My new science fiction novel is available on Kindle now!

Thank you to everyone who supported me and helped me through this one. It was a lot of fun to write, and I can’t wait to see what you guys think of it.

This one asks an important moral question. Do the ends ever justify the means? The characters of the story each have their own answer to this question, and they act accordingly, which creates a lot of tension within the Esslar star system. The tension builds and builds until it needs to release. But will the tension gradually deflate? Or will the star system pop?

I love the plot of this novel. It took a lot of turns that I even didn’t expect. The characters were fun to write. I had intentions for them in the beginning, but the more I wrote, the more they took on lives of their own.

With this novel, I learned how to write without an outline. It was really fun to dive into a project without much planning. I had a blast writing without limiting myself to a pre-established plot. I made sure to follow some kind of structure, but it was still very freeing.

Then came the editing, which was harder than it was with Liar’s Legacy. I had to rearrange some scenes, take out others, and add new ones. There were many inconsistencies, including a dead character showing up at the end because I had forgotten I killed him off.

But everything was fixed in the edits. All-in-all, the editing process was much easier than it could have been. I could have gone completely off course and derailed the entire plot at any point. But the story remained mostly consistent throughout the drafting phase, so it wasn’t a total wreck of a first draft.

I learned a lot while writing this book that I hope to share with all of you. I learned about improvising a story, I learned how to write faster, and I learned how to create meaningful plot-twists.

This novel was a ton of fun to write, and I hope you have fun reading it! The Kindle edition is available here, and the paperback edition will be available later this month.

This book is the beginning of a new series, but it can be enjoyed on its own as well. Many of the plot threads are tied off nicely at the end, but the story doesn’t end here.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy Fossil. Have a fantastic day!

The post Fossil Is Available Now! appeared first on Elliot Kessler.

Anyway, Patterson.

His books are… okay.

In all fairness, I’ve only read two. I’ve read The Shadow and Private Gold. The Shadow is a science fiction/fantasy thriller based on the old comic book character from about a hundred years ago, and Private Gold is a novella (sorry, BookShot), about some conspiracy in Johannesburg.

I don’t remember the plot of Private Gold very well. The only thing I remember from that book is learning about Patterson’s BookShot series, which is described as books that are up to 150 pages, cut all the fat out of their plots, and are only five dollars.

Congratulations, James Patterson. You invented the novella.

Some of you guys might not know who James Patterson is. He’s a thriller author, and he’s one of if not the bestselling author of all time. He’s sold a lot of books. You’ve likely seen his novels in airports and stuff. He seems to be very popular.

I don’t get the hype. Again, I’ve barely read any of his work. But the little bit I read was less than satisfying. His characters are bland, his plots are basic, and he ruined the Shadow.

The original character of Lamont Cranston (A.K.A. the Shadow) is a masked vigilante armed with two pistols and supernatural abilities who strikes fear into low-level criminals to fulfill his vow and rid the world of evil.

Remove the pistols and the powers, and you have a very familiar description…

That’s right! The Shadow was the inspiration for Batman. Millionaire with a secret, crime-fighting identity and a posh butler. Bruce Wayne who? Lamont did it first!

The Shadow has had several reboot comics. I haven’t read any of the originals, but I have read some of the newer ones. I like them. They’re fun, action-packed, and exciting. They aren’t exactly beautiful, thought-provoking, tear-jerking works of art, but they’re not trying to be. They know the readers are only there for the action, and they go all in. I appreciate that.

But then there’s James Patterson’s book, where he got everything, and I mean everything, wrong. But that’s not even the worst part! The worst part is that he knows he got everything wrong, and he acknowledges that in the book. It’s part of the story!

The book is about a man named Lamont Cranston who gets poisoned by his arch-enemy, Kahn (not the cool one from Star Trek 2), while on a date with his girlfriend, Margo Lane, who also gets poisoned. Lamont quickly drives Margo to some warehouse where he has a secret life-preserving thing. He tells his butler to put himself and Margo in the machine.

Decades later, Lamont is awoken by a young girl in a dystopian future, where Kahn is in power and rules everyone. The young girl who wakes him up is a huge fan of this character called the Shadow, and she has all the comics and all the movies in her room. When she finds out Lamont is the Shadow, she takes him back to her house and shows off her collection of memorabilia.

This is the worst part of the book. Are you ready?

