Creation can take a lot of energy. Sometimes the words just flow, and it seems to be so easy. Then I stop after a few hours or so, and realize how tired I’ve become.

Creating a new story is relatively easy for me, if the setting is similar to a place I know, the house is similar to one I have lived in, the characters are similar to any of people I have met in the real world, and if the story is a new take on one of the basic plots. (Different critics disagree on how many basic plots there are.) Every old plot that is reused becomes a different story. After all, “how the detective learned who killed whats-his-name” is an ancient plot, but no two stories are the same.

But when everything is new — setting, situation, characters, background — then writing a new story takes a lot more creative energy. 

Star Kings (working title) is the most demanding book I’ve ever worked on, far more effort per page than even The Black Ring. It’s a story cycle, from the hero’s birth to the birth of his first child. It is set in a galaxy so far away that George Lucas never heard of it, and in a time that bears no relation to any time with which we are familiar. It involves a highly advanced people who have come to share the Cold Star Cluster, deep in the Great Cloud, with twenty five other intelligent peoples among hundreds of star systems. These other peoples are not the aliens, my heroes are the outsiders. My people trade with many of these other peoples, and with hundreds of other peoples out in the limb of the galaxy beyond the Cloud. 

Each of these peoples is different, in biology, physiology, appearance, technology level, psychology, culture, and so on. I can only hint at those differences, and I don’t have to do more than that, unless a difference affects the development of the story, and then tell no more than what is necessary. The peoples cannot be actors in rubber suits. They have to feel like real people, even though they are not “human.” 

My hero and his people are not “human” either, I just portray them that way to make it easier to tell my stories. They live in what they call the city, a giant construct in space near the center of the Cluster. It is complex, enclosed, an artificial environment with different gravitational zones. Life in the city is not like the life we know here.  

I use what I know of our world as models for what my Star Kings do in the city, how they live at home, how they trade with others in the Cluster and out in the limb of the galaxy, and where they get their wealth. My models here are obvious. Mining towns mine for a living, no matter when or where. They are supported by people who provide shops, government, community, just like any small town does. Traders trade, they are not merchants buying and selling. There is no common currency between, say, medieval Cornwall, the Italian states, or the far East. And some of the cultures I portray also have models in the real world.

The worlds I visit (if they have people, I call them ‘worlds’, otherwise I call them ‘planets’) are not like our world, and each of them must be different, at least in some small way. I describe only their obvious differences from our world, rather than giving a full description of their land forms, their botany, their styles of architecture, and so on. I try to suggest, instead show. 

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Each of the forty one stories is a challenge. The plot of each story must make sense, it must have a beginning that hooks the reader, an ending that is satisfying and makes the reader want another story, and a middle that draws the reader from the beginning to the end. This is, of course, what every story should have. But for the stories of Star Kings, each setting, situation, problems to be solved, and cast of characters — except for a few who continue from story to story — has to be created from scratch. If any of this is used in a later story, the reader may need to be reminded about it, if only briefly. 

Continuity is a problem. Have I said or done or shown something before? Did I provide a necessary set-up more than once? Did I use the same plot device in different stories? Has the passage of time been consistent? It takes a lot of effort to check all this, but it must be done. Readers catch mistakes in things like that. 

Every story I finish shows how my heroes grow, and helps me to understand them better. My understanding of what their life is like in their artificial world, as miners and what they mine, as traders dealing with other peoples, of their culture, of the society of the Cluster, and of the greater society of the peoples of the limb beyond it, all that grows too.

Sturgis, which I published in 2016, had just one recognizable town, several recognizable characters, and only a vampire who was different. It was based on Stoker’s book, not the movies, and it was easy.

Star Kings, well, that continues to be difficult, and it is taking a lot of time. And yet, as I finish each story, I get chills, a sign that I have done well. I don’t know what it will feel like when I finish the whole cycle.

If you can’t go further with your story, don’t just keep pushing. Beating your head against a wall will only give you bruises, and brick dust on the floor. Take a step back, or two steps, or three. Maybe then you’ll see that, off to the side, there’s a door. You can go through it, and now you can move on.

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When I was younger, I could work on my writing at least six hours a day, frequently eight, sometimes ten, and once or twice as much as twelve. As I get older, my physical and creative energy diminishes. Now, if I can work four hours, I’ve done well.

It doesn’t take that much physical strength to write, so much as endurance. But when my handwriting becomes illegible, or typos pile up on the screen, I know that I am getting tired, and I should take a break. I find something useful to do around the house, or read a few postings of on-line comics, or play a round of Spaceward Ho! on my iPad, or read a few pages of the two or three or four books beside my chair. My breaks usually take no more than about twenty minutes. As soon as I am relaxed and able to think and see clearly again, I go back to work. I’ve caught my breath, and now I can go on.

Sometimes it’s not easy for me to stop pushing beyond the limits of my strength and creativity, especially if I’m not aware that I’m doing that. One more sentence that leads to another, then another paragraph, then another, until finally I can no longer see the setting, hear the dialogue, distinguish one character from another, or have any idea of what happens next. I’m not just tired, I have taken a wrong turn, hit a wall, and I have to stop. 

If I’m lucky, I may recognize the wrong turn later in the day, or the next morning just before I wake up, or just as I walk out of the house. Then I can go back to the story, delete that wrong turn and everything that follows it, and go the way that I should have gone before. Everything works now.

