100,000 Words · 1:29pm Mar 27th, 2016
Art by Tsitra360 because wow, that's cool.
I found something out today. There are now 100,000 words in Nightmare Nyx between the published chapters and the unpublished drafts. That means it's time for me to reflect on the project as a whole for a moment.
100,000 words? As a number, it's not all that impressive. Lots of stories are much longer than this. In fact, it only took me four months to draft 70,000 words of garbage a good first effort when I was just starting out as a brand new writer. I find it interesting that drafting quality prose is a lot slower when you know what you're doing than when you have no clue. I suppose the same is true for most art forms. Anyone can chuck paint onto a canvas. But if you're really trying to make a quality painting, you have to take your time and do it with a lot of love and care. As one character says to my protagonist in a nightmare... "If you're going to do it, do it right."
Life has been distracting me as well, lately. It's partially this which makes drafting slow, but it's also partially fear. There's a certain amount of fear that I won't be able to say just the right thing to portray a thought or concept into the prose. It's just too easy to open up Youtube or edit someone else's story, or check world politics, or load up a game, or do anything to put off writing. And I know why. It's the fear that this amazing image which only exists in my mind won't look right once it's written down. What's crazy is that experience tells me that the opposite is true. That once I write it down, it actually looks better than it did in my head.
What am I working on now? I'm currently drafting chapter eleven of Nightmare Nyx. It's an exposition heavy chapter, so I need to be extra careful with what I reveal without giving away too much. The chapter is about 75% finished being drafted, so I'm on the final stretch. I'd say that this is probably the last major exposition chapter in Act One, which will likely span until chapter sixteen. Starting in chapter thirteen, the SHTF for real, and it's nonstop until the end of Act One. And any of you who have been following along with my unpublished chapters know that the proverbial fan has already been thoroughly coated once before.
I've been thinking a lot about the two source material stories lately as well. Both Past Sins and Fallout: Equestria are enormously popular on fimfiction due to when they were released shortly after Season Two began. MLP was very fresh back then, and epic stories were a very rare thing. And the bar for quality is much, much higher now than it used to be. That makes it significantly more challenging to produce something that will become widely successful.
As my story has grown, I have begun to feel the constraints of one of the origin stories. In particular, Fo:E because it sets future events which I can't just go changing. When I first started, Fo:E provided a ready-made setting which I was excited to write about. It's strange, in a way, that I am less motivated to include Fo:E aspects in the story, now that my universe has been fleshed out and can stand on its own merit. The few Fo:E elements I am using are very important, though. The zebra war and Littlehorn are probably the most important. Memory orbs are a critical component to the story. The Black Book will play a critical role as well. So yeah, Fo:E is a key integration, but I probably won't be adding many more elements from it than are already in the outline.
As for Past Sins, my goal continues to be to write a high quality sequel to Nyx's character arc. The entirety of Past Sins is really a wrapper around the character of Nyx. There are a lot of peripheral elements to the story, but I don't consider any of those as critical to my work. My focus continues to be on Nyx and following her journey toward her ultimate destiny through a very difficult challenge she faces as a young adult. Past Sins itself suffers from being written very early in the MLP fandom before the world of Equestria was really fleshed out. It also suffered from being written in the omniscient perspective, which I believe robbed it of a lot of intimacy. The nature of Past Sins itself is highly intimate, as it follows along the very emotional journey of Nyx's childhood struggles soon after her creation. My goal will be to utilize the advantages of third-person limited perspective to provide a lot of that intimacy I think needs to be in any Nyx story.
What's the present state of the story as a whole?? I'm happy to say that it's quite healthy. The climax at the end of act three is all mapped out, and I've got all the major story arcs mapped as well. Everything from front to back looks complete and in good shape. No contradictions or major concerns remain. The only significant missing piece is quite a bit of character development which I usually reserve for the drafting process. Planning that kind of thing ahead of time doesn't work very well. The current plan is that Act Two will have a whole lot of interpersonal character drama following Nyx as she really advances through this transformation she's going through. It will also reveal a lot of the ancient backstory as we examine the pillars of the facts and events that prop up the metaphysics model as well as explain the origins of just about everything. Finally, Act Three will be a whole lot of action and suspense as we get close to that all-important climax. Here, everything the story has been building up to for quite some time all comes together simultaneously in one gigantic convergence.
Overall, I'm very encouraged by the way things are heading. My development team is talented and on the ball. The editing process is smooth and thorough. It's just a matter of pushing forward and getting it done!
Oh wow one hundred thousand, they grow up so fast!
Very impressive reaching that many words!
Couldn't agree more.
I have the same problem when trying to develop characters inside of my planning stage. It just doesn't work for me. My current project has a protagonist that actually has a bit more problems than I initially wanted her to have, but I actually like her having these problems because when I went back to read my drafts for the first two chapters I was a bit stunned I had gone in the direction I had gone in with her character arc. Surprisingly, when writing out a draft I know where these characters are going even if I give them problems that I didn't intend them to have.
I just wish I could have the writing skills required to give these characters more justice.