When Lamont looks at all the comics and stuff, he says something like, “Yeah, they always got me all wrong in those depictions. I wasn’t anything like that. I never used two pistols. It’s ridiculous!”

So, the Shadow in this book isn’t the Shadow? Great. Wonderful. Way to please your audience, James! I was looking forward to the Shadow going to the bad guy base and hiding in the dark while all the goons tremble, pointing their machine guns at all the corners where Lamont could be hiding. They’d hear a cackle echo throughout the room, sounding like it was coming from everywhere at once. Then a deep voice like a demon would growl, “Who knows what evil lies in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”

Then the Shadow would drop from the ceiling with his two pistols and take out all the goons single-handed.

That’s what I wanted! That’s what I was looking forward to!

Is that what we got? Nope! We got some dude who could turn invisible on command occasionally and never once held two pistols. He wasn’t scary. He wasn’t cool. He wasn’t interesting. Just a dude that was like, “Oh, yeah. That guy is bad. Let’s go stop him.”

The final fight of the book ends with some kind of magic battle or something that should have been in Harry Potter, not The Shadow. Stories with the Shadow are supposed to be about a man fighting crime, not shooting fireballs at Big Brother from 1984. What was this book trying to be?

Also, spoiler alert for this last section, but it turns out that the girl who found Lamont was also his daughter, which I figured out before I reached halfway through the book. She could turn invisible, she had a strange connection with Margo, and I easily put two and two together.

It wasn’t a twist, Patterson. If you’re going to put clues in a book, make it less obvious. I would think you would know that because you write detective novels!

There’s also a scene right before the final fight where the main characters are on their way to find Kahn, but they find this lady giving birth in an abandoned building, and some other people are there to help her. The characters stop and help the lady give birth, then they leave and keep running down the street to fight Kahn.

What was this scene? It didn’t add anything to the plot or the characters! I think it was supposed to foreshadow that the girl was Lamont and Margo’s kid, but I already knew that because I’m not dumb. I used a little bit of thinking power to reach that conclusion. Who do you think I am, James?

Basically, I didn’t like this book. It was dumb, and it assumed the audience was dumb, too.

“Maybe this is a fluke,” I thought. “Surely someone as famous and bestselling as James Patterson is a good author. Maybe I only read one of his bad works. Not every story can be a winner.”

So, with this in mind, I picked up a novella from the library called Private Gold. It still stunk.

But it wasn’t bad the same way The Shadow was bad. There was no previously established character to ruin. There was no legacy to tarnish. It was just a boring, basic, stereotypical thriller story. No interesting characters, no new angles, and no fresh ideas. It was the same tired tropes of detective thrillers that I’ve seen millions of timesacross the board.

You know those movies that characters watch within other shows that are the most generic things ever? Like in a sitcom when a family gets together to watch a movie and the movie is hilariously bad. You know what I’m talking about?

That’s what Private Gold felt like. There was no attempt to try anything new. It was like Patterson had a checklist and ticked off all the marks as he was writing instead of trying to create a fresh and interesting story. It was dumb, and I hated it.

Now, with all that out of the way, there is something to be said about James Patterson’s writing style. His stories and characters might be bland, lifeless, and unoriginal. But the prose he uses sets the reader’s imagination on fire.

When I read a Patterson story, I can see what he sees. The scenes play out in my head like a movie. I became immersed in the world of the story. I slip into the pages of the book and I stand right alongside rip-off Lamont Cranston and his idiot daughter.

I might hate Patterson’s stories. I might think his books are dumb. But there’s something to be said about that feeling you get when you read his books. I love that feeling, but that creates a bit of a dilemma for me. Do I buy Patterson’s books and contribute toward supporting the types of stories I despise? Or do I stop buying Patterson’s books and not experience the magic that his prose presents?

I think the answer is simple.

Pirate his works from the internet!

I’m just kidding. Don’t do that.

I’ll probably pick up his books from the library from time to time study the prose he uses and try to incorporate the same magic he creates into my writing, but I don’t think I’ll be collecting his books. I don’t want them, anyway.

I’ll be honest, I don’t enjoy most modern thriller authors. The only thriller authors I read are people like Raymond Chandler. I love their old-school, no-nonsense stories that get straight to the point and don’t have the characters going off on random side quests to help ladies give birth in abandoned buildings. That’s what thrillers should be. Fast, fun, and to the point.

