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.
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