Love Your Universe, Hate Your Story?

Find something to love about your MC and focus on it. There are some parts of my story that I find boring, but because of the many quirks that my MC has, it makes the process much more fun. It is my MC that the story revolves around not the other way around and that makes it more personal and fun. Yes, I love the universe that I created, but I did it for my MC.

~When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.

~ I tried to wrestle my inner demons once... but they used too many illegal holds.

Sounds like you need a better story. :)

You look like you are on track to win this year, so hurray for that.

Your synopsis sounds grand enough. Do you find yourself straying from it in your writing? With a synopsis like that, I wouldn't expect mundane individual dramas.

I don't necessarily hate my story, but I plan on reorganizing many elements of it eventually. It just doesn't seem to come together in the way I wanted it too, but I'll keep many parts of it.
I do love my world though, and simply by writing in it I've managed to develope lots of things I'd never really gotten around to before. It has a lot more nations, people, and places now.

Thank you, this is good advice. I started with two characters that I did care about, but they were really not complex enough. I think because they weren't well developed the story was free to wander away from them, and it did.

I agree!!!!! There are parts that I really like, but they mainly revolve around exposition. Science fiction writers seem to get a little bit more of a break on exposition than other genres, but even still, how marines eat, sleep and pee in armored vacuum suits or how warp travel is deadly can only be taken so far. Meh.

Yes, the race against time and allying of enemies I wanted to do never really materialized. My biggest challenge was trying to fit all the elements in at the right time. I really like "galaxy spanning" SF and thought that if I made it a race to lots of different locations, I would have a good excuse for getting the characters into lots of exotic locations. At some point, though, I stopped caring about the detective work and setup that a race / chase would need, and really wanted more of a haphazzard adventure. I made a subplot for this (with those previously mentioned armored marines) but it ended up taking over a lot of the story and, short of deus ex, I've had a hard time weaving them together.

Yeah, that was my experience too, and I'm grateful for that at least. At the moment I do feel like there's something to salvage. I just have to make it more coherent.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

Wavinator, I think one thing to remember is that different readers like different aspects about a novel. Personally, I love weird cultures and interesting characters -- I'm *not* hung up on action, action, action like everyone tells you to write. (That doesn't mean you don't need action. :-) Some published novels actually go so fast for me that I'm left wanting more. CJ Cherryh is an example -- I'd love to read more about some of her worlds themselves. (I actually liked Cyteen, read it twice, and the only aspect I wasn't enamoured of was that I thought she could have gone more interesting places with it.)

So write about the fascination sociopolitical changes... :-)

I can't remember the author -- it might have been Orson Scott Card -- wrote a book about writing that mentions the "MICE" quotient. This link might be a plagiarized version, but here's the idea: http://triton.towson.edu/~schmitt/311/pages/tsld004.htm Basically, the concept is that different stories are about different things and different people will like them.

Ah, I think I was right. Check this out: http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/2000-08-02-3.shtml

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2009: TBD
2008: Alienation (NaNoWriMo winner)
2008: Born Free (ScriptFrenzy)
2007: Future History (NaNoWriMo winner)

I kind of feel the same way. I love my universe, and I feel like I should love my MC. But not the way I'm writing him. The way I'm writing him he seems blah and angsty and full of private thoughts about "WHYY DOESNT THE FMC LOOOVE ME." Gah, what a wimp. That's not how he's supposed to be. He's supposed to be awesome and cool and badass but with secret insecurities, not blatant whiny insecurities 24/7. This story is going to need so much editing. My world, though, yes, I love it. It's kind of stupid at times, likely because I've been writing in/about it since age 12 (though it's evolved a lot since then) but it's mostly satirical anyway so I think I get away with the stupid parts, maybe.

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My goal in life is to write the next Eragon or Twilight and become so famous that everyone on this forum will make fun of what a crappy author I am.

I think the novel I wrote is little more than a pointless rambling adventure that could go on forever with out end. It isn't exactly what I'd call "good" but I don't hate it. If nothing else it has given me the opportunity to create a nice little fictional universe populated with lots of interesting species, planets, and cultures for me to use as I get started on my next writing project.

Not really - hated the time that I had to develop it. But I made sacrifices to the Gods and storyline to make the deadline. Some of the technical aspects could have been refined, but I chose to work on the characters more than their environments. Without trying explain FTL drive or how colonies area settled or the political background of everything, I dealt with Joe Spaceman and his take on life in space. As for the the problems that occur, like the original Twilight Zone, I dealt with the Monster from Within. Heck I didn't even talk about bugs on another planet.

Johnny B

Rome didn't build a great Empire by having meetings. It built it by crushing all those that opposed it.

2008: (winner) Phoenix Rising