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.

The post My Thoughts on James Patterson appeared first on Elliot Kessler.

The novella is the beginning of a series following a young adventurer named Eorum. As he travels the western countries of the continent of Eretor, he helps those in need and gives what he can.

In The Shadowman, Eorum has journeyed for several years, and he is now ready to find a house and settle down. But Eorum must go on one more quest before he can hang up his sword.

Liam’s daughter has fallen fatally ill, and he tasks Eorum with finding a cure for his daughter. The pair soon discover that she has been attacked by an ancient evil: a Shadowman.

Together, Eorum and Liam must find this monster and destroy him to free Liam’s daughter from her illness.

Eretor is a fantasy world I created when I was 13, and this novella is based on one of my very first short stories. I grew up with Eorum and several other characters in this epic, mythical. I’ve seen them go on adventures and travel to distant lands and fight terrible evil.

Years ago, I had a plan to write the greatest fantasy series of all time. I began to write the first book, but quickly gave up. I wasn’t ready for such an enormous task. I still had much to learn.

I had moved on from the world of Eretor. I decided that was my jumping off point into the world of creative writing, and my real books were going to be other stories set in other worlds following other characters. But there was something about these stories that I grew up writing that I couldn’t let go of. They were always in the back of my mind, and I wanted to find some way of bringing them back.

Originally, I was going to write a Kindle Vella series centered around Eorum. Each episode would be a brand new adventure, and it would build into a climactic battle before the next series of short stories began and a new evil force arose.

The problem with this is that Eorum’s adventures are far too epic to be condensed into 2,000/3,000 word short stories. The original Eorum story was only 1,500 words long, but that was my longest work at the time, and it barely scratched the surface of the full story I wanted to tell.

Because of this issue, I decided that Eorum’s adventures wouldn’t be a series of short stories, but a series of short books. Novellas.

A while ago, I heard of a science fiction series of novellas called The Murderbot Diaries. I tried the first one, and I didn’t like it very much. Not only was the story boring, but there was too much swearing in it. It seems that I’m in the minority on this point, but I prefer my books to be devoid of swears rather than filled with them. I thought the idea of a novella series was interesting, though. But I never gave it a lot of thought until a few months ago.

At the time, I was reading classic Spider-Man comics when an idea occurred to me. Why don’t I write a series of short books with action-packed yet meaningful and thoughtful adventures centered around a specific character? Each book would be its own adventure, but they would all tie together and connect in some way, much like comics.

I thought the idea was brilliant, and I quickly got to work on creating a character to make a series with. Some were good, but most were terrible. Then I decided to make the series with a character I already knew well and loved.

I knew the first Eorum Chronicles novella would have to be based on his original adventure. It feels like forever since I first wrote his story. Since then, I had written another story featuring Eorum about how he became an adventurer, so I knew his backstory. Everything was in place. I wrote the first draft of the novella in a week, sent it to my aunt to edit it (She edited the original short as well.), and had a cover made.

Now, it’s almost here! The Eorum Chronicles: The Shadowman is the first of many exciting adventures filled with action, heart, and biblical messages about sacrifice, servitude, and humility.

The paperback edition will be available this Saturday, October 7th, but you can preorder the Ebook now!

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.

The post The Eorum Chronicles: The Shadowman Releases Saturday! appeared first on Elliot Kessler.

The complaint that stories aren’t original anymore has lasted for many years. It seems that anytime I talk with anyone about stories, someone brings up the topic of originality.

But the truth is these people would also rather pay to watch a sequel to something they enjoyed than go to an original movie they don’t know they’ll like.

During the marketing campaign for The Creator, an original science fiction film by Gareth Edwards, my family saw an advertisement on TV for it during a sports broadcast. My dad’s first reaction was, “That looks weird.”

My brother and I were the only ones in my family who wanted to watch the film.

See, there’s a reason that most mainstream stories released today are sequels, reboots, or remakes. It might be because they’re easier to make, but I don’t believe that’s the whole reason. I think it’s because those are the movies that make the most money.

Think about it. Would you rather watch a new science fiction movie about a war between humans and robots or the next Star Wars film? Would you rather watch a movie about a brilliant detective solving a strange case or another Sherlock Holmes movie? Would you rather read a new book about a sprawling fantasy world and a long, arduous journey with heroic characters or reread Lord of the Rings?