But if I’m not lucky, I can go no further. Not because I don’t want to — wanting to is why I kept on pushing — but literally because I can’t. The pen doesn’t move, my fingers won’t type. I have to back off for a while. Sometimes I don’t discover the wrong turning until days, or months, or years later.

I forced myself to write two sequels of a proto-Black Ring, even though it hurt to do so. When I tried to read it some years later, I discovered that it was garbage, and I threw it all away. Some people say that a writer should never throw anything away, that it might be useful later, but after a while garbage starts to smell, and draws flies. 

I forced myself to write sixty thousand words past where my character did something against his nature. It took me six years to realize where I had gone wrong. This time I let him do what he knew he should do, and followed him off into a fantastic adventure which became The Gift. 

I tried to plot out a series of stories inspired by my Elf Quest work, but in a galaxy so far away that George Lucas never heard of it. I forgot what the nature of that inspiration was, and it took me almost thirty years to remember, that my Elf Quest stories were about normal people, in their own world, dealing with a situation that was normal, but which they had never experienced. 

I threw the heroic adventures and dramatic enemies and implausible obstacles away. I laid out a rough and largely disposable structure, in which my far future stories could grow.  I’m working on it now, and I’m letting the stories, the scenes within those stories, the characters and settings and story objectives, just come to me, instead of trying to force them. It works now, and I get chills. 

Forcing in any way has never worked for me. Planet Masters came to me as an inspiration of the whole story, needing only some extra background and settings. Pursuit of Diana was in my head after watching both mini-series of V several times back to back. Book Two of The Black Ring came to me when I knew that the beginning had to follow directly from the ending of Book One, and that informed me about how it had to end.

I have learned, though I sometimes forget, to trust my muse for creation. I have learned to save my thinking about a story for revising and correcting and polishing. I have to remember, that there may be a door just to the side of whatever wall is blocking me. And when I do, then I can go through it, and I can go on.

In a way, my stories (novels) grow like a tree, but not like a topiary. My stories grow according to their nature, but they are not wild. They are more like a bonsai, trimmed and wired so that it looks like a natural tree, but far more picturesque and dramatic than if it were left to grow without careful shaping. All fiction is more picturesque and dramatic than the same events in the real world.

Something written without an objective, without plot or resolution, is like the news — just the facts. It comes out of nowhere, it happens somewhere, and it may not have an ending until more has been written, and may have no closure at all, if it is no longer newsworthy. That is the way much journalistic reporting is supposed to be. But it won’t work for fiction. Check your newspaper for examples. The accident happened and tied up traffic. And…? News stories have been carefully written and edited to be what they are, news, but there is no plot. 

A storyteller, as I really am, may take the same material, add conflicts, characterization, new settings, some kind of change at the end, and turn it into a story. Good stories may, in fact, start from something in a newspaper that triggered the writer’s imagination. In a similar way, all bonsai starts from a natural sapling, or even just a seedling, frequently found in the wild, and put in a pot, where it is allowed to just grow for a while, sometimes for years.

When I start a story, my notes, sketches, and roughs tend to go all over the place, even though I try to rein them in a little. It’s a jumble, but I believe that it is better to include all my ideas while I’m writing that first sketch or rough. It can always be trimmed, added to, changed, moved, or deleted later. If I don’t record my spontaneous thoughts in the heat of creation, they will be lost. If there are no words on a page, digital or paper, there’s nothing to work with. 

On the other hand, if an idea comes and I don’t make a note of it, but it keeps coming back to me, then I know I have something good, and I had better put it down, even if I won’t be able to work on it until another time. The idea may well have evolved into something else when I finally get to it.

I don’t try to do everything all at once. I focus on just one aspect of storytelling in each read-through. I start by developing my raw material, that is, a note may become more of a sketch, or a bit of dialogue, or a simple description, or it may be cut. A sketch may become a rough draft of real dialogue, character development, settings I can almost see, action as things happen. Parts of that first writing may present new ideas, or a new direction. I may have to change the order of events, or change who says what in a dialogue, according to the nature of the characters. I may insert new events or movement or people so that the story can actually go from here to there. Frequently I have to improve a phrase or sentence or paragraph by tightening it, by using fewer words. Even in later drafts I find passages which need to be clarified, expanded, tightened, or rearranged. 

But always there is an idea, a seed, a beginning, no matter how poorly expressed at first. I may discover toward the end of the story, that there is a better beginning. Always there is an objective to guide me, an idea of what the ending is about. It may turn out to be what I thought of when I started, or become an entirely new ending for what the story has grown to be, and that surprises me.

The draft on which I am working is like the bonsai which has been allowed to grow for a while, and now needs to be trimmed, and wired, and has new growth which must be encouraged or cut away. But still, the bonsai has its roots, and though it will never be finished — it is a living thing after all — eventually the bonsai-maker can do no more, and it is good enough to show. And with a story, when I can no longer see what I can do to improve it, I stop. I have done all that I can. It’s ready to be published.

Sometimes, years later, when I have grown, and my skills have grown, I can see that the story could be worked into a second edition. I have done that twice. But better yet is to start working on a new idea, make new notes as revealed by my unconscious muse, let new characters come alive, and have a new idea of what I want to achieve.

It is time to pot a seedling, and grow a new bonsai.