Scope

I think the hardest part to really wrap your brain around when you start writing is the scope of your story. Everyone wants to tell something amazing, to have an immersive world with lovable characters and a deep background with mature and hard hitting messages that will change the world as we know it. And it's not that having all of those things in your story is impossible - many of the great novels known around the world incorporate all of these things, and even some of the obscurer ones that only a select few have heard of.

The problem that arises with this is that, in most of those instances, all of these things that we as writers so desperately want to have in our stories weren't done in a single book. I mean, I've heard people say that they want to write the next Harry Potter, but what they tend to forget is that Harry Potter was seven books long. I mean sure, it was popular when even just the first book came out, but the further we get from that time, the more I hear people talk about wanting to write the successor, and the less they recall how much was covered past the first book.

This was certainly a problem for me when I started writing. The first "book" I ever wrote - embarrassingly titled "The Power of the Balls" - besides being terribly written and not really making any sense, tried to have way too much content to it. As you may be able to guess by the title, the point was to go around and collect a series of orbs, each emblazoned with and granting some kind of power, from fire and ice to telekinesis and necromancy. Every orb was obtained by fighting and defeating a monster, which was the embodiment of that power.

If that all sounds really boring and cliche to you, well, that's because it was. But that's perfectly excusable - I was seven or so. No, the real problem with that story was just how many orbs of power there were. I never got around to them all - probably because no one in their right mind could have feasibly come up with enough of them - but in my head, there were at least a hundred of the damn things. Most of which I blatantly stole from the tv shows and games I watched and played as a kid. One in particular I can recall quite clearly is heart, which should sound pretty familiar if you ever watched Captain Planet like I did.

Most of the power orbs had some kind of crap message to them, usually about how you should have and believe in your friends, and that they will give you power, which isn't necessarily a bad message in and of itself, but it's been way over done. And imagine if that was the message a hundred times over in a single story. You'd get tired of it pretty fucking quick.

But these are steps that you have to go through. There are a lot of things that you can feasibly teach about writing - what tense to write in, or point of view, what makes a character good or bad, grammar - but understanding the scope of your writing is really something you can only get through experience. Unfortunately, gaining any insight from that writing isn't going to happen immediately.

And that's how you end up with "The Power of the Balls 2."