Timewaster's Guide Archive

If any single dream is too fragmented, one option is (similar to the powers idea) start crossing them.

Another option for both magic and story ideas is to randomize two wikipedia articles. Or one wikipedia article with a dream.

Examples:

I once dreamed I was at a benefit dinner with Michael J. Fox, I assume for Parkinson's. Mostly, I remember that he was unfailingly polite and a good conversationalist besides. I hit "random article" on wikipedia and was linked to a tiny article about the Thomas River.

What could possibly inform fiction or magic about these two items? Even the dream is relatively mundane. But possibilities are actually endless.

The first thing that jumped to mind is that a cure for Parkinson's was found in the Thomas River. Going with the magic element, said cure is magical in nature. A magical cure carries many implications for industries like pharmacy and medicine.

Or perhaps I associate Michael J. Fox specifically with Back to the Future (which I do). Perhaps the Thomas River navigated upstream takes people in the past, downstream into the future, and you can travel back and forth. Or choose a river you like better; the point of the article was just to jog ideas loose.

The best way to approach any article or dream for fiction is to solve a problem contained within it. I hit "random article" again (got a stub but linked over to) Kiribati, an island nation in the tropical Pacific. Remote places make me think of hidden magics, for example if the Kiribati are actually from another planet and the island is a crossover realm. Or perhaps their music has hidden powers not seen elsewhere in the world.

The article says a Japanese-proposed space shuttle called "HOPE-X" was to have a landing strip in Kiribati, but HOPE-X was cancelled. There could be a million reasons (many of them magic-related) why that happened.

Moving the same story to a fantasy setting, perhaps there's a city from which every ship sinks when it sets sail. All ships that land on said island are permanently grounded. Does it become isolated due to the island's curse, or does it thrive on a constant influx of new arrivals? The story's hero is one of the many determined to break the curse.

Found the entry for "original screenplay". The low end is $56,500, average is $81,285, high end is $106,070 according to the 2010 Writer's Market.

TOLKIEN WASN'T WRITING A WORLDBUILDING DOCUMENT!

Yet to the modern novelist or storyteller, the Simarillon exists as nothing but a world-building document. It hardly matters whether that was Tolkien's intent.

The inventor of the Post-It note intended to invent a strong superglue. What they invented was a weak glue which was quite poor at its original intent, but a genius way of holding up tiny temporary notes.

You're saying Tolkien wasn't world-building, but as a readable story, the Simarillon...well...fails. Even die-hard fans acknowledge this. Tolkien did not succeed in building a readable story. He succeeded in laying the groundwork for other stories. No, that wasn't his intent. If he was trying to build a standalone "story" with the Simarillon, he has failed to hold my attention after over a dozen attempts...because it doesn't read like a story.

It reads like a world-building document.
 

The Silmarillion was a number one best seller and continues to sell in multiple editions to this day. How many of yours have? 

Nobody here is discrediting Tolkien's success, imagination, genre-defining, intelligence, or trying to diminish Tolkien as a contributor to the genre. But this response is akin to if I told my wife I didn't like a movie (or disagreed with its premise, or disagreed with what its fans state is its premise) and she said, "Oh yeah? How many movies did you make? How many of them won awards?"

Well, none. Does that invalidate my opinion?

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History has proven that Tolkien was, frankly, misguided. He wanted to build a mythology for England. Instead, he only built a mythology for himself and for Tolkien enthusiasts (and by Tolkien enthusiasts I mean "people who were introduced to Middle Earth through the novels and wanted to learn more"; basically there is no other kind). His goal was unattained.

Umm... I think you are taking the "mythology for England" a little too literally.

I don't claim to know what Tolkien was trying to do, but I know what he actually accomplished:

He built a world. He wrote in-universe articles, songs, poems, histories, genealogies.

And how many people are interested in reading the aforementioned?

Only die-hard Tolkien fans. Nobody hands the Simarillon to someone and says:
"It's a page-turner."
"Had me guessing all the way."
"Changed the way I think about x."

Unless -- and this is the most telling thing about this discussion -- unless "x" = world-building.

I think Peter summed this up succinctly when he said that if a writer emulates Tolkien for the sake of world-building, he doesn't have "world-builders' disease" as it is currently understood (and described by Brandon) as a problem for novelists.

I even hesitate to use the word "writer" in the above sentence, because when I am world-building for dungeon mastering, I don't consider myself a writer. I consider myself a world-builder, similar (but far less skilled) to Tolkien.

If a would-be novelist emulates Tolkien out of a misguided belief that he must have complete mythology, background, history, or even character history in place before putting pen to paper, he has world-builder's disease.

Tolkien may not have had the "disease" in that it was a problem for Tolkien -- I believe that is Fardawg's primary point here -- but Tolkien did have worldbuilders' disease as understood by the modern novelist -- which is Brandon's and Peter's point.

