I thought I would share the posts I make on the Writing Camp exercize book here, as I don't think that people can read them otherwise and I have tried to make mine insightful and write in the same style as I do on this blog... I never know how to start things like this, but I think I am going to start with an introduction because I think my previous experience and the things that drive me as a person are important and relevant to the way I work and the ideas I have.
My name is Sara, and I have been writing for Dreame for a year and a half. I have been a member of the full-time writer’s program for eight months, and I have completed three stories in that time.
At the moment I am working on four stories, and for the past few months this has been my full-time job.
I have been writing fiction for as long as I can remember, and several modules I took at university were to do with things like the Epic of Gilgamesh, Faust, and the role of the blacksmith in medieval storytelling.
I’ve been working part time as a freelance writer since 2010, and I have produced countless articles for specialist magazines in that time. A book I wrote about the topic I am known for was published two years ago and is available in physical bookstores, which is one of my proudest achievements. For a while I worked writing articles for an archaeology website with a focus on ‘wacky’ theories. They offered me the job after I submitted an article I had written as part of a module on writing for different audiences as part of an MA in archaeology, and I am really grateful that they gave me that opportunity because writing about ridiculous things like whether ghosts are real made me realize how much I missed writing fiction, and the comments my articles received gave me the confidence to start sharing my fiction online again which I hadn’t done for more than a decade.
When I realized that writing might actually be a viable career choice for me I started taking it a bit more seriously. I feel honored that people enjoy and read my work, and I have tried to repay and respect my followers by actively studying new techniques and methods to try to improve my writing.
I have countless books about things like how to portray different emotions or and how to write compelling dialog, I have about 15 special thesauruses which cover things like words and phrases to used to help with fleshing out characters and making sure I ‘show, don’t tell!’
I recently completed a 12 week course in storytelling which I found really inspiring, and for the past two months I have also been running my own blog which I am using to share my own knowledge and experiences to help new authors.
I am pretty confident with writing outlines, and I have my own techniques for that - I found the first video rally reassuring because the three main points in that line up pretty neatly with the way I already write my own outlines.
Because I am used to writing tutorials I ended up using examples from one of the outlines I have done previously as I tried to write this post. I have decided to just embrace that and use my exercise book to try to explain how I work as well as how I am adding and adapting the things in the course to my own way of working. So although this post is about a story I have already written, I will craft a new outline from scratch using a combination of my own methods and the ones given in the first module of the Writing Camp in my next post. I think I will probably follow this format every week - an initial post reflecting on what I have learned and how it relates to the things I already do with some examples, and then a second post putting the new things into action.
I like to start off which a really basic idea. There’s this concept that I find really helpful when I am trying to get down the basic information about a new story, which is to try to start off by summing up the plot in ten words or less.
That sentence often ends up a tagline for the book - for my book Morrigan: I Am Your Fate, my one line summary was ‘a story of recovery, revenge, passion, and destiny’.
This sums up the most important things about the book for me without detailing the characters, setting, or main twists and turns and I keep this one sentence summary in mind as I write every chapter, and when I wrote the full outline of the book.
Every time I finish a chapter of Morrigan I ask myself whether it has at least one of those four main themes:
- Does it show her recovering from the trauma she endured?
- Is there an element of revenge (either her own revenge on the people who wronged her or revenge other characters are seeking for things that have upset them)?
- Does it show the passion the characters feel?
- Have I shown that destiny and fate are important to this story?
Morrigan is the first story I used this technique with, but I have found that so helpful that it is something I have continued with in the things I have started since.
After I decided on the key themes of the book I started to flesh it out more, and the way I did that is similar to Step One.
The first book I wrote for Dreame is Book One in my series Centuries of Sin which was initially intended as a fun way of creating my own rules and mythos manipulating popular werewolf tropes. After more than a year creating my own rules and history, I had loads of ideas. The series follows the last two members of a legendary werewolf dynasty, and the idea for Morrigan came from one of my main characters retelling the legend of their most revered ancestors.
