April is spring time. A time of new beginnings. A time when many animals give birth, trees bud, and flowers bloom. For me, as a writer, I would consider college to be my spring and more specifically, my April. This is the time when I first found my voice.

So in honor of the first real month of spring, I am going to have an entire month dedicated to flash fiction. This is because my favorite creative writing professor in college challenged me, a long-winded epic fantasy writer, to create short stories of around five hundred words or less. I came to enjoy these weekly exercises,  and writing such succinct literary pieces, helped me to find my voice as a writer.

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Historically, humans have been thought to be distinguished from other animals by love, a particular form of social attachment, for which we often live and die for. Until recently, the word love has been primarily reserved to the realm of poets, philosophers and more recently psychologists.

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When writing a novel, the revision process never ends, unless your manuscript gets published, or you throw it in the trash and never look at it again. And nothing tends to cause a writer more fits than the opening of a novel. Here is one of the earliest versions of my first book that I wrote years ago.  I cringe just reading it.

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If you’ve never written a novel before, you may not grasp what it means to revise a manuscript, especially one over a thousand pages long. Some people think revision is going back through, checking typos and fixing misplaced punctuation. That’s proofreading or copy editing. A more appropriate term for revision might be rewriting. You see, writing the first draft of a novel is relatively easy. Once that first draft is finished the work has really just begun. Now I can’t speak for authors whose craft has been shaped and polished over a career of writing and publishing several books or more as their revision process might be quite different.

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The Various Stages of My World – CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGES

Now that you’ve decided to create a map for you stories and your world, let me give you some insight in how to go about doing this. While I plan to cover a number of topics on world-building and how it relates to map-making in my series, let me first point you to a vast repertoire of knowledge.

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The Various Stages of My World – CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGES

Until you put your world on paper or on file, it is no more than a figment of your imagination, no matter how well-realized that figment may be. Creating a map of your world is one of the first steps you should take in world-building. In fact, I believe it is a must. Not only then does your world become tangible, and perhaps something you can show off to others, but it also becomes part of a chain reaction in which your map and story feed off of one another.

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My World From Space

Today I’m going to start a series of posts on world-building. They will by no means be exhaustive, and while some of the material may be advanced and never actually be seen on the page, that is to say in the story itself, the purpose is to develop the most fully realized world possible. After all, the vast majority of world-building is never spoken of in a novel, but exists in the mind of the creator.

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In my previous post, I wrote about what it means to be a writer and why it can take so long to finish writing a novel. Now I want to tell you why it’s taking me so long.

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People always ask me, “Why haven’t you finished your story yet? What’s taking you so long?”

For those of you who’ve never tried to write a novel before, let me educate you. To most, writing a novel seems a simple enough venture. But then try writing one. Then try getting it published.

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