Everyone says they want original stories, but the numbers show otherwise. The Creator didn’t make enough money, while the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film and Barbie made plenty. The truth is that original stories are seen as odd, strange, and weird.

But that’s the point.

An original story should be something we’ve never seen before. It should explore new concepts, ideas, and characters, none of which the audience is familiar with. Of course, they aren’t going to sell as well, and of course, they will be seen as strange.

Audiences would rather find comfort in something familiar than try watching something new. New stories are weird, but that’s because they’ve never been done before. They’re supposed to be odd. But it’s that strangeness that pushes audiences away. They would rather watch a terrible remake of an old classic than a brilliant new work of art.

I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing. If the point of this article were to say that all sequels and reboots were terrible, then that would be a bit hypocritical. Some of my favorite films are sequels or adaptations. Some of my favorite books I only read because they’re so popular. Ready Player One is a book filled with references to nerd culture, and I enjoyed it because of that.

But the lack of originality in modern storytelling is suffocating. Some of the most popular books these days are retellings of old myths or generic fairy tale/romance novels. Those aren’t the stories I find interesting. I like the weird. I enjoy exploring the unknown. You never know what you might stumble upon.

On Instagram, I found an advertisement for an indie author who writes science fiction and fantasy. He didn’t have a lot of followers, and his books didn’t have a lot of reviews. I thought I would check him out anyway. I bought one of his books called The Gunner Chronicles. It’s a cross between a Western and a post-apocalyptic science fiction story, and I have enjoyed every second of it.

I also recently stumbled across a book in Barnes and Noble called The Day of the Triffids. I thought it looked fun and weird, so I picked it up. If I hadn’t seen the author’s name before reading the first page, I would have thought it was an H. G. Wells novel. It’s a bizarre and fun story about a meteor shower that turns humanity blind and seven-foot-tall carnivorous plants. It’s a strange one, and that’s why it’s so fun. I’ve never read anything like it, and I’m only a couple of chapters in.

There are so many other hidden gems out there waiting to be found. With everyone having easy access to self-publishing these days, authors around the globe are getting their stories out there. I understand that most of them are terrible, but that’s okay.

So, if you’re tired of watching the same stories repeatedly, look through Amazon and find something weird that piques your interest. If you only have a select few books you enjoy but don’t like the popular ones everyone else is talking about, take a look online and find something less popular that speaks to you. You never know what you’ll find. Plenty of adventures are to be had, and they all await you.

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.

The post Original Stories are Weird appeared first on Elliot Kessler.

If you’re looking for a fun and thrilling Sci-fi adventure to read this summer, this is the page-turner for you! Filled with pulse-pounding action, loveable characters, and heartwarming moments, this is one book you don’t want to miss. I had a ton of fun working on this story, and I’m sure you will have even more fun reading it!

When the evil Polemonian Empire secretly returns, Ben Novak must escape his home planet and find the legendary hero who thwarted the dark army in the last war: Sevdis Minare! But nothing about Sevdis is as it seems.

This version of the book also includes a brand new side story that was not in the original serialized version!

Back on Ben Novak’s home planet of Astru, his brother, Caleb, leads a desperate rebellion against the invaders. The odds are seemingly insurmountable. The rebels are outgunned, outnumbered, and out of hope. It’s up to Caleb to bring confidence back into these revolutionaries and save his home before it’s too late.

I am proud to present this book in all of its thrilling, heart-racing glory. If you’re tired of the same basic story over and over produced by Hollywood and major book publishers, check out this one! It breaks the mold in an ending you won’t see coming! There are so many strange worlds you’ve never seen before, and the colorful cast of characters will make you wish the book never ends. So, what are you waiting for? Get yours here!

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.

The post Liar’s Legacy Releases Today! appeared first on Elliot Kessler.

Wonder. Awe-inspiring wonder. That’s why we still talk about these worlds. They’re mysterious and filled with questions and riddles. We have so many strange, unanswered questions about the worlds of the stories and the characters. We talk about what the answers might be to these questions. We speculate what the hidden meaning of words and lines of dialogue might be. It’s fun. It’s exciting. No one knows what lurks around each corner of these stories, and that’s very exciting.