I didn’t actually intend to write the story; I just wanted to do a little world building.
The information given in Centuries was just a snippet of a story given in an offhand way, but it left me with the basic framework that I was able to flesh out. I started off with these points:
Plot
- The Alpha character has a ‘suitable’ mate
- He bonds with someone who is deemed inappropriate
- He initially dismisses their connection but is unable to ignore their connection
- In the end she proves she is powerful, and is accepted by his pack
- Set several hundred years in the past, in Europe
Characters
- A wolf who is portrayed as dark grey on the family crest
- A wolf who is portrayed as silver on the family crest
- An Alpha
- A ‘suitable mate’
- An ‘unsuitable’ mate who fights for her rightful place at the Alpha’s side
What I did with that information fits pretty well into both Step Two and Step Three of this weeks Writing Camp task - I took this basic information and I modified it to fit in with the four main themes I had decided on.
The biggest things to think about were logic, and making sure the story was different to the others in this genre. I wanted people who read and enjoy the world I created in Centuries to feel comfortable that the rules I created in my own world still apply in my other work.
The rest of this post contains minor spoilers for Morrigan.
I needed my main female character (Morrigan) to be ‘unsuitable’ for the main male character (Ares), and for him to already have a mate (Zaahra) who is deemed appropriate by the rest of his pack.
There needed to be a logical reason for Ares to find Morrigan unacceptable, and for him to reject her initially. There needed to be a way for her to ‘become’ acceptable enough to replace his original mate, and there needed to be a reason they couldn’t just live as a ‘thruple’/ co-mates.
I looked at all of the points I had to work with, and in the end I thought that the fact the wolves are different colors would be a good angle to take. In heraldry, the color silver is known as ‘argent’ and it is interchangeable with white, so I thought that tiny snipped of information I gave as a throwaway comment in Centuries would make a really awesome plot point in Morrigan.
The ‘white wolf’ trope is already well established within the werewolf genre, but… (don’t tell anyone…) I have never actually read another werewolf book. I avoid them like the plague because I don’t want other people’s ideas to end up influencing my own work, and I am aware that the fact my own world is a little different to some of the established ideas in other novels is what a lot of my most passionate readers like about it.
So I had this idea that the fact one of the characters is a white wolf would work really well, but I didn’t know how that would play into things, or what it would actually mean.
The white wolf could be notably weak, or enormously powerful - that’s the beauty of making up your own rules!
I initially thought that Ares would be the white wolf, and that Morrigan would not be seen as suitable for him because she is a lowly gray wolf. As I tried to flesh out my outline that way I realized that was just not right. I couldn’t ignore the fact that one of the wolves had to be either very pale silver or white, though, and when I finally decided to try writing an outline with Morrigan as the white wolf everything fell into place.
That was the logic that had been missing from the plot, and it ties in to all of my four themes.
Morrigan looks like a white wolf when she is in her human form - her hair is pure white, her eyes are the color of Baltic Amber (a trait which is seen and noted as both beautiful and unusual in her last surviving decedents in Centuries). She stands out, and it is supposed to be a good thing, but… she isn’t a real white wolf. She has no powers - she can’t do the things that all of her descendants do. She is supposed to be able to read minds, and have visions. She can’t. She has lived her life being treated like a massive disappointment and a failure, and when she first meets Ares, who has always been fascinated by the idea of white wolves, it is humiliating for her to admit the truth,
If she was white wolf she would be acceptable, but the fact she appears to be a white wolf when she isn’t makes her deeply flawed and unacceptable.
It is revealed that her brother was a real white wolf, and that he was murdered by the Alpha of the pack she grew up with because if a powerful (male) white wolf would have posed a threat to his position.
At this stage I started to think a little more about how my basic ideas about the main character would work with the four key themes - recovery, revenge, passion, and destiny.
