Behind the Scalpel #3 Setting the foundations

Hey there, traveler!

Dar here with another episode of our favorite penguin telling stories clutching a weapon-sized medical tool. Today’s topic starts with one of our dear friends and important beta readers. He just finished reviewing the first draft of our WIP and the familiar itch to write came over him, so he asked us a question – how do you start?

So let’s talk about that, shall we?

A few disclaimers first: we are not a writing advice blog, and we never will be.

There are plenty of those around the web if you’re looking for some, I’m sure they’re easy enough to find because they are literally everywhere. This is more like a fireside story of how we did it and someone may find a few moments here and there that rings a bell or inspire them.

Still here? Awesome! Let me show you around…

I. Our writing style

Before we started creating our little book-baby, we already had a few years of experience roleplaying on play-by-post forums, so we pretty much knew what type of writers we are. Mainly, we are the type that doesn’t outline. Yes, that’s a thing and no, it is not the devil. You don’t HAVE to outline, some people can’t stick to a plan and like to explore the story as it unfolds through the characters. This is especially true for the co-writing method we used, which I talked about in a previous reply, but if anyone’s interested chuck me a reply and I’ll gladly elaborate again.

II. The world

But still, there were a few things we wrote down in a really pretty, ornate notebook. These were the “do”s and the “don’t”s. They are pretty self-explanatory: the “do”s were a bunch of concepts we insisted on putting into the book (to be more concrete, the “do”s were Arabic aesthetics, the appearance of djinn and A thousand and one night type of magic, a kingdom destroyed in a magical cataclysm leaving a desert and the few surviving cities). The “don’t”s were things we detested in other books so we tried to avoid these (things like forced love triangles, the chosen one trope, over the top mythical animals, a prophecy about the end of the world). When we finished this little brainstorm over a cup of green tea, we had ourselves the broad outline (well, not really but sorta) of a world.

III. The main character

Now came the exciting part and a point where our roleplayer past kicked in – we needed a POV character. We decided that Lory would control and act out this character throughout the story while I lob plot-related things and sexy mercenaries towards her, so she came up with the idea of our main character, Zaira. To start with she wrote a page-long text about Zaira smoking hookah in a luxurious villa and trying really hard to forget something in her past. Reading her thoughts two things became obvious: first, that Zaira (or Zee as we call her among ourselves) was a type of djinn that should’ve been able to control air, but she for some reason couldn’t. Second, that she worked as the assistant and adopted daughter of a perfume maker because the only superhuman power she had was an overly sensitive smell. That was all I needed to start and formulate a story.

IV. The inciting incident.

My first thought was some kind of murder-mystery. Maybe an important man was killed, a nobleman and his wife, and the murder weapon was a poisonous gas. Maybe the nobleman’s surviving son saw a young woman, so the city’s law enforcers think Zaira as a perfumer created the gas and know they are trying to blame, imprison, or even execute her.

That was the first idea, so I picked up the scene of Zee in a hookah party and threw a benevolent but serious law enforcer at her. This was Rashad, one of the more important side characters, a soldier tasked with finding the killer. Then all we had to do was act out how would the characters react. What would Rashad ask? What would Zee answer? Would she cooperate? Would Rashad believe her? From that point on we just kept acting out the characters, I swtiched from Rashad to some other faces you’ll meet eventually on our blog and I kept adding random tidbits to the story until it started to take shape. Of course there were a lot (I mean a LOT) of bad ideas, which needed rooting out. So before I weaved something into a scene I always asked Lory out-of-character what he thought about my newly made-up idea. When I got the green light I smashed it against the story and the part that didn’t scrape off on the already existing lore became our new building block. This was the same if she had an idea we could add, and that was the way we discovered our story.

Well, this is kind of it for now. I know it’s a bit shorter than our last post, but you get the gist of it. 

Some take-home messages I wanted to pass: outlining is not the only way, writers are not Mandalorians. There are many ways. Also, it is a good strategy to just dump everything you want and don’t want in your story on a blank page, then mold it into a more or less functioning world, then create a character to explore it and flood him/her with every possible fuckup that can happen. Then just write until a new idea flashes your mind, try that idea against the already settled things and if it fits, go for it! Just keep your character’s personality in mind so they don’t do something unthinkable and unbelievable. Once again I must say this is not a writing advice post, so don’t go burning your manuscript if you’re not doing it like this. Go, find your own path, but if you try how we did it and succeed in jumping into your story, definitely message me so we can cheer together!

Also, we are toying with the idea of releasing the first book in pieces on Wattpad (either the whole thing our a few chapters to give a little taste), so if you’re interested in what that little first scene in the hookah place turned into, please let us know! But if you think that’s a terrible idea and we should sooner hit ourselves with a hammer, then don’t keep that to yourself either!

Dar