I love the feeling of wonder I experience while reading mysterious stories or playing through strange worlds. I love exploring the unknown. It’s even more fun when the creators of stories don’t even know all the answers. It adds to that sense of wonder and mystery.

Stories have begun to lose their wonder. Science fiction and fantasy novels are hundreds upon hundreds of pages long so that the authors can explain every single detail of their worlds. Every rule, every law, and every mystery is uncovered, and that’s no fun. There’s no sense of exploration. No sense of strangeness. Nothing piques the audience’s curiosity, causing them to question what’s out there. Who are these characters? Where do they come from? Why does the world work the way it does? What’s its history? So many questions form in the minds of audiences whenever they stumble into a strange new world through a book, a show, a movie, or a video game. These questions spark wonder in the audience. The setting of the world and the strange characters stay in the minds of those who experience them. How vividly do you remember No-Face from Spirited Away? How often do you remember the Beast who lurks in the Unknown? Are there times when your mind dwells on the secrets of a certain small, Orgeon city?

But authors and film studios seem to feel the need to explain every detail. They need to know every inch of their story. Nothing can go unanswered. But some of the best stories keep that sense of the unknown. I like to think of stories filled with wonder, like Metroidvania games. If you don’t know what a Metroidvania is, look at Hollow Knight, which I referred to earlier, or even the genre’s namesake, the Metroid series. The games are 2d adventures where you navigate a vast labyrinth and find keys, such as new abilities, to open doors. To find the keys, you must find your way through a large, dangerous environment. You get lost. You find dead ends. You meet enemies and, sometimes, allies. But you never know what’s in the next room. You never know what you’re going to find next. You might find a very helpful power-up. You also might find a challenging new enemy. It’s always a mystery, with you constantly guessing and wondering about what’s out there. By the time you finish the game, you might not have explored the entire world. There still may be rooms that haven’t been etched in on your map, and you can’t help but wonder what might have been in those rooms.

That’s how I like my stories. I want to feel that sense of wonder. I want to guess what might happen next and be completely surprised. The weirder, the better. I like things left unexplained. I like speculating for myself. This is why weird stories got bit in the first place. Back in the days of pulp magazines, much of the marketing was geared toward showing how weird and strange their stories were. That’s why the magazines had names like “Astounding Stories” and “Weird Tales.” People enjoy getting lost in strange worlds. They want to escape and don’t need everything explained to them. It’s better that way. When I watched Princess Mononoke, I didn’t need to know all the details about the spirits. I didn’t need to understand why they did what they did or why they looked how they looked. All I needed to know was what happened in the story. The spirits were strange and wonderous, and I loved that about them.

I’ve been experimenting with wonder in my own stories as well. I’ve been writing a novel without any outline or detailed explanation of how the fictional world operates. I don’t even know how the story is going to end. I hypothesize that if I feel a sense of wonder while writing and I feel like I’m exploring the world while writing, the audience will feel the same while reading. Of course, while editing the novel, I’ll have to make it look like I knew what I was doing all along. That’s the point of editing. But I believe that by writing without knowing what’s around the corner, that sense of wonder and exploration will leak into the story and embed itself in the readers’ minds.

Wonder is important. Some stories, such as Spirited Away and C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, are written with wonder at their core. Their primary purpose is to get the audience to feel lost in an unknown world and to explore its strangeness. I love those stories, but I haven’t seen many lately. Maybe I’m not looking deep enough. Or perhaps no one’s writing those kinds of stories anymore. If that’s the case, I guess I’ll have to write those stories for myself, and I’ll let you guys ride along as well.

Also, I wanted to give you guys a quick reminder that Liar’s Legacy rereleases tomorrow on Amazon Kindle! I will provide a link to the book for you guys in another blog article, so stay on the lookout for that.

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.

The post The Importance of Wonder appeared first on Elliot Kessler.

I don’t have a definite answer as I’ve only written a couple of books (although I don’t think anyone does), but I do have some ideas that may help you when writing a book. I think it mostly depends on the length of your book, the genre, and your writing style. I’ve read some thrillers that have long, long chapters. But James Patterson writes chapters that often fit on a single page. I’ve read a lot of space operas with lengthy chapters, but Douglas Adams prefers to be short, quick, and to the point, which also helps with the comedy of his books.

It’s all really about timing. How long do you think you can hold your readers? How long do you need to hold your readers? When should the scene end? How many scenes do you need in your chapter? What defines the beginning and end of a chapter?