Recovery is one of the most important things in things in this story, and although it is a difficult subject to write about in a sensitive manner, I decided that the trauma Morrigan has to recover from is sexual abuse at the hands of her former Alpha. This is a really serious topic to cover, but I find it frustrating that there are so many books which deal with physical and emotional abuse in a very trivial way, or which end up with the abuser and their victim in a happy relationship by the end.
I wanted to show that Morrigan has been through some extremely difficult things, and that those things have left her with lasting, complex issues which make integrating into a new pack difficult. She was abused because she looks like a white wolf, but she did not realize that it was abuse at the time.
To recover from what she went through, I felt that it was important for her to be separated from the people and situation she was in completely. This also makes it extremely clear to the readers that she is not going to fall in love with the man who abused her.
The first few chapters cover her actual physical recovery - she was abandoned when she was close to death, and she is close to giving up when she has a vision (which she does not fully understand because she is semi-conscious) of Ares, a man she has never met before. This was something that I included before Ares was introduced properly as a big sign pointing to him as being her destiny.
Revenge and passion are both established as key to the plot early on because after her initial vision of Ares, Morrigan is inspired not to give up. But as she begins to fight for her life - building a fire, finding water, hunting for food - she is motivated by her anger and hatred towards the people who abandoned her, and she decided that she will survive because they wanted her to die.
The rest of the story fell into place really easily after that, because I had a really strong idea of who Morrigan is a character and the things that motivate her.
She’s a fighter, and as she begins to recover emotionally she shows that side of herself more. She is a fiercely intelligent and independent young woman, but because of her upbringing within a nomadic pack and the way she was treated by them she is also rather naïve about a lot of things. She keeps herself alive, and she knows how to survive on her own, but she genuinely doesn’t understand that her old Alpha was mistreating her.
Ares is captivated by Morrigan, but he attributes this to the fact she looks like a white wolf. He tries to find reasons she is not acceptable, because he is in denial about the fact he has a bond with this woman he found living in the wilderness on her own.
She’s living in a run down tent wearing rags and as far as he is concerned it is suspicious that she was left on her own that way, because no pack would abandon a white wolf with no reason.
I didn’t want him to be some magic hero who takes away all her pain and makes everything better - that is not how recovery works, and it would be insulting to suggest that finding a nice guy takes away the pain of years of mistreatment.
So I decided to make him understanding. That was the logical quality for him to have - he realizes that she was abused because she has very visceral and instinctive reactions to him when he behaves in a certain way. He is observant, and this means he is able to tell that she has had a child recently - he is initially rather cruel about that, but as soon as the pieces fall into place and he realizes she was abused he tries to help her understand why she struggles with some things, and he understands that she needs someone considerate and attentive. He falls in love with the fiery temperament he sees slipping through, and he finally accepts that they are destined to be together because he cannot ignore the way it makes him feel when she is afraid.
As he discovers more about her past, he starts to resent the Alpha who abused her, and his obsession with white wolves leads him to believe Morrigan must be magic. He believes that if he nurtures her and helps her accept and move on from her abuse, she will be free to grow into the person she was supposed to be. He accepts her as she is, and he loves her, but he has faith in her when she is unable to feel confident in her own abilities, which allows her to move on from the past within a loving, secure environment.
I am hesitant to reveal the full outline of the book (and conscious that this post is getting reallllly long) but this is the technique I used when I crafted the entire outline of the book. I worked the four main themes into every aspect of the book, and they also form the main framework of the plot. By the end of the main plotline my readers should be able to look back and see that she has recovered from her past (though there will always be some things she is unable to forget), that there was been some revenge (whether tangible, or through the fact she has a power that had been denied to her for her entire life… I won’t give that away here), that there is passion woven throughout every aspect of this story - both positive and negative, and that Morrigan and Ares have fulfilled their destiny.
I think it’s really interesting that the process I have developed and refined over the past year and a half has so many similarities to the steps given in the Writing Camp. I find it reassuring that I am doing things the ‘right ‘ way, and I will definitely keep on working this way in the future. The only thing that I would do differently is to start out with the single sentence summary, because I find that this helps me to keep on track when I am doing the rest of the outline.
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