Let me start by saying this was no easy feat. I didn’t kid myself by thinking it would be going into it, but suffice to say my eyes were opened much wider by this experience. I thought I knew rejection before, but I didn’t. I thought I knew hard work, but the joke was on me. Maybe my biggest mistake was thinking that once the writing was complete, so too were my duties as author. I was so cute back then, so innocent. Still wet behind my proverbial ears. One grows up fast in the literary world, I found. Below you’ll find a recounting of sorts, both of my journey as first-time author and that of my first manuscript. (It’s a long one, so get comfortable.)

Glimpsing Infinity did not start as a novel. Far from it, actually. Well, maybe not that far from it. It started as a cousin to the novel: a series of short stories. Most of my main characters were born in their own short story a long time ago. Long before I dreamed of writing for anything other than a hobby, and longer still before I ever dreamed of writing a novel. These short stories were all mostly in the same universe, just taking place at different times. With hopes of not revealing any spoilers for the book I’ll try and not mention any characters by name as I talk briefly about their evolution.

One of my male protagonists started out far back in history when he was a young warrior in the Eternal Wars, which was the ever-raging battle between the Heavens and the Hells that preceded our current era. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know who I’m talking about. That short story was nothing more than a battle scene, really. A small raiding party of devils, in an attempt to provoke the Heavens, had gated into the human realm and attacked a hold guarded by a powerful priest. Another of the protags in Glimpsing Infinity had a very similar start, but hers (wink wink) was set much closer in time to our current era, after the Eternal Wars but before the human realm was magically sealed off from the rest of the universe by the gods for safekeeping (an act which also got its own short story.)

I began noticing a common theme to my writing. I’m not religious by any means, but I’ve always been fascinated by archangels, and Heaven and Hell battling over us mortal-folk. So I started thinking bigger than my short stories. Why not try and merge a few together into one story? Sounds easy enough, right? But I wasn’t thinking novel, I was thinking screenplay. All of my writing was action-based, and people love action movies. So young, foolish me starts in on the idea of writing a breakout spec screenplay. As if I’ll write and sell it no problem. After all, a screenplay is roughly only 120 pages, and the author doesn’t delve into feelings and emotions in a screenplay; it’s all action and dialogue, which I’m great at. I bought a few books on structure, one being my favorite “self-help” book of all-time, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder (which will get another post all to itself soon, because it’s simply amazing.)

I soon found out that writing a screenplay was the hardest writing I’ve ever attempted. I have so much respect for screenplay writers now it’s not even funny. A note to all my writing friends who think it would be an easy transition: It’s not. One would think, or at least I thought, the writing would be so much easier without all the emotion and thoughts and inner monologues of the characters – and one couldn’t be, or at least I couldn’t have been, more wrong. The difficulty of the writing is increased at least tenfold without that stuff. You have to show everything in a few quick sentences in a screenplay, whereas in a novel you get pages and pages to explain in detail why a character does or thinks something. In attempting a screenplay, I learned two very valuable lessons about writing (anything): 1.) Cut the unnecessary out, and 2.) I don’t have the ability to do #1 very well. Trying and failing at writing my screenplay (the first time – it has not defeated me yet) showed me that my idea was too big for 120 pages.

I came to a crossroads. I could scale my idea back and adapt it better for the big screen, or I could scale it up, add some meat to its bones, and make it a novel. The first horrified me in that it meant killing off some of my idea babies before they even took their first steps (i.e. characters, some action sequences or subplots, etc.) and the second horrified me in that it meant I had to reinvent all of these characters and ideas burning up my mind to better fit on the same stage – essentially build my own universe. I was scared of the novel at first, until I realized what the possibilities were. And those possibilities were endless. I realized I could literally do anything I wanted. This was my world, and my characters and my ideas would be what inhabited it. The thought was thrilling.

But then the soul-crushing anxiety that writing a novel for the first time brings with it nearly got the best of me. I had all these ideas for characters and a few awesome fight scenes, and an ending – and that was it. I had nothing to tie them together into one story. I had no “bad guy.” I had no real conflict, other than the timeless and cliché “good vs. evil.” Every time I began, it always fizzled into another short story. That was when I started venturing out into writing communities on the interwebs, looking for what the problem could be.

I had no structure.

I scoffed when the thought struck me. Structure? An outline? What, am I in school again? What kind of author writes to an outline? Apparently a well-organized one, who actually cares about their manuscript. So I swallowed down my foolish, impatient pride, and turned again to none other than Blake Snyder. In his book Save the Cat, Snyder lays out a beautiful outline format that has helped me plug through all my manuscripts. In the movie world they are called beat sheets. Blake Snyder’s beat sheet saved my book’s life when I didn’t even realize it was in jeopardy. Sure it’s formatted to the 120-page screenplay, but every beat on it is still a milestone that any good story needs to hit to be well-received by the audience. Save the Cat is a book full of valuable wisdoms any writer – new or experienced – needs to succeed. I highly recommend reading it, and I give many thanks to my good writing friend Andrea Bailey for turning me onto it (whose name you’ll know soon enough, I’m sure.)

So I had my structure, but nothing to give it substance. All of my ideas were still too isolated from one another. That’s when the old, cliché saying “Write what you know” popped into my head. What I knew was Dungeons and Dragons, in terms of being creative. Looking back to my days as a player and as a Dungeon Master helped me begin to fill in all those holes my story had. I realized I was good at coming up with all that stuff all along, I just never associated D&D with storytelling.  (Stupid, I know. But like I said, I was young and ignorant at the start of this.)  But that’s exactly what you are as DM – you’re the storyteller for your players. You make the adventure. I was thinking about writing my novel all wrong. Thinking of my story like it was a game campaign (like what I already knew) helped tremendously (and this logic vice versa is also sound, for any writers out there looking to DM.) That, coupled with my beat sheet, made me unstoppable on the blank page.

In mere days, after months of stalling, I had my main characters and their relationships worked out, and I had my antagonists, and I invented the magical staff everyone was searching for, as well as its backstory. The ideas were just flowing out of me like snot on a bitterly cold day. And it was all thanks to having found my structure. Structure is key. Make an outline. You don’t have to necessarily adhere to it word-for-word, but writing an outline is one of the wisest things an author can do. Even if it’s solely to help guide your thoughts, not necessarily your written words, I suggest it. Because I know how scatter-brained a writer can be when ideas are burning up their thinky parts.

So in conclusion: structure, structure, structure, and write what you know (super cliché, I know.  And yes, I am aware that I overuse the word cliché.) I realize now this blog post could have been much shorter. But where’s the fun in that? And structure isn’t the only thing I learned. I forgot that I touched on what happens after the book is published – that your job as author is never done. Maybe we’ll save that for next time, since this long post is eating into the time I set aside to do those other authorly duties.  See, still learning…

See you next time. Until then, thanks for reading!

Kyle