May 19, 2023
[Part 1 / 2]
Well, this was quite a journey for sure. Not just inside this story, as it turns out. First of all you can be really proud to have finished this, even if it had gotten hard to push further half way through. Finishing is an achievement already and shows that you are able to bring things to an end even if they aren't all colorful and rosy all the time. I've heard from many people that they started hating their work during the process because they had to work with the things that their past self laid out for themselves. But don't see it as a bad thing: This actually shows how much you've grown during the journey of writing this story.
I sometimes feel like I am in a constant state of writer's block myself. There are always things that don't match up or could be improved - even in the plotting stage (maybe that is why I am so unbeliveably slow at this ๐). And this is true for so many other writers and storytellers, even the ones everyone admires for their creativity and skill. It is like building a theme park ride through and unexplored forest. There are countless path laid out and you have to explore the forest to find the ones with the nicest sights. There are many decisions for which turn to take and sometimes you run into a dead end and have to backtrack - sometimes even to the very beginning. It can be a constant struggle and a stress-inducing nightmare, but when you step into that one beautiful clearing with the little waterfall that has the crystal-clearest water you've ever seen, it was all worth it.
Still, if the jump is too big you sometimes have to put a lid on it and call it a day. THIS right here is the best you were able to create with your current skillset, you current knowledge and your current life experience, but tomorrow you'll be able to craft an experience even more grandiose, thrilling or heartwarming.
Just remember, whenever you feel this "writer's block" (even though I don't really like this term) coming up again: It might be a sign that something in the bigger scheme does not work out. Take a step back, think about something else, take a nap and question if your assumptions up to this point even make sense. And maybe even as a general idea (that I myself am guilty of only rarely complying with): Keep a little chapter buffer to not cut off the way behind you too early. Sometimes even bigger changes are necessary to make it work out somehow.
But in order to give you a small guidance from my side, I'd like to provide you with a little feedback on a few points. As already implied above: You might be aware of a few of those things already. Still, I'd like to give you my view on them in the epic detail you'll sadly have to read through now (soooryy ๐๐
).
First of all, the narrative structure: I'm not exactly sure if I suggested this for you or for Katsuhito, but definitely check out "The Hero's Journey" (there are a ton of helpful YouTube Videos on that topic). It should not be seen as a rigid framework, but a rather loose guideline for structuring stories and is ACTUALLY BASED on how every story is structured no matter what continent, nationality or language it originated from. Stories and storytelling is part of humanity's DNA and the hero's journey is the railing you can hold on to when structuring your narrative.
The reason, why I was so surprised that this story was about to end already, was because this story did not really follow this intuitive guideline, or it rather didn't follow it to the end. You see, in the framework, there is the ordinary world and the special world. The hero(s) receives a call to adventure that drags him into the world. At first they might refuse it, but they somehow get past the threshold anyways. In your case this "special world" would be the world where they killed someone and have to live with the consequences. In other words: Sora's death was supposedly the one thing that would have pushed the four over the threshold, but crossing this threshold is something that normally happens (roughly) at 25% of the runtime. What follows are tests, trials and at the end the hero(s) get to ascend out of the world to be stronger and have grown as humans. So up to Sora's death it was actually a great plot progression. It could have been paced a little faster, but I believe that if you would have followed the hero's journey, this problem would have resolved itself as well, since it is a great help for getting the pacing right as well. So I would guess that your struggles with writing started right there, when you left the circle after Sora was killed. I alwayss assumed that this story was a bit like your version of "I know what you did last summer" (it even had a similar naming ๐), where they kind of get their punishment for the terrible things they had done. I assumed that this was the main part of the story and even the synopsis seemed to suggest this, but maybe this was just me. If someone else is reading this novel of a comment: I'd be curious to hear other opinions.
What I think is that you had an idea that was thought through up until the mid point and already began writing and publishing chapters and all, but once you came there, hadn't been an idea that magically popped into your mind on how to go from there. In my writing I've had this issue so often, that an idea was thought through only up until the turning point in the middle (that is actually a part of the hero's journey as well ๐) and was like: "I'm actually quite happy with the plot until here ... once I've written a few chapters, I'm much more in the world, characters and headspace to take a much more sophisticated decision on how to go on from there." But the bitter truth is: NO! Just being more inside a world doesn't eliminate the infinite possibilities you could take from there!
Ideation is a really strange thing - at least for me. It is much more iterative than intuitive as what you would think and it can be excruciatingly hard and painful. I always imagined the great writers to have a whiteboard in front of them where they start off with an idea and attach things to it and characters and whatnot, until they are happy with the outcome and write that down. The reality from my experience - and what I learned from other writers approaches and writing cooperations - is much more ugly. It's like digging through thorn bushes, your hands getting bruised and bloody until every single move just hurts and you're no longer sure why you are even doing this to yourself.
THAT is ideation and plotting and you can't shortcut it through postponing this to another day. It might even get harder since you are cutting off your way back with every chapter you publish. And I'm not even pretending that I'm not falling into this trap again and again. Even with Root Access, if I had a bigger buffer of chapters, I probably would have shortened the whole getting into the school for Isato, but it is the way it is.