That last question can be difficult. How do you find the beginning and end of a chapter? I suppose one could look at each chapter as a smaller story that is part of a larger narrative. This is similar to how Timothy Zahn approached his chapters in the original Thrawn trilogy of Star Wars books. In each of the chapters, the characters either solved a problem and took another step forward to succeed, or they found themselves in deeper trouble with more problems to solve than before. Either way, the plot moves, and that’s the most crucial part.

If there is a chapter where the plot is not moving, it doesn’t matter how long or short it is. Cut it. It doesn’t need to be there. Most people nowadays have shorter attention spans. What’s the cause of these shorter attention spans? I don’t know, and that isn’t my point. My point is that because people are harder to hold onto for longer periods if a story sits still for an entire chapter where nothing happens, it’s boring, and you’ll lose your readers. If you aren’t introducing new characters, if your characters don’t have a problem they need to solve, and if your characters aren’t working toward a specific and personal goal, then you don’t need that chapter. Stories need movement. If it isn’t moving, it probably won’t work.

But that isn’t about chapter lengths. That’s about whether or not you should keep specific chapters at all. So, let’s get back to the question. How long should your chapters be?

I wrote a book where every chapter was anywhere between 3,000 and 5,000 words. I think it worked pretty well, but it was my first book, and there are some slower chapters in there. But I think this is a pretty good goal to shoot for when writing a big sci-fi or fantasy novel. However, my go-to chapter length is between 2,000 and 3,000 words. These chapters are shorter, but that helps to hold the readers close while you take them through the story.

These shorter chapters can be tricky. I have written a lot of chapters that stop shorter than they should have. This isn’t specifically because of chapter length. It’s mostly trying to get a feel for the story and get the timing right. If you have a slower segment in your story, write it long and give it room to breathe. In fact, give every scene room to breathe unless it’s an action scene. If you’re writing action, you want the reader on the edge of their seats. You want their eyes glued to the page. You don’t want the characters to stop in the middle of a life-or-death situation to talk about their feelings. The only gripe I have with the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie is the scene where Barbosa marries Will and Elizabeth in the middle of the climactic battle in the third act. As fun and goofy as the scene was, it slowed everything way down and had me wishing we could get the scene over with and get back to pirates whacking each other with swords.

So, is there a specific answer for how long a chapter should be? Do I have word counts for you based on genre and book-length? No. That would require math which I am not very good at, and it wouldn’t be necessary. If your chapter has a point, make that point explicitly clear and take as much time as you need. If you have a scene you need to put in this chapter, make sure you put that scene in and don’t cut it short. Let the scene play out to the very end. If it ends on a cliffhanger, great. Writing cliffhangers is fun. But don’t cut the scene in half. That is a big no-no because while it leaves the readers wanting more, it also leaves them unsatisfied, which makes them not want to keep reading your book.

So, to answer your question, write short what needs to be written short, and stretch out what needs to be stretched out. If you feel one chapter should be longer or shorter than your other chapters, go for it. Again, it’s all about timing, and the more you write and read, the better sense of that timing you’ll get.

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.

The post How Long Should Your Chapters Be? appeared first on Elliot Kessler.

This isn’t going to be a brainless action story written purely for excitement, and adrenaline rushes. This will be a personal, character-driven story about what it truly means to be happy. Because of the direction I want to take this story, it requires much more thought behind every sentence and every word. This story has taken about two years to get to a 30,000-word second draft, and it still has much more work to go through.

After reading through the second draft, I immediately began working on the third draft based on the notes I took while reading the second. I think I lost the story’s core, and taking a step back will help remind me of what I hope to achieve with this book. I need to look at the bigger picture and remember the goal I’m after.

So, because of that, I’m taking a break from “Empty” and focusing my attention on the “Liar’s Legacy” rerelease and (maybe) a new project. I have a lot of ideas I can’t wait to share with you guys. It feels like my journey as an author is only just beginning, and I am so excited to give you guys as many fun, thrilling, wonderous, and fantastic tales as I can. I have been delaying projects and taking breaks from some of my books for quality concerns. I want to give you the best I have to offer, and that has led to a lot of pushes on deadlines I set for myself.

