Inside The Cover #1: Ideas & Openings

Introduction

People always wonder about the writing process and what it takes to write a novel. Inside The Cover is my way to share with you how I go about the creation of a novel. I will cover every topic I can think of. Each is formulated as an essay and will showcase the whole thought process that goes into the creation of a single line of any of my novels.

By no means is this complete for all writing processes, but I view it as a must-read for any aspiring writer to understand what they are getting themselves into. If you know nothing else about writing, then you should at least know the formula an author uses.

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Foreword

As part of an extensive project, I, Timothy Connor, have decided the best way people that people can understand me is by giving them a look inside my mind. Inside The Cover is that attempt, and, while it is an ambitious and improbable task to complete, it is something that will help a lot of people understand why I write what I write.

The thing that a lot of people do not understand about me is that I am a very difficult writer to decipher. I mean that in the most literal sense as a lot of the passages I have written in the past can be quite contrived for a reader. Inside the Cover is intended to lift that veil and reveal how the inner machinations of my mind operate. Of course, there are some secrets that I will keep to myself.

After all, where would the fun be in revealing everything?

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1. Ideas

At the core of every piece of writing is an idea nugget. Sure, this nugget balloons into a massive project after careful planning. Yet if you could imagine this imaginary nugget, in the grand scheme of your novel, it is no larger than a grain of sand (and those are massive ideas). In fact, ideas are a lot like sand. There are billions of them in your lifetime, but you never really give them much attention until they become interesting. That interesting grain of sand becomes your nugget.

Yet, as I can attest, there is so much effort involved in producing that nugget, it is a job all of its own. Your brain dedicates an entire section to memory. Even then, the synapses that store memories are not large, yet humans can store so much information in them. The basis of ideas come from these memories. Whether they are large memories or small memories, you will draw equal amounts of ideas from them. Memories are the important parts of what you know. It is a physical impossibility to remember everything that happened in your life, and anyone who tells you they know everything, test them. Ask them what they wore when they were one year old on whatever day of the year it is. I guarantee they will not be able to tell you.

So while our ideas do come from memories, most people fail to realise when they ask a writer to write something, it is not that is so easy to do. Sure, we can draw a rough plan, but we cannot come up a complete idea on the spot and have it done in a tight timeframe. For all creatives, the process of cultivating ideas is a long one of rejection and adaptation of ideas.

 

• Here’s a test for you: write down the next idea you have, no matter how bad and see how much you think about it. You will be surprised how far you get with it and how quick your brain wants to finish it.

 

Now, for someone such as myself, ideas are something I am going through at a lightning pace. 99.9% of my ideas never see more than half a second of thought put behind them, and those are the ideas my brain finds boring. But boring is a good thing. The boring ideas are what helps generate filters for your brain to find the piece of dirt you will turn into a pearl.

 

I’ll take a brief moment to do a little comparison between three ideas of the same story. As you know, The Elder Ones Part One: Sea Spray is my first published book, but what you do not know is that it took over five years to get to that point and went through multiple versions. The following excerpt is the opening paragraph from the original draft of Sea Spray and it is the first time the public has seen it:

“Wings as black as night, shadowing the ground as they pierce the air, a shroud of darkness following. Our only warning, a roar more fell than anything we have heard, as the beast descends upon us, and we scramble around, trying to get away. The first people washed away were the guards, as the beast unleashing a torrent of foul smelling water with a deafening growl, water flowing down freely from the upper walkways. The smell of rotten fish fills the air, as arrows harmlessly fall from the scales of the beast. Swooping back and forth, the beast lays waste to everything in its path, levelling the city in a matter of minutes. As suddenly as the beast came, it left, leaving only a ruined city, half flooded as the survivors try to flee as quickly as they can.” Master Alein closes the journal he is holding, his fingers shaking.

That was my original vision for The Elder Ones and I wanted it to be at most a trilogy of novels. I stopped work on that in the middle of 2015 as I did not like the direction it was going in. I spent the rest of that year revising every detail in my brain. Then, by October of that same year, some four months after I stopped work on the first draft, this was my opening paragraph:

A thick fog blankets the sky, perpetually sending a chill down the spines of each inhabitant of Tors Landing, though this is little more than a typical night in the dead of winter. The ocean, stretching out to the north, east and west of Tors Landing lies eerily calm, the tips of pikes glinting in the dull glow of the moon, a pair of shadows reflecting off the water.

The difference is astonishing. I recreated the first draft all in my mind and the result blew the original out of the water. That was my opening for the next two years until I had finished writing the entire novel in a way that I envisioned. It is also the second draft opening that caused me to rethink the trilogy idea. The character roster expanded by a factor of three and I thought I might as well take this idea all the way.

While I wrote the second draft of Sea Spray, my original trilogy became a nine book series. Then, as I wrote a storyline that came from yet another idea I had after I wrote one of the most solid characters I have written, the original idea became a series of ten, with less focus on the fantastical elements and more of a focus on the characters.

