Painting the Perfect Picture

When I was in Primary School, we used to sing a hymn that began: "I'm going to paint a perfect picture, a world of make believe..." Creating a fictional fantasy world is something that many authors who write in the fantasy vein have to do and it was also something that I had to do today to prepare to write my novel.

I have to admit it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, afterall how do you create a world from scratch. My earliest design started as a large diamond shape made up of 4 diamond shapes (the 4 kingdoms making up my world) but I quickly realised that this wasn't suitable fof my needs. Being a bit stuck I decided to seek help a la google, so I typed in 'how to create a fantasy world' by which I found a link to Holly Lisle's website http://hollylisle.com/. Holly is a published fantasy author with some great tips to wannabe writers and using her help and that of my artistic house mate I was able to create my world.

Creating the world and the objects in it was the easy part, naming all of the villages, towns, rivers, forests, deserts, mountain ranges, oceans and lakes was the difficult part. That's the part which has taken me hours, through dozens of internet searches from river names locally to latin translation websites I looked everywhere trying to name everything. It's not happened, my main mountain range which all my characters will have at some point have to cross still hasn't be named but I will cross that bridge (or should I say mountain) when I get to it. :-)

The next stage for me was to download pictures of the various places that I have imagined for my book. I am no great artist and can barely draw to save my life, so I have been googling for images and have also been using Deviant Art which is where my background image of my fairytale castle comes from.

I thought researching my previous novel which was set in the 18th Century was hard as i was trying to be as realistic as possible in terms of architecture,fashion, history and customs; but this fantasy novel which I have free rein on is so much more difficult to write as I am having to literally make things up as I go. At least I can use the internet to help me, I don't know how writers such as Tolkien and C S Lewis coped with out it when creating Middle Earth and Narnia. I don't even know where they came up with some of the names from. All I can say is that they must have had amazingly overactive imaginations.

A sight for sore eyes - is too much planning a bad thing?

I went to the hospital today to have some eye tests. Whilst I was sitting in the waiting room, waiting whilst everyone else was being called in, I used the rare time to myself to think about my novel. In my very first post I detailed my method of writing my chapters explaining that I do this first of all by hand and then type in to the computer correcting any errors and adding where necessary. My third chapter of the novel has proven to be my most challenging one to write so far and even now I am only half way.

I had previously planned chapter three in detail as to exactly what would happen, but I had the difficulty of not being able to 'get going' on it. Yesterday I managed to write only 483 words which was not like me at all. I was considering this whilst waiting for my appointment, why couldn't i get going and why was what i had written - to put it bluntly - so terrible.

So often we plan things in our lives, but even the most well laid plans sometimes do not work out, and a minor detail can result in our plan being thrown out altogether, despite all the work we may have put into it. You just have to look at the Titanic to get my drift. I think that sometimes planning can do more harm than good, as you can miss out the freedoms of creativity and not knowing where you are going can be half the adventure of getting there and not to mention the half the fun.

Do we also plan too much? Or should we just go with the flow? It can be good to have a routine or structure as it can help keep you focussed, but is too much focus a bad thing, and are we missing out on things because it is part of our routine to stick to our structure?

Returning from my own appointment I decided to go straight to my laptop and rather than opening my saved file of chapter 3 I opened a fresh page and began with a stronger sentence inspired by my time at the hospital this morning. I changed my plan, and the time period my novel was set (only by 20 years or so)and followed my heart instead of my head. Now I am feeling much happier and although I haven't yet finished chapter 3, by changing my planned way of doing things I am half way through the chapter and looking forward to finishing it rather than wanting to give up on it.

Personally, I believe that although, planning can be the writers best tool, it can also be the writers biggest obstacle, and unless the writer acknowledges that things don't always go to the plan then he or her will be constantly disappointed.

PS Comments are very much welcome :)