My History As a Writer Essay Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

It grew too long to post there, and i felt that it might be of more general interest to other readers out there. I reference the boards and people posting there, but you dont really need to know who they are to understand the essay. My history as a writer ive been thinking that i should give a little bit of an explanation of my history as a writer for those of you who dont know. I think it might give you some context for some of the posts ive made, and things people are saying in the forums about my unpublished novels.

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That was the year when i decided for certain that i wanted to write novels for a living. I had heard that a persons first few books are usually pretty bad, and so i decided to just spend a few years writing and practicing. As you can probably guess by me writing five books in two and a half years, none were very well edited and while i had a lot of fun writing them, they were done very quickly, and had a lot less planning than my later books. Not many people read any of these novels, and i only ever sent one out to publishers the second one, stars end.

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Around 19 i cant remember the exact date i started attending the science fiction magazine the leading edge at byu i also took an important writing class, less because of what i learned about writing though i did learn a lot and more because of people i met. Through tle and the class, i ended up as part of a community of writers, editors, and science fiction/fantasy readers who were serious about what they were doing. During this time, i founded a writing group with dan wells and peter ahlstrom fellfrosh and ookla over on the twg forums.

Other members included our friend nate, who doesnt hang out here any more, and ben/tage, who used to be one of the boards mods and who is still often one of my alpha readers. Ehlers was another of our good friends, as was kristy brenna , among numerous others, many of whom dont hang out here very much any more. I was getting to one of the most creative points in my life, and was very energized and excited about the writing id learned to do. After practicing for five novels, i felt that i was finally in a position to do justice to an epic fantasy story.

In 19, i started a book i called the spirit of elantris, which eventually just became elantris. As i said, this was the golden era of my unpublished career though i think the unpublished part of that statement is important. I hope that ill grow and progress, and think that the books im writing now are better than the ones i wrote then just as i hope that the books ill do in ten years will be better than the ones i do now. However, the three novels from this era elantris, dragonsteel, and white sand represent some of the best worldbuilding ive ever done. White sand was good, though it will feel dated now if you read it, since my writing skill has improved quite a bit since then and it never got the level of editing and revision that elantris did. Dragonsteel has moments of brilliance surrounded by some really boring sections it had trouble because of the scope of what i was attempting. I think any of the three could have become publishable if theyd gotten the right editing and revisions.

I finished at byu, and since tle was for students, a younger crowd was taking over and i no longer quite fit in there. I continued my writing groups in various forms, and we started the timewasters guide as a project and forum for those who had worked together during that era of the magazine. At the conventions, editors kept saying that fantasy novel submissions were too long, and that new writers shouldnt be trying such beastly first books. I sat down to write mythwalker, by ninth book, and halfway through just couldnt continue. I was trying another epic fantasy, but i was increasingly disappointed in how poorly the first three had been received.

Mythwalker felt like an inferior knock off of my own dragonsteel, and needed to be rethought. Though one side story in the book about two cousins named siri and vivenna really interested me they would later get their own book as warbreaker. After giving up on mythwalker, i decided that new york wasnt looking for my brand of epic fantasy, and that id try to see if i could write something else. Mistborn prime i added the prime later to differentiate it , the aether of night, and final empire prime. In mistborn prime, i tried to write a dark anti hero involved in a story that was not epic. I tried to write something much shorter than id done before, forcing myself to stay away from grand stories or epic style plotting. The result was a 100k work which is half the length of my other fantasy novels which just. . .

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The magic a preliminary form of allomancy was awesome, and the setting had great points to it. Though i did show it to joshua, who is now my agent, as he was curious and following my career at that point. He never saw elantris, hed given up halfway through dragonsteel which means he never got past the boring part and had really liked white sand, but had wanted to see more from me before picking me up. After mistborn prime, i wrote a book called aether of night, which was far more successful. I think its the best of the four brandon tries to write more toward the market books.

At 150k, it was only 50k shorter than what id been doing during the elantris era, and i let myself play with slightly more epic stories and scope. At this point, i was trying for something with a little more humor in it, something with lighthearted, fun characters in a situation that was at times ridiculous and at times adventuresome. Joshua liked it just fine, and thought it was a step forward from mistborn prime. At this point, my epic fantasy books got another round of rejections, including elantris rejected by daw and dragonsteel rejected by ace.