So, for example, after writing a really good page and a half scene out of my steampunk novel night before last, I felt good whenever I thought about it, and then when I turned to my story plot, structure, etc for the steampunk novel and fantasy webcomic I’m working on, I felt pretty awful.

I need that happy medium. Being depressed about my writing is so not fun. It’s not like I could even get out of writing - I’d be depressed not-writing.

Is it okay to feel good about your writing? “I know this is a good scene”, etc? Is that different from feeling brilliant? ;D

Jenni, yes, it’s GOOD and HEALTHY to feel good about what you write. I understand the back-and-forth emotions. I almost always go through a phase of “my writing sucks!”–every single novel I’ve written so far, and I’ve got four published to date. But it’s good to re-read them and realize, wow, they’re actually not bad. It really is a matter of balance.

And Sonja–yeah, it’s a sickness. We all have it. Welcome to the crazy-house.

An author’s unique perspective and combination of elements will make the work their own. One of my favorite movies is 10 Things I Hate About You… which is simply a modernized rom-com version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. And look at one recent blockbuster success, Avatar - which was nothing more than a sci-fi version of Disney’s Pocahontas.

So push those doubts aside and write, write, write!

In highschool, I wrote a fantastic novel about a peaceful race of short folks who got wrapped up in a quest to defeat the world’s most evil sorceror. To do so, they had to destroy his magic ring…

(I’m sure when I wrote it, it wasn’t a ring, but it might as well have been).

When I realized I had re-written the first three chapters of Fellowship of the Ring, I quit writing for years. I wish to God I hadn’t. Don’t you quit either. None of us are original, we all just like to think we are

How do you file off the serial numbers? Swap in different characters, or different settings. Abstract out the “three disasters and an ending” from several different books, shuffle, and pick out the makings of a new story. Change points of view. Make the hero the villain, and vice versa. Then write.

And write.

And write some more. And keep reading — your subconscious needs raw material to process.

It’s been said many times that a beginning writer has to write about a million words before they’re consistently good enough to sell. Your mileage may vary, but it’s true that nobody gets good at anything without practicing.

One thing I’ve found is that the more you write — even if it’s crud and you know it — the harder your subconscious works to come up with stuff to keep the pipeline full, and that fresher stuff gets better and better.

Also remember that writers are the worst judges of their own work. What might seem lame to you — because it’s in your voice that you live with every day — may be completely fresh to somebody else.

You are already on the right track by reading this blog. Now you have to give yourself permission to write the junk stuff. Get it down on paper. The real writing begins when you edit and rework. Read it and find what doesn’t work. Then figure out what to change to make it work.

If you don’t already have Randy’s Snowflake, get it. Read it, follow it, use it. It will help you make these tired old plots uniquely your own.

I wish you well in your writing.

Randy sez: Thanks, Judith! RETRIBUTION is what I consider my best published book. However, it’s not my best book. I think my best book is RABBI YESHUA, which crashed and burned during the pre-publication stage. Meredith Efken was my freelance editor on that one and she helped me make it better than I thought was possible. Tosca Lee, one of my writing buddies, tells me that it’ll be a crime if I don’t publish it. I respect Tosca’s opinion, and my plan is to publish it as an e-book original later this year or early next year.

As for that pesky RETRIBUTION sequel, I originally had a sequel contracted, but the series was prematurely terminated before I had a chance to write it. I plan to write several sequels, probably 3 or 4, to take the story all the way through Masada. That may happen as early as next year, depending on how well all these e-books do. (I’m about to release all my previously published novels as e-books, now that I’ve got the rights reverted back to me for all of them. I’m just working with my artist on the cover art.) So put away that pesky broom, Judith!

Randy sez: Were those labeled as fantasy or as fairy tales or something else? For sure, MacDonald was a precursor to Tolkien. Like I said, nothing is really original.

I have only ever been able to buy Retribution (um, for $1 from CBD’s clearance section) and really want the rest since I jumped in at the end of the series.

Continuing the series sounds like a great idea; I love that period of history!! Will the modern characters ever return to our time?

**back on-topic**
George MacDonald is generally considered in fantasy circles to be the step between fairy tale and fantasy.

There’s a great amount of advice here; I have been encouraged greatly.

Asking the “What if…” question also helps.

I’m reading RETRIBUTION also. Randy is using one of my favorite names for God: HaShem.