It's also worth noting, with all due respect to the man, that Tolkien's own opinion of his "true" work was not a realistic assessment of the marketplace. How true of most new authors this is. Yet it's equally true today that a novel within a customized fantasy setting is far more marketable than a rulebook for a customized fantasy setting.

I know, I know, how dare the editors and Fan Dumb define true art. Right?

Brandon Sanderson's breakthrough story isn't just a good example of how persistent and experienced it takes to get published. It's also a good example of how the industry views series.

My understanding is that once Sanderson had an agent, he wanted to publish the Stormlight Archive. His agent was like...woah, you're a new author. There is no way you can introduce a multi-volume series and expect to be published.

So Brandon led with Elantris. And after that, Mistborn, which although it became a trilogy, definitely stood alone without need for a sequel. Only after those and Warbreaker (another standalone) was he ready to begin the Stormlight Archive for general consumption.

Inkling,

I'm in the same boat as you. I'm writing my third novel. I've written about a dozen serious short stories. I am (to date) unpublished.

I have also done a wealth of research on the publication world, because I've known I wanted to be "a writer" since about age 11. And I thought the book I finished at age 13 was a book. Hell, I thought the book I finished at age 23 was a book, but it wasn't.

By research, I mean that I've read about 40 books "about writing" (only 8 of them were worthwhile) and listened to at least thrice that many lectures/classes/podcasts.

Though not a "member" of the industry, my research indicates the following:


1. There is an extreme stigma against first-time authors. Familiarize yourself with the Steps experiment, in which an unknown author submitted an existing award-winning story and was universally rejected.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_steps_experiment/

Also familiarize yourself with the rejection stories of successes like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson.

The latter wrote 13 books before he was published. That's more than you and me combined.

2. There is an extreme stigma against self-publishing, and with good reason. It's taken as evidence that since no agent/editor was interested, the author basically paid an outside group to print his book. And basically, that's what happens. The success stories in self-publication are the exception, not the norm, and only after you've beaten tough sales standards will an agent or editor even touch you after self-publishing.

2.A. Self-publishing is an extreme amount of work, IF you plan to be financially successful at it. In addition to being the author, you must also be entrepreneur, marketing expert, market researcher, editor, promoter, and distributor. All things that are handled by others in the traditional publishing industry.


3. The best way to get published is to write consistently and submit hundreds of times, both novels and short stories. (I have not taken the latter step because after I truly understood what it would take to get published, I realized my writing had to reach a whole new level of expertise, and I am only now approaching where I'm aiming.)

3.A. And to keep writing without waiting for results. John Grisham's first book was purchased on a wing and a prayer, and didn't get good reviews, but it didn't matter. He'd already written a second, which was optioned by Tom Cruise before Grisham's first publisher rejected it.

4. Make sure a sizeable group of unbiased readers has already reviewed your work. And submit your 20th draft, not your 2nd.

5. Familiarize yourself with industry-standard formatting.

6. Texts I found helpful:

For an agent's view (someone who throws away hundreds of manuscripts a day after reading just one page) of the quality of writing, read Noah Lukeman's "The First Five Pages". It is an eye-opener on how writing is judged.

For Lukeman's view of the business, I recommend "How to Write a Great Query Letter" (free e-book) and "How to Get and Keep a Literary Agent" (which was about $3.00 as an e-book). I've read many others on writing...Orson Scott Card, Stephen King, and Lukeman's information is the most concise and the most-directed at first-time authors with no clue about the industry.

I'm asked every day "Have you ever thought about self-publishing?" and my answer is always the same. Not a chance, because I want to be acknowledged by the industry, as tough or biased or chancy as that may be.

I want a publisher to PAY ME for my work -- even if it's ridiculously low amounts -- than pay someone ELSE for the priveledge of printing me.

(And if I were published tomorrow, I would make way less than minimum wage on my current novel, even with an advance on royalties given to experienced authors, which I would not receive.)

Thanks, Peter. It was hard to imagine physical copies of the book stacked hip-high being an effective way of compiling notes.

I recently made the e-book transition myself and it's kinda hard to go back.

I want to make one final plug here that I respectfully disagree with the premise behind your original question.

It is phrased in such a way as to indicate:

1. You have an existing world or story and
2. You want to add magic over the top of said world/story

I challenge you, rather than using magic to SUPPLEMENT your existing world (adding fire magic or healing magic), build a story AROUND the magic (or in SciFi, technology).

I'm a firm believer that a love story with elves should just delete the elves, or a mystery story with fireballs should just delete the fireballs. Tolkien's story, however, would not have worked without rings of power. Without Feruchemy and Allomancy, there is no story for Mistborn. Without runes, Elantris is meaningless. Without a tainted Saidin, the fear of men channeling doesn't exist.

In each case, the magic is as vital to the story as the characters and setting (in good fantasy, magic is indistinguishable from setting), not something the author added to an existing story which could stand alone without the magic.