Episode 34: The Writing Process
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Hello cinnabar moths or any kind of moth you’d like to be welcome to the writers triangle cinnabar moth’s podcast about all things publishing, and books. Today I am here by myself. This is the first time that I am doing a solo podcast for the writers triangle. And I will be talking about my process with writing my book, which was the Pixies in the Mist. And I’ll be doing that my own. So hi, I this is a little bit unusual for me. Usually I have somebody here that I’m interviewing. So this is kind of a different experience for me overall with just being on my own or having somebody to to talk with. For those of you who are missing Kisstopher, unfortunately, you’ll have to wait for a little bit longer before you can hear Kisstopher’s lovely voice again. But for now you have me. Now for this topic about pixies in the mist and the writing process, I want to talk a little bit more into the history of what I actually started off with like writing and how it began, the original inspiration for pixies in the midst actually isn’t some story that I had in mind already that I wanted to write. And instead, what happened was, I was like I need I want to write a book, but I don’t really know how to get started. And I think that this might be something that other people have experienced, I don’t know. But having like this creative drive in you, so to speak, that you want to put out there, but then not really much direction for I guess, is kind of the experience that I had. And so I did was I went online, and I found a bunch of different writing prompts. I went through maybe 20 or 30. Before I found one that was interesting to me. And it was
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if I recall correctly, the writing prompt was your character wakes up and finds that they have a magical tattoo on their body that just appeared out of nowhere. What happens and that was the entire prompt, there was nothing more no history or anything. I just had to create everything from there. And so I started off with Okay, I have this character who has a tattoo, how do I go from there. And it really evolved into something completely beyond just the tattoo. In fact, the the tattoo that Jake main character ends up having is a very, very small portion of the story and doesn’t really play into it as heavily as I would have first expected. And the process of writing that and the direction it took was just fueled by my own imagination. And what I thought would be interesting, and would make sense for this type of character that I had in mind. I didn’t really set out with a specific goal of writing a dark story to start with. But I think maybe that’s just how my mind works. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad. Is that a bad sign about me? I might actually Am I just dark? Is that is that a descriptor for me? I don’t think so in real life, I’m not that dark. But my thought process for the book ended up being a rather more dark story on the scale of things with certain I mean, if you look at the content warnings, there’s some things about like loss of limb, and abduction, gaslighting, which all happened. But the original starting point was just this writing prompts where it was just a prompt to write a story about someone with a Magic Tattoo that appeared out of nowhere. And it took its own. It took it took on a life of its own in a lot of ways. I started off with just the one character who admittedly has a lot of basis in my own experiences in life. I, I live in Japan. So that’s the starting point I moved from the United States. So there were some aspects of my personal experiences in life taken into like with dancing, salsa and the salsa community in Japan. Those are all things that I personally have experienced. And so I started from something very concrete, because I hadn’t written a lot before that book actually, when it comes to fiction by myself. I done some role playing stuff where I had interacted with other people. via text and we’d written like, more collaborative storytelling or like Dungeons and Dragons based role playing and more real time on the moment improv style things. But I hadn’t actually had experiences sitting down and writing even short story really on my own. So this was very new for me in that regard. And I started off very lacking confidence. And as things went on, I started to become more become more confident. But the starting point was very much, oh, I don’t know, will this actually be good? And what should I write about? And for those of you out there who are experienced this as well, the only thing I found that worked for me was to just keep writing, and ignore and do my best to ignore that feeling be like, Okay, this first draft is not going to be good. I just have to admit, I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s going to be a mess. And that’s okay, we can start with the mess, we can always fix something that we’ve created. But we can’t fix something that doesn’t exist. So this was advice I actually got from Christopher was just get words on the page, you can’t do anything unless you have words on the page. And so that was my starting point was just getting the words on the page and seeing what was there. And the initial version for pics in the midst and initial ideas for were very different than the world that I created in the end. And only a few of the aspects really remained the same. Like even my starting point for Jake was quite different from what I had originally imagined. Because I didn’t have him studying English, instead of him working had a completely different,
