Yesterday I put a post on Instagram, jokingly commenting on how anal retentive I am about planning out my book series, which I simply call Marcus after its main character (this will not be the final name, but I don't have a good name for it yet). The picture I posted (one that will be presented in part 2 of this post) was of three notebooks, fanned out and complete with labels on the front. I had purchased a label maker for the sole purpose of being able to label these notebooks.
The comment I made on the picture remarked: "The organizational skills that I employ while planning out this series border on the insane and slightly unhealthy."
It was a glib remark, but all the same it got me to ruminating on this whole writing thing, on myself and on Marcus. It had me wondering if I have perhaps taken this whole "planning and organizing" gig just a bit too far, and had me questioning exactly how much counts as "too much."
To give some background: the first scrappings of Marcus were written as far back as when I was in eighth grade. At the time, I had just read Eragon and desperately wanted to emulate Christopher Paolini's style. I also think I wanted to try and achieve fame as a young writer, as Paolini did - in truth I believe the reason he became as famed as he did was not because of the quality of his writing, but due to his age. I did not understand that Eragon, while entertaining, is a very derivative series that has far from reinvigorated the fantasy genre - something that, as I have made clear in past posts, is desperately needed. The result was Marcus' first scrappings were just that - scraps; pieces of dreck that I have long long since thrown out. I don't even think the main character's name was Marcus at the time (as I recall, his name was Rith Rilec), and the series was called The Darkness Rising or something cliche like that. But I was young and still discovering writing.
Throughout high school, a number of events happened that helped shape and change Marcus into something entirely different. I scrapped the initial story and started fresh. Many times. I still had not identified what the problem was yet - but I was beginning to realize that something was very wrong with the series.
Then came college. College brought with it years of learning, years of experience, years of seeing the real world and understanding it better than I ever had before. The stories I have from college number the innumerable (yes I have a finite number of stories, but too many to accurately count), and I don't know if I will ever tell all I have to tell about my years at Bard. I was distracted from Marcus by school work, relationships and other writing works, but whenever I came back to it, I restarted the series. Now I was realizing that Marcus was deeply and profoundly flawed, and I began to understand why.
As I have grown older, I have come to love real world situations more and more, and with Marcus I am increasingly interested in the clash between the conflicts of the Marcus world and the real world - it's when the two worlds collide that things get truly exciting. But there was the issue, staring me right in the eye and refusing to back down; a simple question that I had never asked myself: what is the Marcus world?
In all of my years working on this series, it took until the end of college for me to understand that the intrinsic problem with Marcus was that I had never built the world of the series, and I had never - I mean never - planned out the events.
This mortifying discovery led me to make the best decision I have ever made with Marcus; scrap everything that I had to this point in the series and start completely fresh. I started fresher than I did even when I began the series in eighth grade. It was an absolute necessity, I realized, if I wanted any hope at writing a thoughtful, interesting, or original series.
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