With all that being said, there is a line I keep crossing between trying to make a story good and searching for perfection. I almost decided to rewrite “Liar’s Legacy” from scratch before my Aunt talked me out of it. If I’m constantly trying to write the perfect story, I’ll never finish any of these projects, and you’ll never get to read them.

I hope to get some more projects to you soon! I realized recently that I hadn’t written a short story in a while, so I might do that soon. Next month will be pretty rough for me, and I won’t be able to write blog posts for a couple of weeks, so I’m thinking of writing a short story and serializing it for you guys. This isn’t some scheme to squeeze multiple blog posts out of one. Okay, it kind of is. But I also think it might be fun for you guys. I’m unsure why, but I’ve always liked serialized stories, like TV shows. I enjoy the anticipation for the next installment. I don’t know if the feeling is mutual, but I will make you sit through it anyway! Mwahaha!

Anyways, I hope you guys enjoy the story I write, and I hope I can make these books as great as they can be!

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.

The post Taking a Break from ‘Empty’ appeared first on Elliot Kessler.

For formulas

When I first began writing stories, I would scribble short stories that lasted one to three pages. The stories weren’t good looking back at them (which I expected), but I had a ton of fun writing them. Eventually, I participated in a creative writing workshop-type event. That’s where I learned about the Eight-Point Arc formula, which changed how I wrote my short stories.

I started writing my stories by following the formula to the letter. A lot of my stories were still random ideas, scenes, and concepts that I thought would be cool, but my better stories were written by faithfully following the formula. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. I didn’t have to hope that my story would be fun to read. I knew it would be and didn’t have to worry about it. I began to get a little more ambitious and outlined some novels (which never came to fruition). It was around this time that I learned about Dan Harmon’s Story Circle, which is another writing formula. When I outlined my book ideas, I would either draw an arc and make notes for each of the eight major plot points or draw a circle and do the same but with the Story Circle formula.

I thought that’s how stories worked. I felt that authors were supposed to stick to formulas, and if they didn’t, they weren’t doing it right. Formulas were gospel to me, and I didn’t want to stray from them at all. If it weren’t for formulas, I would never have gotten as far as I have with creative writing. I would have either stopped a long time ago or continued to scribble garbage short stories in notebooks.

Formulas help new authors to understand story structure better. When it comes to creative writing, one learns by doing. I learned how to write good stories by writing good stories. I didn’t know how to write a good story until I did. Plot formulas are a way to help people learn what makes a story enjoyable. I needed the plot formulas I learned to point me in the right direction for writing. Otherwise, I would be writing nonsense and duplicating other stories I have read or watched. I wouldn’t be trying anything new. I would just do what everyone else does because I know it works. Fortunately, formulas gave me a way around that. I could plug in my own ideas while still doing what the experts do. I can make a space story that is my idea and my concept but still write it the way something like “Star Wars” was written. (For those that don’t know, George Lucas read Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” and wrote the first “Star Wars” movie by following Campbell’s Hero’s Journey formula, which is another great formula.)

Formulas helped me do things that I otherwise would never have figured out how to do. They propelled my writing to a level that would have taken much longer to reach otherwise. They helped me learn what it takes to write an entertaining story and pushed me in the right direction.

Against Formulas

Eventually, my writing got really stale, and crafting new stories wasn’t as fun for me anymore. Despite all these new ideas I had and stories I wanted to tell, it felt repetitive to plug my concept into a formula and watch what happened. I wanted to make something that was truly my own. I tried to stop doing what everyone else said worked for them, and I wanted to do what worked for me. I grew bored of formulas and grew out of them. I started writing stories by plotting them how I felt they needed to be plotted. I wrote and structured them how I felt they needed to be. Despite not following formulas for these stories, I think they turned out pretty good.

Obviously, they can’t all be winners. For instance, I wrote a story about a guy who got lost while hiking and ran into Bigfoot, and all Bigfoot wanted was to be accepted. As fun of an idea as it was, the story I wrote wasn’t as entertaining as I hoped it would be. But breaking free of formulas helped me to experiment and try things I had never seen done before. For instance, I wrote another short story about a group of college kids exploring the woods at night before they were attacked by a monster of some kind. As basic as that story sounds, I wanted to write it in a way that would be unique. So, instead of turning it into a traditional short story, I made the story read like a transcript of an audio file found on an audio recorder at the scene of the attack. Why was a group of college students exploring the woods at night with an audio recorder? I don’t know. But the idea of a whole story being made up purely of dialogue fascinated me (and still does), so I wrote it.