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like direction that I expected him to take and a different basis for his character that ended up completely changing me because I felt like it didn’t really make sense where a character of this type to end up in a scenarios that I end up writing later on. So for those of you who are struggling with making all makes sense from the very beginning, some some of you might be able to do that. I think there’s some writers out there who are just better than me at this who can create that cohesions from the get go. But for those of you who like me struggled, I would suggest just getting it out, getting the words out getting that story written. And then once you have all the pieces kind of like scattered about being a being okay with just shaping them and molding them to fit each other after, which is basically how I did it was I just admitted to myself that I’m going to have a bunch of disjointed pieces that all loosely are tied together, but don’t really fit as cleanly as they need to to make a proper story. And that’s okay. Getting there was difficult, but ended up getting there. And then from there, I with pictures in the midst, I started working on other characters. And that includes like Kenneth and his boss and the like Rivera and a bunch of other characters. I don’t want to spoil anybody on any of these if you haven’t read it already. But the experience for me was very much about, okay, I’m gonna base this character off of people that I’ve seen, and experiences that I’ve had and have that be the foundation for my concept for how they think. Because I struggled with doing any just purely off the top of my head, no reference point. This is a human human being or this is a pixie or this is a creature that has these thoughts completely untied from anything else because it made it difficult for me to actually imagine how they would act and behave in the world. And so instead, what I did was I looked back over my experiences meeting a ton of people over the years because I have been very social and I’ve met just many different vibrant personalities. And honestly, not so vibrant personalities. There have been people that I got along with very well people I didn’t get along with, but in the process of getting to know all these different people. I learned a lot about how different people would act in the certain scenarios, and just kind of stole from that. And that’s something that I with the ones that are references to people that I met that I was no longer in contact with. I just kind of worked it worked it out. and thought of it on my own, but some of them I took pieces from even Christopher’s personality, for example, and see a few of my friends personalities. And I was like, Hey, if you’re in the situation, how would you react? Like, you’re, you’re suddenly put in this scenario, right? You, here’s your background, here’s your bit, you’re in this situation, what would be your reaction to this. And that helped me a lot with kind of formulating how I felt the character would end up reacting because I didn’t just take it wholesale from them. But I took bits and pieces from their different reactions and my friends different ideas about how they proceed, if they were put in that scenario to think about, okay, these are the types of things that people would reasonably think, rather than just falling into the trap, I initially fell into it, my first writing of it, of what just makes the story continue. Cuz I, my first bit was just how do I just make this work continue? And then in my second, going through a, I took more references for what would actually make sense for a person or a Pixie, or an entity to do. If your motives are this, what does that mean? And digging more into the motives of my characters, rather than just having this basic shell of personality, because personality and motive are a little bit different. And so I built everything from a very character oriented perspective. And then also hand this world that was, where they existed. And so I had the characters in the world were my two starting points I had Jake Kenneth, and all of them have their personality shells. And then I dug deeper into their motivations, like Jake’s motivation was figuring out what the hell’s going on. That was the basic motivation for him was, what the hell’s going on? And how can I, you know, embrace my power, because Jake comes into his own and tries to understand what’s going on with this new, completely different world and type of existence that then is used to in these, these new powers that he gains over the course of the story and figure out what the limits of what he can do are and, you know, trying to survive when there’s creatures out there who would rather than he doesn’t.
