Sharing the Process

As much as I intend this site to be a publishing apparatus, a means by which to present my own works, and eventually those of others, to a broader audience, this site is also about the writing itself, what goes into writing stories and making characters come alive for a reader. By no means can I, or do I, claim to be any manner of expert in how these things are done, and certainly I cannot assert how they ought to be done. There is a void, though, at least to my mind, and it is a void which I believe that perhaps in some small way I can help to fill. You see, there are so many books out there, and so many people who would love to be able to tell stories like that, and yet the process by which authors arrive at their magnum opuses is shrouded in mystery.

I don’t blame authors for that: it seems that every career has a little bit of mystery to it, playing into being wizards of their disparate crafts. However, I do believe that there are people who would benefit from some manner of insight into the process of writing, the tools and infrastructure that an author uses and builds to take an idea, perhaps a prompt, and turn it into a fully-fledged story, perhaps even an entirely unique world populated by completely different kinds of individuals. To that end, I am going to attempt to share something of my own writing processes, when I can.

At the moment, I’m not sure exactly what that will look like. It may involve sharing drafts, edits, or other materials related to the actual writing of my stories here on the site. Perhaps posts on the process, or I may even share some of the notes that I create as I go through the world creation and writing process. Although I lean significantly towards the free-writing side of the outlining/free-writing spectrum, as my stories have grown larger and more complex I’ve begun to write down details about the worlds I create and the characters with whom I populate them in what I call World Bibles.

Some of the contents in these World Bibles are written from my perspective, as the all-knowing “author-god” who created the universe and all that it contains. Others are written from an in-world perspective, sometimes from the same era, sometimes from a different era, explaining how the people within the world perceive their universe. Please note that whatever I do decide to post here on the site should not be considered canonical, nor final, to any story. I reserve the right to change the past, the present, and the future at will, any time before a detail is actually incorporated into a published story made live on the site.

As I said, I make no promises on what this will look like, or how much/frequently I’ll post content in this vein, but it is something I would like to do. I may also post things like chapter revisions as I go through them, or even examples of the kinds of comments I find helpful from my test readers during the revision process. At the moment, Blood Magic has the most coherent, written-down World Bible, so anticipate content from that first, but there will also eventually be content for Fo’Fonas (which is in dire need of a more robust World Bible), Djinn, Golems, Impressions, and other stories. Generally, only stories that will have multiple installments, or are at least novel length, will have World Bibles; anything shorter or more contained than that I can keep in my head, at least through the first draft.

Many of the authors I most respect have conducted similar efforts wherein they try to share their process and provide free writing advice. Brandon Sanderson, for instance, wrote a short story for an anthology where all of the authors included several drafts of their story before the final, published version, so that readers could see how the story changed and evolved through the revision process. With these “World Bible” posts, I hope to contribute to that same ideal.