When I began to stray away from formulas, I found concepts, ideas, and storytelling methods that I had never conceived before, and I would never have thought of them if I had only stuck to how other people told me to write. I found my own voice and my own storytelling methods. Instead of plotting stories the way storytelling teachers told me to, I plotted stories the way the stories told me to. Each story had its own structure. It wasn’t made of a list of checkboxes. It was just how the stories were structured naturally.

I found myself as a writer only after I broke free from the constraints of formulas. That’s when stories didn’t feel the same anymore. I wasn’t going through the motions. I was thinking about every plot point and every story beat as I wrote, and I wasn’t making sure it aligned with the ideal story structure. Instead, I made sure it aligned with the story I wanted to tell.

Conclusion

There is no right or wrong way to write a story. If you use formulas for everything you do and can’t live without them, great. As I said earlier, the first “Star Wars” was written using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey formula, so clearly, formulas work fine. But if you’ve never used a formula a day in your life and hate being constricted by rules and regulations that others impose on your creative work, that is also fine. There was a point where there were no formulas, and some of the best pieces of fiction originated from that period, such as the Sherlock Holmes stories.

I do think that when you are only beginning to dip into creative writing, you should learn story formulas to get you started. When you get bored or frustrated with formulas, that’s when it’s time to start thinking of them more as guidelines than actual rules.

There are alternatives to this as well. You can use things in life as formulas. I’ve seen the five stages of grief used as a structure for an episode of “Doctor Who,” and it’s one of my favorites. You can also “steal” a story structure from one of your favorite books or movies. When I say “steal,” that probably raises some red flags, but you’ll notice the quotations. That’s because you’re not actually stealing anything. You aren’t taking someone’s story and changing the names around to pass it off as your own. Instead, you’re taking another story’s structure, the main plot points, and applying them to your own ideas. This helps give your story a skeleton that you can build off of later.

There are so many ways to approach storytelling. Only you can find the method right for you; the only way to find it is by writing. So, good luck, write great stories, and, most importantly, have fun.

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.

The post On Storytelling Formulas appeared first on Elliot Kessler.

Story

The story is an interesting one. It’s set in a world where people that die are plugged into a virtual reality where they can live out their final days in peace and occasionally talk with their loved ones. While investigating claims of corporate espionage on another planet, a group of employees fall into a trap and are bombed by a rival company. When they return to Earth, things start to get weird, and the employees begin to wonder who died in the bomb blast and who is living in a virtual world.

This theme of questioning what is real appears in many of Philip K. Dick’s works. Like, almost all of it. He finds many exciting ways to explore the theme and gives it many perspectives. But his books generally have a plodding pace and are challenging to get through. His short stories are a completely different situation, but this is not a short story.

I found myself putting this book down a few times before returning to it days or weeks later. It was not a page-turner. But the concept was exciting enough that I had to finish it.

Writing

As I said, Dick’s works aren’t usually super thrilling. Even “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” a book about a bounty hunter searching for androids posing as humans, is slow. But his ideas and the themes they explore are captivating enough to keep going.

The language Dick uses isn’t as lucid or vivid as someone like Ray Bradbury, but it gets the story across. The book isn’t oriented to the sense of sight. It isn’t oriented to any senses. It does just enough to give the reader the story that provokes their thoughts and makes them think about reality.

Characters

The characters of “Ubik” aren’t the focal point here. Like Isacc Asimov’s books, the story’s purpose is the concept and the themes, not the characters, which is unfortunate. There are a lot of characters that we never get to know. Apparently, one of them was a love interest for the main character at the beginning of the book, but their relationship isn’t ever explored or even hinted at.

I can’t even remember half the names of the main characters. One character introduced early on was a fascinating concept, but the concept only came up a few times later in the book. I didn’t care about any of the characters. Even the main character was flat. I only finished reading the book for the concept, which I believe is a testament to how unique and exciting the concept is.

Verdict

While this novel is strange and has a lot of room for growth in the character department, the concept and ideas it explores are interesting enough to carry a reader through the whole book. It’s slow, which can hinder many readers’ experiences, but I think this book is still worth the read.

If you’re interested in this story, buy the book here!

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.

The post Ubik | Spoiler-Free Book Review appeared first on Elliot Kessler.