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And dealing with these difficult difficult scenarios, and figuring things out when nobody really wants you to fully figure anything out, and how to overcome that sort of barrier of not having any true help, and needing to be self sufficient, while maneuvering your way through completely foreign experiences. Which I think is something that is relatable for me in certain scenarios, because I have gone first time to different like places or to different events and been completely lost and just struggling to keep up. Obviously, not with anything magical, because there’s no magic bullet, or if there is I just haven’t been letting on loop What the heck. But I have drawn from my own experience with that, and from talking with people about their experiences being in, for example, a foreign country isn’t, despite the lack of magic, it is, in some ways, very similar to being in a magical world with all these new rules and expectations, and understandings that you just don’t have any context for. And so I drew a lot of his reactions and his thought processes, from the perspective of, I’m in a place where everybody has context, but me, and nobody really is willing to give me the full story. So I had to figure it out on my own. So that was Jake’s kind of an evolution was he is just some person in Japan, and he slid into magical world and then drawing more from okay, what how would he wants to proceed? As things get crazier and crazier, more and more involved? What would his reaction be? And how would he make this make sense in his mind, when his world has been turned upside down, essentially. And then Kenneth was kind of the opposite, where he’s a character that has all of the information basically, not truly all of it, but most of it he has the full context. He’s, you know, kindness or Pixie, so he’s been living in this magical world, his entire life. He’s been going through this experience his entire life, and he’s been doing his job his entire life. And so none of this is new to him. He’s experienced, he’s got years and years of on the job experience with doing what he does, and with working with magical humans like Jake, and all of this. And so when it comes to this more world Lee, so to speak, creature, in this role that already understands magic, how it all works and has his own motivations and his own goals within it, and fully understands what all the pieces in play are, to a certain extent, then it becomes a much more controlled and measured character compared to Jake who’s essentially fumbling his way through everything and trying his best to catch up to the knowledge that he’s missing. Whereas Kenneth is the opposite of an as a character is competent and capable, and trying his best to meet the demands of the different places where he’s being stretched thin, and make it all work while juggling the fact that he has to deal with Jake, who is a, essentially a landmine thrown into kind of dysfunctionality. And working around that and making sure that he still gets his job done in all different aspects and not dropping the ball on all the new them. And kind of that struggle of having being a being good at what you do. But having the situation be such that you don’t have the the just the time and the resources to manage everything all the time. And that creates openings in the story for Jake to no longer be under kind of supervision, for example, and be forced to not have that support, but also not have somebody who’s watching over Jake’s soldier to limit what he can do within what Kennett schools because Kenneth is motivated for something different from Jake. And that sort of balancing act of Jake needs time to act on his own. And this is the opening that’s created from Kenneth just simply having a lot of stuff to do that isn’t about Jake.
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And so those are the kind of the two balance main characters that I had played back and forth. And then a lot of the other characters are characters that will either come back again later or are, you know, one off characters, and my mind for them would be just a matter of, okay, well, if they’re going to come back, then I want them to be situated in a way that we understand who or what they are. And there’s enough left to be discovered. But there at least have a solid personality to reflect on and interact with for the reader. Because I want each one to be fleshed out to at least some extent. And what happened with that for me, and was one of my bigger struggles that I had to work through is not getting distracted or writing the story. And I, because I built a world along with these individual characters, I ended up fleshing out a history behind some of these side characters that would never get revealed in the pictures in the midst at all, it would just never come up. And so they’re they’re these several characters that have their own vibrant histories that I made. And I was just like, but I want to write the story about them now. And it’s an I had to get slapped myself in the head like No, stop. That’s not what this story is about, we can’t go into this. And keeping myself on task was one of the bigger struggles for me. And the world itself has its own rules and functionality that I think every writer when they when they go into fantasy and fiction has to make sense of the world for themselves and has to create rules that they kind of abide to, and follow when they are operating. Because if you if anything goes, you can kind of go in that more kind of super fantastical style where there, you can just chuck all the rules of normal, like worldly and earthly