The craft

So, how does one become a writer? I certainly didn’t wake up and day thinking “I’m gonna become a writer today!” No, wait… I did, but that’s no the point of today’s rambling.

It all starts with an idea, not with love and death as some like to say. You get anidea, and it sticks into your mind and all of a sudden you find yourselfthinking: "This is a book I'd like to read". But it is your idea, and if you don't write the book, no one will. So you start holding meetings with your co-writers and start writing the story down. It will probably go well, one scene, leading to another until you realize you have lots of chapters.

This is usually when it happens: you are on the roll, you are enjoying your new"job" and start thinking about what you could write next... And before you realize you will be planning your new book series consisting of seven books! (who cares if you haven't actually finished the first one you started writing? You can never have to many ideas, right?) Most people will consider this a good thing, it should be; at least until the momento when characters from one of your new, unwritten books start walking behind you living instructions as to how exactly you should write THEIR book. Yeah, you read well: once your characters come to life in your office, it becomes THEIR thing, THEIR book... You are just the poor soul that's gonna write it.

It's all about the numbers

I know you are confused now, but writing a novel is all about numbers. Number of times your computer crashes without saving a crucial paragraph, number of characters you are tempted to kill for pissing you off, number of hairs pulled in front of a blank page... but above all, there's the number of words.
Once you have a few characters, sort of an outline for the story (not to be confused with a plot, that came much later!) and you have researched a few crucial details (Are there wolves in Finland? What transport should this character use to get from point A to point B? Does my hair look good today?), you start to write. The story is still young and malleable, so after a few days, you notice you've written quite a few pages and start thinking: I wonder how many words we've written. That day, you do the first word count, and you are lost forever. Because you're almost at 10k words and you can't have that, can you? So you write furiously and get over the mark, a milestone, a big achievement, a sign that you are getting somewhere.
From then on, words is all you can think about. I wonder if I can get to 15k by the end of the week? When you think of a new scene for a chapter you are happy that you can add a couple more thousand words. You start comparing your novel's length to other's. You learn that Animal Farm is just 30,000 words long, while War and Peace has 590,233 words. You don't base the writing in the numbers, of course, but you can't help doing a happy dance every time you cross a new limit.

How to deal with unruly characters

The first thing I learnt when I started writing, is that characters have very strong opinions. You start writing a character, thinking 'This guy should be easy, he just makes software and a lot of money in the stock market'. Big mistake. Because, suddenly, said guy will look up to you from the page and say: 'Hey! I think I want to write poetry'

We've mentioned before that our characters usually win the arguments, so after a bit of discussion I just sigh and start making up haikus about money dancing in the summer breeze. 

Or, say, you're trying to write a Finnish god. He seems a serious guy, strong, god of creation, good with metal. So you're totally unprepared when he decides to disappear from the story for fifteen years. You counter by sending a pack of wolves to find him and he suddenly starts relentlessly mocking your main character or playing matchmaker in a very twisted way. Once again, you sigh and hope you can write a decent love story with a god hunched over your shoulder pocking fun at two young people. 

Then, there's the issue of what times the characters choose to make their opinions known. To them, it doesn't matter if you're in the toilet, if you have to get up from a cozy bed where you were trying to sleep to write down a scene or if you are in the middle of a bar surrounded by people. Characters are selfish creatures, so they don't mind ruining your social life, as long as they manage to get their points across, so you end up being the crazy chick with a notebook ignoring everyone in the bar for half an hour while you mutter curses under your breath. 

The important thing to remember, though, is that you can't control your characters. There is a lot of sighing involved, curses that would make a sailor blush and inkblots that would make Rorschach proud, but there is absolutely no control. So just lean back and enjoy the ride, because characters get you to places where you'd never go on your own.

The craft of writing

So far we have told you that we write, but we haven’t given you any details. I’m inclined to share our working habits with you, and maybe provide you with some new ideas. Our way of writing a novel differs quite a lot from most authors, simply because we are two people (therefore two completely different minds) creating the same story, so we have to implement some extra stops.

STEP #1 How to share a brain?
The first thing we need to do is make sure that we are both on the same wave length: We go to a bar with a couple of notebooks and start outlining the plot for the next few chapters we have to write. This is the main line of the story, where we mention the most important characters and their roles.

STEP #2 What’s in a name?
We have seen our characters, but we know nothing about them. This is the part where we build their story and all the things that will be the base to their behaviour.

STEP #3 You are just jealous cause the voices are talking to me!
We listen to the characters. Some characters talk to one of us, some talk to the other. We listen to them and transcribe what they tell us. Sometimes their plans differ from ours. Usually, they win.

STEP #4 If we do not learn from the mistakes of history, we are doomed to repeat them
We write on the real World, so we need to know some historical facts to make sure our story makes sense in the timeline. Hours and hours surfing the Wikipedia in search for a light.

STEP #5 Write, write, write
Self explanatory

STEP #6 Food for the masses
We are getting closer to the end so we need to hear the opinions of others. We send the first draft to some friends and listen to what they have to say.

STEP #7 Winds of change
We implement changes, fill some chapters and add some things we might have forgotten in the first round. Hopefully, after this step, the book will be done.

(Here is where STEP #8 rich and famous should go, but since we haven’t achieved that yet, I’m just gonna mention it superficially.)

How It All Started

How does one (in this case, two) decide to become a writer? We have both been writing for years, short pieces, stories, half a script and other scary stuff thankfully lost in the ether...
I even started a few stories that could be turned into novels and participated in NaNoWriMo twice, without actually finishing. My problem? I always ran out of plot halfway through the story and left it at that.
Who needs a plot? I hear you ask. And that's exactly what we asked ourselves last winter, on a (probably) cold and dark night after too many beers. We had a main character, we had a first sentence, a (thankfully already dismissed) working title and lots of experience in reading novels of the sort of what we wanted to write, so we tought, why not? What do they have that we don't? The answer was, obviously, published books, so we got ready to correct that.
Since our fantasy novel is set in the real world, the first thing we did was research for months, right? Endless hours getting to know Finland in the Middle Ages, to have the accurate dates and historical sites... or maybe we just browsed Wikipedia for a while, got some ideas for a plot and started writing in a bar, notebook on a greasy surface, pen in one hand, beer in the other. That's why our greatest ideas and part of our manuscript are written in worn-looking notebooks, one chapter here, one extra scene there... After a few minutes of furious scribbling, it was time to swap notebooks and see how the story had moved on without your help.
Messy? You bet, but it worked and soon enough we had a plot for half the book and had passed the 10k mark, so we were on a roll.

Hello there!

So this is displaying in your screen right now, which means that either you clicked whichever combination of blue characters one of us sent you, or you followed a quite dissoriented White Rabbit. However, welcome to our humble blog: Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!... Or whatever.

We would like to invite you on this trip and you will witness in real time, the story of how we decide to write a book (usually after a few drinks too many), how we plot it, what happens while we write it and finally, how we try to find someone brave enough to consider publishing it. You will be witness to conversations like "Yesterday, while I was in the toilet, this guy riding a war horse just appeared in the middle of the room and…", or "Gosh, shut up, can't you see the characters are talking to me right now?".

If you are still reading, you will probably have noticed that we are a bit crazy (some would say we're mad as a March hare, but that's not the point of today's post). Hopefully, that’s what will make this blog a bit different from all the others on the net and will provide you with some hilarious moments. We have a problem when it comes to taking life seriously, so, please, lean back and enjoy. In the following posts, you will get to know us a bit better, and know what our books are about, where we get the ideas from… You might even hear some things about other topics, who knows?

So please, fasten your seatbelts and follow us!

Akitania & Sirannon.