So, this last year has been a time. Since the last anniversary, there’s been global lockdowns, riots in the streets, chaos. On a more personal note, I wrote the better part of two novel first drafts. And, in the spirit of the last—two! How’d that happen?—years, I’m going to write a quick memoir-essay mix about the center of this last year. Whereas the previous year was devoted to getting the blog off the ground, with the pandemic, I figured this year I should use the extra time to focus on my longer, more in-depth works.
That said, let me start with the blog. I really liked how it felt writing the Serendipity and the Villa Magistrorum Nostra stories, stories with overarching themes and plots lasting several months. With that in mind, rather than simply stagnate, I started testing the waters further. First, I brought the disparate storylines of my superhero tales, converging on a series of confrontations and ending it. I took characters initially written to have little or nothing to do with one another, and I tried to fit the pieces into a single story. While I feel it worked, each story took a lot of work to fit with all the others.
That difficulty of working in a catalogue of preexisting characters, personalities, and worlds led me to try writing something more akin to the Villa stories, just taking a world I had already worked in and writing a longer plot within it. And so the miniseries in Galaxy Incorporated from the perspective of a rather murder-prone ship AI, PPPI Destro, was created.
I also experimented with the idea of continuation. I remembered the interesting setting I’d made with the Flooded World Stories. When I read them, I realized two of the three stories ended with cliffhangers. And so I figured out a general plot outline to continue those cliffhanger stories, and began the Rite Saga, a Flooded World series which should be finished soon™.
While those are the smaller scale examples of this more lengthy storytelling practice, throughout it all, I was using everything that I’d learned and practiced from those smaller things to improve my big piece of long-term continued storytelling. Early on in the year, I realized I wasn’t really fulfilling the potential of my Villa stories. I was doing these brief character bits, but it was mostly focused on the minutiae of how Villas work. Instead, I realized I could tell basic college stories in this mystical world. Stories taking place over months, developing my characters and relationships naturally. So, before I even started thinking about the pair of summer stories, I wrote a basic plan for what I wanted to happen over the course of the year. Small arcs, big arcs, characters to be introduced, relationship developments, character development. Then, once I started on the stories, I worked out what I wanted each of the stories individually to address from that list and how. Whereas the first year was not at all planned, just went with the flow of what felt right, Year Two had a lot of planning going into it (If I’m entirely honest, probably too much). I started using my so-called ‘vignettes’ to tell a bunch of real stories.
With the blog out of the way, I can move to the two works that dominated my life in the apocalypse, what went into them, and what they meant for me. Villainy and Flight.
Villainy was a story I started last year, for NaNo. The important thing to note is, when I started it, I had exactly four things planned: The beginning, each of the two main characters’ personalities, and the date night midway through the story. That was it. I had a general idea of what was going to happen, but it was entirely pantsed. Once I’d stopped at the end of November, it was no longer the same story I thought it would be in the beginning. And worse than that, there wasn’t a clear path forward. After the turn of the new year, I’d put Villainy away entirely. I was uncertain where to take it, and as it hadn’t been planned previous, I wasn’t sure I wanted to plan it too much. Then, around the end of March, I picked it back up. I was at a lull, I had short stories for a minute and we were locked down. Rather than dive into the writing, I wrote seven pages worth of outline, each and every chapter getting their own, detailed accounting. It made the writing itself feel more like work, certainly, but it meant my story had an actual climax, had a solid, albeit uncomfortable ending. But, even with making the writing feel like work, having an actual outline meant I was able to finish it and have a first draft ready for people to beta-read.
Then, there was Flight, the pinnacle of my more substantial story work for this past year. I started thinking about what I was to write for 2020 NaNo in the summer, and decided on something completely new. I wanted to make a whole damned world again, with its own culture, mythology, history, etc. And so, before I even started, I wrote out a general idea of the world. I made a world map, outlined where the different nations and states were, the international relations between them. Then I asked myself, what kind of story did I actually want to write? I decided on genre, then themes, then the basic idea behind the plot, then the ending. Then I started to come up with the story, chapter by chapter, adding characters as I felt appropriate. Rather than the near page per chapter of my last third of Villainy, I wrote only one or two sentences per. I was hoping that would help me keep to it but allow for interesting tangents (which it ended up doing, so points for prescience). Then, arguably more importantly, I stuck to that outline when the writing actually started. On the one hand, while I was writing it, it was more fun as I let events unfold almost as though I were pantsing it. But, with that focus from the outline, the pantsing didn’t result in any tangential side-plot like things lasting for too long or taking control of the story. On the other hand, because it was planned to the end, I had to find a different motivation for writing it, beyond my usual wanting to see how the story ends.
So, what did this mean? Why did I do it and, more importantly, why did I decide to devote my retrospective to it? We all know it isn’t about planning for a future, because that just isn’t me. No, I want to talk about the themes of these wonderful, lengthier works. Where my short stories can paint wonderful pictures of characters and scenes, the longer the tale takes to tell, the more in depth themes it can explore. The Super-Zero stories were about everyone struggling, fighting, even dying, to change the status quo, and they ended with everything essentially where things were before the first story. PPPI Destro and the Flooded World miniseries are about the most coldly brilliant minds from the past trying to change the present for the better, and doing so in terrible and excessively violent ways. So, in a lot of ways, are Flight and Villainy. Villainy is essentially the former. The plot of the book is a series of events, a lot of organized chaos, but in the end, nothing of substance changes. The conflict, the death, the story itself just serves to increase tension. Flight is both, in a way. In the end, after all the chaos caused by the main character’s actions, everything is returned to the status quo from before the beginning of the story. Multiple times, in fact, Eike(the protagonist of Flight), questions whether his, or in fact any, actions can change things, and by the end he’s seemingly proven correct in his belief that it can’t. But, importantly, everybody in the story, from our main characters to the villains to the parties only present for a chapter or two, constantly makes terrible decisions for some greater good, causing only more violence and chaos. I don’t call it my pinnacle because it is the longest. Villainy has it beat already, and Villa will over take it eventually. I call it my pinnacle because, in this last year, it is the distillation of the themes I wanted to tell with that style of storytelling.
If Flight is the pinnacle of my these more in-depth stories from this year because those themes are distilled into it, that leaves another important question. What about this year makes those themes so important? For me, writing has always been a means of asserting some semblance of control over my world. Of forcing my ideas into reality by sheer willpower. This year, as the apocalypse rained down around us, I felt that control slipping. I felt chaos taking over. So, I wrangled even more control in my writing, planning things and connecting things as much as I could. But I used those planned, connected stories to comment about the world I saw, a world in which nothing ever really changes or matters, and chaos, no matter how well intentioned, always seems to beget more chaos. I’d love to end this with some powerful call to action, like the last two, but quite frankly, there is no call to action. Not now. Put whatever you have in your head into the world, certainly, if that is what you can and want to do. I will always say the more perspectives in the world for general consumption, the better. That said, if we go back to the center of my longer and more flushed out storytelling, what I can say is actually the opposite, at least for now. Go out and do something about the world. If you feel out of control, don’t find some outlet to feel in control, go out and wrangle yourself some damned control. Do something about anything and everything that you think needs doing things about. Otherwise, you’ll end up like me, looking out on the world and seeing nothing ever changing and chaos reigning.
Sorry about the super depressing ending there, but, you know, I think the whole world ending around us for the entirety of the time this retrospective is about thing excuses me. At least a bit.
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