaller portion of the story pie. I really didn’t like that. I wanted to write the story to talk about my life and not because I wanted to write a story about philosophy or religion so I ended up throwing away the idea.

After throwing out this idea I realized that each story has a kind of budget of “stuff” you can fit into it and each part of the story takes up some amount of space inside the story. Depending on the worldbuilding, theme, and other parts the story could end up bloated and slow or lean and fast. I know that my writing style is on the leaner side meaning I have to be very deliberate with the content I put into my story. From figuring this out I went through and cut a crap ton of stuff out of the story. It’s still possible to read my first attempt at writing a story but I believe I bloated the world building making there be less story and more scene painting.

By realizing I only had a finite amount of “stuff” I could fit into a story, I learned how to quickly judge if an idea would fit in my story.

You know, sometimes I wake up, stare at the ceiling and think, “Damn. Why do I get up to do the same thing every day?” and then realize I really got nothing better to do with my life. Not like I’m complaining. I rather like things being simple. It’s just sometimes I want something a little more exciting than sitting at a desk grinding away at a degree that won’t yield results for years. Maybe that’s what going outside is for. If only it wasn’t snowing and brutally cold everywhere except my room. I guess I’m stuck in this building for a couple more months. Eh. Why do I think these things? Oh yeah, post plan for this week:

• Media Review
• Making Ads For My Book
• Raw Broccoli
• Titanfall 2 Edit
• 3D Software Shenanigans

Aight that’s it for me today.