[CONTEST OVER] JNC Original Light Novel Contest
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@Angelus Everything gets recycled and inspired by something else—your job is to not worry about that and figure out how to make it yours.
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@Lily-Garden How’s is yours going? When writing is going well for me —it’s like all the pieces just start fitting together. But right now I am missing too many pieces for that to happen.
I don't even have an idea of what the last half or third of my story will look like. I have written a lot of dialogue between the three main characters but one or two of my other main characters are barely developed and my secondary characters have almost no dialogue. And I have only really just started my world-building. -
@jazzyjeoff Thanks for asking!
I’ve written the first thousand words, so I’m a bit behind schedule but once I get to the second chapter I expect to get the momentum going cause that’s when the meet-cute with the romantic interest happens and I have a very clear idea of how I want that to go.
I chose to make my narrative more episodic, dividing it into distinct chapters, because I figured it would be easier to write if I can break the book down into chunks.
Once I have the brain-width and can knock out a few thousand more words I expect it to go more smoothly; I have a good idea of where I want the story to go, now I just need enough time to get there
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@Lily-Garden, do you write your stories in order, then? I generally start from the outsides and work in towards the middle for a bit (plus I've got a dramatic middle point this time so I've written that as well), but after that it gets kind of random as the different ideas emerge and then I get all embroiled in revising and rearranging the sections to make the story flow better. Which I think makes it a small miracle that I'm at 23k words now and still going reasonably strong.
@jazzyjeoff, thanks, that makes me feel better about it. I've rewritten it anyway now to make it less similar. As for world-building, I got 5k+ words of background down almost before I started the novel proper so I'm thinking of tidying that up and tacking it on the end as a sort of "mini-fanbook".
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@Angelus I've decided to write the story in order so that I can make sure all the pieces flow organically into each other and so that the continuity is maintained. I hadn't actually thought about writing it in a different order, but it's something I'll consider and end up running into a wall.
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@Lily-Garden I think a positive for working on several parts at once is that (when it works for me) it can make the story feel more cohesive—things like foreshadowing and jokes that reference other parts of the story can feel more natural because they are written while in the same state of mind. Of course there is no right way—but, as you mentioned, the problem is when you “can’t get there from here” without things feeling forced—I have multiple digital trash bins of stuff I liked but stopped fitting the story.
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I'm not sure if I'll actually get to a finished product to submit but I'm having fun working on a premise for the sort of light novel that I'd like to read.
I've got my initial set-up and am happy with it but have yet to come up with a satisfying conclusion. If I have enough time I'll write out of what I've outlined so far to see if that helps to inspire the rest and otherwise I'll keep working on it in bullet point form.
Good luck to everyone who is participating. I look forward to seeing your entries in due course!
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I've functionally broken up my narrative for Bounded Fate into about four parts and only intend to submit the first part so that I don't end up overrunning the word count limit. That's looking to be around 40K words, which will be enough to set the tone, do a bit of world building, and introduce the audience to the main characters. The supporting characters are going to get somewhat shafted, at least in the current draft, and even one of the main characters is going to be a bit thin in this first part, but my priority is to get this thing done.
The main thing that this draft has to achieve is to make JNC interested enough in it to want to publish, after which there'll presumably be at least some time to incorporate feedback and make additional revisions to smooth out any major rough edges. Optimistically speaking, the premise and narrative in the current state should be interesting enough to at least get past one or two of the rounds. With more polish it might even be able to reach the grand prize, but the issue is again time. The current draft is almost done, I'd expect by this weekend to be wrapping it up and submitting it. After which I can move onto Motive & Means, which I think tonally might elicit a more dynamic response if I can nail the intended character presentation. If I can get those two submissions in before the deadline, I'll be satisfied.
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For me, I've done most of the first 4 chapters (character/setup), (exposition), (ability/world), (action and dilemma) need to finish them over the next week or so...
I always find the start the hardest, so when they are some and polished I can write the rest in a couple of weekends most likely
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I woke up this morning with the first fully formed half of a story that's completely different than the one I was originally writing for the contest in my mind.
Has this ever happened to any of you guys, you start writing one thing and then your brain starts spitting out something that's completely totally dissimilar?
Well I guess I'm going to be trying to write two stories before the contest ends now....
“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
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@Lily-Garden, I've never had that happen to me, but I did wake up one morning a few weeks before the JNC competition was announced knowing the basic outline of the story that I'm writing now right down to the title. It seems strange enough to me though that the brain can do this at all, let alone that it should do it whilst someone is already writing a different story.
If I have the time, which I very much doubt, I'd like to get two stories in as well because I have the first few thousand words of a sci-fi story that's set so far in the future it might as well be fantasy and I realised that it might make a good sort of isekai too if I can bring someone from the present day into it.
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@Angelus well, to be fair to my brain, the idea for this second story had been percolating in the back of my mind for a while; but it all came into focus with detail this morning
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@Lily-Garden You see that Mumblemumble post above? That was me scrapping about 50K words of text to redo (twice!) the entire story of Bounded Fate at that point. And that's ignoring the fact that I have another entirely different narrative in Motive & Means that I've yet to start on.
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@zwabbit personally I'm just impressed you had written 50k
I might be lucky if either story makes to the word count requirement by the deadline at the rate I'm currently going...
“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
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@Lily-Garden said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
Has this ever happened to any of you guys, you start writing one thing and then your brain starts spitting out something that's completely totally dissimilar?
I've had that happen to me three times since the beginning of the contest, two were ideas I've been stewing on for a while but a completely original idea struck me out of the blue. I actually wrote like 3k words on it before I realized it's not even a novel.
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@Lily-Garden Just have fun!—and for what it’s worth—when I say to you to “just have fun”—I am probably mostly trying to convince myself to do that. I can't help but get caught up in delusions of grandeur with this —but realistically the most I will probably get out of this is a so-so story that I might finish some day and the chance to talk about that attempt here. I know I need to be okay with that—but honestly the delusions are kind of fun, too!
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The only person that I really have to bounce my story ideas off of really trashed the ending I have been working on. I guess I probably shouldn't keep it—I sort of enjoyed working on it—but now I am a little down—and I really don't know how this is going to end. (and, I have a lot more to write outside of the ending).
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@jazzyjeoff as a relative stranger from forum-land, I just want to say "keep at it!" and encourage you just like you have been encouraging me
And in my completely totally & utterly uninformed opinion I think you wrote a decent ending (or at least I imagine it to be 😉)
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Whenever someone criticizes a work of mine, there is a sort of checklist I apply to determine whether the criticism is warranted or applicable.
- Are there any actionable improvements within the criticism?
- Is the criticism raised consistent or coherent within the context of the narrative itself, or is something being asked of that's impossible to begin with?
- Does the criticism align with the actual story that I am personally interested in writing?
By and large if someone outright "trashes" something, it indicates a mismatch in personal taste between what is being written and what the reader wants to read. While there can certainly be legitimate criticism of a work that centers around technical inaccuracies (coughCheat Blacksmithcough), if a reader's feedback is centered around how the story is not of the type or content that they themselves are interested in, there's nothing really that can be done to improve the work by trying to take into account such feedback. At the end of the day, you are writing a story that you yourself are interested in. If the end that results in is not what some prospective reader wants, there's no point in forcing either to try to reconcile with each other.
In other words, write what you want, be it ending or other parts. At the end of the day, unless you're personally happy with what you have, you won't be able to do the most important bit of all this, which is to actually write something out.