concepts and be like okay, though everything, you know, out the window to a certain point, but there’s always going to have to be some foundation for people to react and interact with. And because mine’s more on the realistic fiction, kind of the more urban fiction and fantasy style, a lot of the stuff still has to make sense on Earth, like Jake can’t suddenly just not have to breathe anymore. And he still needs to eat because he’s still a human being. He doesn’t just get to ignore that and function within the world. And with that balance of okay, the world is created. It has all these unique rules to it both with the magical world that are different from the human world but are still connected to Earth. And working that through I ended up discovering a lot about the side characters and fleshing them out. And then also, that actually, once I got myself back on task, I was able to say, Okay, this, this actually makes it easier to write out the interactions between these characters because I know, okay, this character has a desire to just keep their job, that’s all they want. They just want to live a simple, simple life where they do their job, and they go home. And that’s all they want. Or this character is very ambitious. And so that’s going to change how they interact with the main characters when they do come up. And, and kind of having these motivations fleshed out in my mind really helps me to make them feel more real to myself. And hopefully, the readers also enjoyed the interplay between the characters. And speaking in the interplay between the characters, with Jake and Kenneth, there were a lot of interactions between them that I felt made them seem almost like friends. And it was kind of a struggle for me to separate them, and keep them clear that Kenneth was not Jake’s friend. And that his role as like a friend in Jake’s mind was purely him doing his job. And that’s something that I felt rather insecure about when writing that I wasn’t sure if I actually got that across. And I want to have them be
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cordial with each other and have this kind of background where they’ve, you know, been around each other a lot and interact with each other in this friendly manner a lot. But then that dynamic gets flipped, when Jake discovers the truth about things. And kind of then reverting more to his natural self as professional together kind of standard office personality that he normally would have with Jake, if they had just met normally, rather than under the original guise of friendship they had. And so that was one of my main focuses with the story was making sure that they seemed like friends up until the point that it was clear that they weren’t from Jake’s perspective. And kind of balancing that to where Kenneth never really actually makes a true connection with Jake, even as he plays it out, and trying to make that seem like a genuine interaction between them despite kind of not actually feeling any true warmth, towards Jake in the process. So that was something that was quite a challenge for me. And looking back on it, I’m still not actually fully confident that I did that, as well as I could have. And I’m, I think that other authors and writers might connect with this. But I feel like I could have done a better job. And at certain portions if I think back over, but at the same time, it’s already out there, it’s already done. And I have gotten, you know, there have been positive reviews and positive feedback from people. And so I let that kind of buoy me against some of the insecurity that I have with having written something that’s out there. And, yeah, I think that’s it for when it comes to talking about the interplay between them. And then for the world building itself, that was probably the most exciting aspect for me with the book. Even though I’ve talked a lot about the characters the world building is what really drew me in, and is probably one of my favorite things about writing in general, is creating this world where characters and creatures and entities interact and are forced to come together with conflicts or with working together to overcome conflict and things of that nature, is creating those rules and kind of building something from a familiar yet different perspective. Because I want my fantasy world would be my fantasy world, and not the fantasy world of a book that I read, you know, five years ago, that kind of would, if it’s too similar, then it’s not my writing anymore. But when we’re building the world, I end up having all these different characters that have to populate all these different creatures. And it was really exciting for me to think about, okay, what is actually the background behind the mist and pixies in the mist? And what is it exactly and thinking about all these things that never actually get told to the reader? Or some of these things that never get told to you guys as readers, as it are my favorite aspects of the book itself that just never get shared? And it’s kind of a kind of a strange thing to me to think about. But it’s exciting to me to have written them, and to have thought them through, even though I know that it’s not something I’ll ever truly be discussed with the reader. And it’s