By the time 2018 rolled around and I published Sea Spray in January, the opening of the book was unrecognisable when compared to the original, as seen below:

A dense fog blankets the sky from the great Northern Sea right down to the Dragon’s Spine Mountains. A perpetual chill causes each inhabitant of Tor’s Landing to shiver and shudder even in their greatcoats and under their furs. They know that this is little more than a typical winter night, but there is still a foul presence present in the very air. The ocean that stretches north, west and east of Tor’s Landing lies eerie calm. A pair of pike tips glint in the dull moonlight. They are dull, brushed steel. Two shadows reflect off the calm water.

The point is that all three of these openings are the exact same idea. When you read through them, they tell the same story, but with different pacing options. That is what my brain did as I continued to write the rest of the book. I was not thinking of ideas ahead; I was contemplating my ideas behind while going forward. I retroactively wrote Sea Spray from a single idea and manipulated the story to fit my vision. All within the confines of my brain.

That leads me on a tangent where I think it’s funny that people underestimate the power of the brain. It is the most integral part of your body, but too often is it taken for granted. Think of everything that you do. Seeing. Speaking. Hearing. Breathing. All of those functions are dictated by your brain and the pathways inside it. What I am saying is that the sheer output of the human brain in a single day is astonishing and bewildering. As you read this on your device, I want you to think of how powerful the interior components of that device are. Now consider the fact that your brain blows them out of the water in terms of raw power. Even the worlds best supercomputer is only a fraction as powerful as the human brain and the brain is so much smaller! It is that raw, untouched power that allows someone like me to think of ideas at such a rapid pace without so much as a thought.

To show this theory in reality, all someone needs to do is look at my current writing schedule:

Monday: Chronicles: Ascension

Tuesday: Crow

Wednesday: Crucible

Thursday: Eden

Friday: The Elder Ones Part 2: Earth Splitter

Saturday: Reality

I do all six of those novels at the same time as maintaining and creating content for my blog AND managing to write up a weekly progress report. All of my work means my brain has to focus on all these ideas concurrently, but that helps me to formulate those ideas better.

Ideas are a tricky beast to manage, but sometimes the best way to come up with ideas is to use the shit ones to uncover the bad ones. Sea Spray for me is the prime example of an excellent story coming from utter trash.

I called an idea a nugget at the start of this pseudo-essay. That is still true. All an idea is, is a nugget that fell on the floor, rolled around in dirt for a few weeks and went to the trash depot before a homeless person picked it up, cleaned it, and made it beautiful enough to put on the wall of his box.

To create art is to take the bad and the good, then filter out the bad so you are left with nothing but good.

However, generating an idea is the first step.

The second step is the Chrysalis stage, which I will explain next week with more examples. For now… I leave you with the opening paragraphs from my current six projects. Enjoy.

 

Chronicles Opening:

War to the citizens of the New Expoletian Empire was not a new concept, since it was all that many of the people born under the banner of the tri-suns knew.

Crow Opening:

Well, shit.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation that you find unenviable? It would be different for everyone of this I am certain. I do not mean to generalize when I say I am certain that if you were in my peculiar situation, you would see why I think that dangling from a height equivalent to a twenty-floor building by a thin leather belt is perhaps the worst sensation in the world.

Crucible Opening:

The last of the bombs fell one hundred and seventy-three years ago. That was how long the walls have stood around the world’s havens to protect what little remained of civilization. The leaders told us not to concern ourselves with what sat outside the corner of the world that we called home. Tumbleweed is the haven that I called my home along with one thousand and thirty-seven others (One thousand and thirty-eight if you include myself in those numbers), and it has long been all most of us have ever known. The walls, at thirty metres tall, blocked our view of the outside world save for the sky above. I cannot recall the first time I looked upon the sky, but I have always felt an attraction to the vast expanse above. Oftentimes while working hard to maintain the wall, others would catch me staring directly upwards with a forlorn look on my face. That was how my story started, lost in my own thoughts and filled with wonder.

Eden Opening:

No one ever expected the end of the world to arrive in their generation. I was part of the unlucky generation where the apocalypse did arrive.

The Elder Ones Part Two: Earth Splitter Opening:

The Nair River flows from a deep underground lake in the Dragon’s Spine range along a path that meanders to the Western Ocean. It finds itself a popular destination for anglers living in the regions around Buulan Fortress and the Denarr docks. This day is no different to those. The sun shines bright in the early hours of the morn, even though it peeks over the horizon by no more than a narrow margin.

Reality Opening:

June twenty-third marked the sixth time in about three years that I had been hospitalised. The stress of it all affected mum years ago, and she became more and more distant with each passing day. She used to be full of life and care. However, when my sister, Lisa, came out to our parents, mum started drifting away. She never visited, and dad would rather get shit-faced drunk in a pub I had never heard of. Lisa, on the other hand, spent every waking moment by my bedside, catering to everything I want.