to those who finished more than one novel : how could you really do that ?

[magician2magici]

hello all, how are you ?
well..

now i'm going through hell trying to manage the flow of ideas through my mind and through my epic.. i'm writing at my third book of this epic , but i suddenly thought in such strange way,,

after i finish my epic , how can i think in different epic ?
to be honest with you i can't really think in my life without thinking in my epic , how can i do that ?

here i noticed people managed to write more than one epic and series , to them , to anybody can help , how could you do that ? how could ytou manage to get out from your previous novel\series\epic to write new one ? can you describe hoe please ?!

salam..
el-saher >>

 

[chopper]

ey up chap

its like starting a new job. you have no idea how to do it, just the idea that you want to do it. things get better from there (unless they don't get better, in which case you change jobs again...).

finding a new idea is quite hard. i only had my second-ever idea last month - it is difficult to stop thinking in terms of your previous work.

here's a simple exercise: create a new character. who are they? where are they? what are they doing? why are they doing it that way? suddenly, that's a whole new world.

hope that helps

s

& sorry you couldn't find anything at the book fair, but don't despair - at least you have a list of titles now. that's half the battle.

 

[Lith]

Ideas are easy, once you get the hang of generating them. It's kind of a way of looking at the world, constantly, and wondering how things could be different. Any book you run across, start playing with the world the author gives you, and see if it doesn't start generating interesting stuff.

Also, keep developing interests outside the world of SF&F. Read science news, ponder it, read comedy, philosophy, history, newspapers, get out and look at the world around you. Walk down the street, pick a person out, and start imagining what they're doing where they are, how they got there, etc. Look at abstract art and try to interpret it. Listen to incomprehensible rock and try to decipher the lyrics by ear. Look at phone books, pick out names, start changing syllables until you get something intriguing that you can build a world around. Same with the dictionary. And maps. Crumple up your napkin after dinner and think about what shape it is, what it could be, what space would look like if it was folded up like that...

Some of the most useful advice I got in college was that the imagination was a muscle just as everything else; you exercise it, and it'll get stronger.

I've found it helpful to just spend some time now and then thinking. Freewriting, brainstorming... just ask questions without worrying too much about answers. Each question will generate five others. It also helps if you have a touch of dyslexia, and read things wrong to very humorous effect.

Further than that, I can only recommend bouncing in and out of a lot of things. Change genres with every book you finish, all while writing. Always keep your story relatively close in your mind, and keep looking for ways to connect it to what else is in your life. AND, KEEP YOUR JOURNAL HANDY, to write down even stupid things. Don't think an idea isn't good enough to write down, you'd be surprised how often you read it months later and find something new about it.

And (this just gets longer...) don't concentrate on how many ideas you aren't getting, or on how creative other people seem compared to you. It's a creativity killer to think that way. And if you ever find that a good book starts inhibiting you by its very greatness, read a couple bad ones and get over it.

 

[JFLewis]

I have to agree with what some have already said. Getting more ideas has never been a problem for me, but knowing what I should work on next can be a little tricky. For example, I really want to be working on my epic fantasy series, but my agent says I need to concentrate on my urban fantasy stuff right now.

Fortunately, I do enjoy writing the urban fantasy stuff and I have loads of ideas there too...

Speaking to the question about how to swap from one to the other, I usually have three or four novels going at once in various stages. It's how I avoid writer's block. If I don't feel like writing about my vampire, I swap over to one of the others. If I don't feel like woking on one of my novels in progress, I break out my folder of short stories and start on one of them.

In a few days or so, I'm ready to go back to what I should be doing. The only exception is if I'm on a deadline. If I'm on a dealine, I slug it out, marking forward through the text even if I'm not really feeling it. I treat it like a job. After all, if I don't feel like doing my day job, I still do it or I don't get paid.

If you don't already have ideas for other stories, then I'd start a document called ideas in a the idea folder of your writing folder. As stuff occurs to you: ideas, little poems, cool phrases, or even just names... record them. After a while, you'll start to realize that some of them shoudl go together and you can break them out into their own files.

That's how it works for me anway. As always, your mileage may vary.

---Jeremy

 

[The Curious Orange]

Some people seem to have thousands of ideas and their biggest problem is finding the ones to commit to.

My problem is the opposite, and I fully recognise what you're saying. The creation of my world, my story, and my characters was incredibly hard work. It was like pulling teeth.

Now I'm (still) editing my novel, the question I've been asking myself is what next? I don't have any ideas. The problem is that the book I've just written is so real to me, so vivid, and whatever else I think of is so thin and slender by comparisson.

But, of course, there is a reason for that. I've been writing this thing for years now, and living in that world all that time. I've been a parent, lover, friend, enemy and psychiatrist to these characters all that time. Of course it seems real to me. Of course my next project seems bland, and its people shallow. I need to live with them untill they become real and solid. But it is hard work.

 

[JFLewis]

Orange, there is nothing wrong with turning out quality over quantity. Is there a rule that says you have to ever write anything outside the world you love the most? Plenty of authors spend the bulk of their career writing in a single series.

 

[The Curious Orange]

Oh, agreed, but the world I've created was created to tell a very specific story in. There are other stories I might possibly want to tell in that world, but probably not with the same characters. Although I write fantasy because I love fantasy, the worldbuilding and the magic systems in my work are secondary to the characters and what's going on in their hearts and heads. The act of creating a new story and new characters is such an effort that creating a new world for them to live in is the easy part.

Don't get me wrong - if the book becomes a huge best-seller I'll be knocking out sequels till the cash-cows come home. But until then I want to stretch my writing muscles a bit and try something different.