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Hmm. I hadn’t thought of it actually this way before. It’s something I’ve kind of been aware of. But just now I had an epiphany, I really enjoyed the process of creating something which saying it now is probably, it probably sounds weird, because I wrote a book, I was creating something the entire time I created the stories, you know, creativity was the source of the fuel for all of this in my imagination as a source for it. But I really enjoyed the act of creation, even without the need for it to be something that the reader interacted with. There’s obviously the portion of the there’s the book itself, which has all the stuff that the reader interacts with, and thinks about and gets to see. But there’s always so much more behind the scenes that never really gets discussed. And never really gets to be revealed and see the light of day, and be open for the readers to interact with. And a single writing of a book that I think back over and I don’t, I don’t think of it now as like, I wish I could introduce a stir reader so much as while I really thought all this through. And that was cool and exciting. I get to kind of think back over and be like, that was cool and exciting. If somebody were to talk to me about it, I would be excited to share all my thoughts and ideas with them. But there was no place where in the story. And that’s something that I’m okay with now. And when I was first starting, I was really not okay with the reader, not getting everything. I was like, I must include everything. If I don’t include everything, how are they going to truly enjoy the story. And now I feel like I’ve calmed down, having written and, you know, through the process, I had to, you know, pull it back and scale it back. And that was most of what I was doing was actually scaling it back and then scaling it back and then also being like, Okay, how do I make these things connect to each other, scaling it back in a minute. Okay, now that we removed all the stuff that the reader doesn’t need to know, but it’s important for this story to make sense in a kind of like a background fashion. How do we how do we make the foreground make sense as well? And how do we flesh out the foreground? So that is the majority, because most of my writing ended up being about a lot of things that were background pieces. And we’re kind of the underpinnings and the flow and the creation of the world and the basis and foundation for everything that the reader ends up actually seeing. Make does add to add to think about, like the history, for example of the Pixies and their existence in the world and the kind of the political backdrop to the balance of power within the magical world and the different factions that exist within it. And the different characters and how they grew to, to become where they are with today. In in it today in the story, that and none of that gets revealed in the end. But it was really exciting to write it in my own mind. And, and then pulling it back. I don’t actually feel bad about it. I when I was writing a lot when I was for like college, and when I do roleplay writing and such, I always felt bad about the things that I cut out. Because I felt like I was not doing justice to the full information, the full facts when I was doing nonfiction stuff for my college assignments, or for my writing in fiction being like, I’m not doing full justice to the whole background and story of the character. And now I feel like I’ve kind of in writing pics in the midst, I’ve understood the fact that not everything needs to be shared. In fact, most of the things don’t be isn’t are aren’t going to get shared. And the final product of the book is maybe about 30 to 40% of what actually gets written and fleshed out and developed to make that 30% work and feel cohesive and come together in a way that is clean and make sense. And this was kind of a long ramble, I think. I mean, y’all y’all deal with Christopher. So you’re used to people rambling. And I’m sure that this is maybe a different way of rambling. But I’d like to hope that I stayed on topic talking about the kind of the experience of the writing. And in the end, I think the the key thing As always, just if you’re unsure about writing or you’re not confident, the first step is being like, Okay, I don’t need to be confident, I don’t need to even be good. My first draft,
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I think I did five or six iterations of pics in the mist during the time that I wrote it, that were wildly different from each other. And if you’re writing, it’s okay to have wildly different results, and have all these things that you don’t include. And, you know, get it out there first, you know, flesh it out for yourself, embrace your creativity and let it flow onto the page, let it pour, let it flood the pages, you know, and then from there, you can go back and kind of trim it down, it’s a lot easier to trim things down and to connect things together. When you have excess, then when you have too little. So that would be my advice, I guess, would be to just do too much. The first couple of times, even the first five times even, you know, however many times it takes just do too much first, and then scale it back after, not where you can have all the pieces, you know, on the table, all the cards on the table, whatever your metaphor you like. And you can then just decide which ones you actually need and want to keep in the end product. So yeah, I, I hope that made sense. I hope that was useful or interesting to you guys and gals and non binary pals, and a habit of saying you guys, I’m working on stopping it. I should just say, folks and y’all more often. So thank you all for listening. I hope that you enjoyed it. And I will catch you all. Probably not in another individual podcast for a little bit or maybe I will, we’ll see. But I will catch you all in an interview. And I hope that you all have a wonderful weekend or whatever time you’re listening to this. I hope you all do. Well. Thank you all for listening and buh bye