I loved the premise of TRANSGRESSION (that got the couple into Jerusalem in the first place) - assassinating the apostle Paul, so that Christianity would die. AS IF!

Thanks for your encouragement and “tutoring” with this blog, Randy.

I think I’ve since dropped all of those plots, but I don’t think the ones I’m working on now are any different in sense of originality.

As others have said, don’t stop writing. Keep your chin up and write!
~IshanaTM

On a different note, I am reading your Writing Fiction for Dummies. I have read many HOW TO BOOKS, not only on the subject of writing, but also in many other areas. So far, I am loving the way you organized the material and integrated all the components. It’s like learning to play piano…getting that right hand to play in sync with the left. Hopefully, I will move beyond paying so much attention to the technical aspects, so that my writing starts to breathe on its own.

Start by making a list of the most interesting people you know (know personally, I mean) and what about them makes them interesting. Every time you get a chance, watch the people around you. From how they look, react, hold their bodies, from the expressions on their faces, and what they say, try and figure out what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what might be their backgrounds and what could be the current challenges, joys, fears, and hopes in their lives. This will help you build up a mental database you can draw on when one of your characters is facing a situation - you’ll have many real life people showing you many ways that an individual can react, and - if your character is “real” to you, then you’ll know exactly how your character is going to react. In fact, I’ll bet if you try to make your character react in a way that doesn’t fit, your character will flat-out refuse. If so, then you’ll have to study your character just as you’ve been studying all the real live people around you, to figure out what your character is thinking and feeling.

To find the world for your story: pick either your own real world, or a world you’d like to explore (some other part of Earth either now or in another time; an alternate earth; other planets congenital to our type of life or to life based on alternate chemistry such as silicone, a virtual world, the heart of a sun, a universe where magic is possible and humans use it with the same skill and thought that real-world humans use internal combustion engines, etc., etc.) Move to your world in your mind, set up your alternate self: who you are, where you live, how you earn your living and/or how you are being trained. What is it like to live in that world? Spend time in your world until you can see it, smell it, taste it, navigate in it; go there until the other beings who populate that world start to take shape and to interact with you. (You want your world to be believable for your readers. If it’s a world that actually exists or did exist, then read all you can about it. If it’s a world that doesn’t actually exist - at least, not that we know of - then learn all you can about the rules that would govern such a world, such as physics and chemistry for extraterrestial environments, or the mechanisms and laws by which magic would work for a magical environment.)

To find a main character: go to your story world and sit quietly. Watch the other people (life-forms, cognitive nexi, or whatever lives there) go about their business. Which of them gradually becomes more real to you? Get to know that person. You’ve made the connection when the character’s point of view starts intruding in your real-world life, when vignettes from the character’s life start running like little videos in your head when you’re busy trying to do something else.

You should now be in a good position to dump a problem in front of your character and see what happens . . . .

Developing characters into real people with real struggles … that is, not having them become two dimensional … helps any story. Very few people in real life are only pure good or pure bad. Having a hero that never slips up, or an antagonist that only has one side diminishes the tale.

How that all relates is that … “original” is really in the telling of the story … the voicing of the author and the weaving of the tale.

For me, I find, as far as ideas go, that if I take a normal situation, turn it upside down or inside out and say WHAT IF? I usually end up with a pretty good starting place for a story. Do they all work out? Of course not. But most do, and those that don’t and usually be redigested into something else later on.

peaceful race of short folks who got wrapped up in a quest to -defend- the world’s most evil sorceror. To do so, they had to -deploy- his magic ring.

Now this is a great twist on the very unoriginal story. Try this anyone and see how personal take can make a great story.
Just changing the two words has raised plethora of questions an story ideas.

I just read the word defend instead of defeat by mistake and got this idea

But this is a good example of adding personal twist.

It seems Ms. Brande, who was a writing teacher in the 1920’s, would illustrate her point by assigning her class the task of writing a story based on a single, sparse, and often deliberately trite, story outline. Always, the stories that were developed from the outline were so disparate that the students - who’d begun by being certain that there was only one way to tell that particular story - came away assured that there were, in fact, a breathtakingly broad number of ways to tell the story.

Brande says, “…it is true that not even twins will see the same story idea from the same angle. There will always be differences of emphasis, a choice of different factors to bring about the dilemma and different actions to solve it.”