Why Withhold Information?

I wrote the “vomit draft” of Daughters of Darkwana (the first in my fifteen-book novel series) in a few months. I originally titled it Daughters of Elsewhere. I made a lot of changes while I labored to edit it and the rest of its family.

I decided early on to trim away any information that the reader didn’t need to know. Other fantasy novels, such as those in the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones series took an opposite approach in the name of world building.

I appreciate world building, but I wanted to write something different: fantasy that moved as greased lightning.

A professor of mine in college made another suggestion. He pointed out that in Daughters, I explained early on the histories of my protagonist, Wally Cook and my antagonist, Special Agent Baxter of the FBI.

My professor questioned why I went that route. My readers did need that information for the story to make sense, but did the readers need that information right away?

The way I originally wrote it, the first few chapters of Daughters offered massive information dumps. It didn’t read like a news report, but close.

“Why not,” my professor dared me, “withhold the information? Why not keep your readers guessing until you simply must reveal your characters' backgrounds?”

I tried his advice, and I liked the results. I reformatted my entire novel around it. Daughter of Darkwana now flings its readers into the plot within a handful of pages.

Downsides exist to this strategy.

My readers must trust that my story will make sense, that the holes will fill themselves to satisfaction, if they play along until the story carries them there.

My readers must trust that Wally and Baxter possess proper motives behind their goals and behaviors, that my characters serve as products of their histories and not just names that do whatever I command from my keyboard.

I added clues along the way to keep my readers interested (one hopes).

Wally, in the first chapter of Daughters, holds an old photograph of a young girl. I offer no explanation—yet—as to her identify.

In chapter two, Baxter announces to Wally (and thus my readers), that he knows that Wally spent years in search of the girl in the photo.

Baxter, a few chapters later, writes repeatedly “I am very, very sorry for November 11^th 1962,” but the readers do not yet know why.

While Wally travels under the guard of his new kitsune allies (more on the kitsunes in a future post), and Baxter sends supernatural assassins to defeat the kitsunes and capture Wally, I fed my readers small clues about the girl in the photo and the purpose behind Baxter’s written apology.

I reveal, by the end of the novel's second act, the answers to those mysteries, and thus I explain my characters' motives.

I can’t claim that this didn’t feel risky. Television shows such as Lost and movies such as those made by director M. Night Shyamalan soured people against withheld information and plot twists.

Blurbs prove another problem. How does one promote a book when one doesn’t wish to “spill the beans” about its surprises?

Daughters already enjoyed its first two years on Kindle, so I can now spill the beans a little bit.

I will, next week, discuss some of the stories that did (and did not) influence the entire series, Diaries of Darkwana.

Thanks for reading!

You can catch my novels, such as Daughters of Darkwana, on Kindle.

I publish my blogs as follows:

Short stories on Mondays and Thursdays at martinwolt.blogspot.com

A look at entertainment industries via feminist and queer theory, as well as other political filters on Tuesdays at Entertainmentmicroscope.blogspot.com

An inside look at my novel series, its creation, and the e-publishing process on Wednesdays at Darkwana.blogspot.com

Tips to improve your fiction writing Fridays at FictionFormula.blogspot.com

What is e-publication?

I mentioned last week why I decided to polish the novels in my fifteen-book series, Diaries of Darkwana, and release them, one per year, on Kindle.

When I decided to e-publish, I researched several firms that promised to upload my work for me—for a fee. Many of these firms, once contacted, unloaded sales pitch after sales pitch in an effort to upsell me on nonsense bells and whistles.

I eventually decided to do the job myself. A quick tutorial on Youtube provided me with all the knowledge I needed. I basically used “Heading 1” (found under “styles” in Word) for all the chapter headings.

After that, I uploaded my first novel, Daughters of Darkwana, onto Kindle via Kindle Direct Publishing.

I also uploaded my novel onto Nook, Google books, and ibooks, but I ended up with spacing issues on many of these formats. That fact—plus a promise for more promotion by Amazon if I went exclusively with them—led me to make my work available only on Kindle.

I often check my account on Kindle Direct Publishing. I click on “Reports” to see how many copies I’ve sold and how much money I’ve made.

Kindle offers something commonly called a “cyber watermark,” which, in theory, makes it difficult for someone to illegally download my novels. I opted out of this option. I want readers more than I want money.

Kindle offers several programs that allow someone to download one of my novels for free. I accepted each of them.

I experimented with what price to charge for my novels. I suppose I still do. Daughters, for its first year, cost nothing. I offered it free in an effort to amass a readership.

Several fellow writers insisted that this might send the wrong message to potential readers. People might say, “If the author doesn’t think his work’s worth anything, it probably isn’t.”

Once Dreamers of Darkwana, my second book, arrived on Kindle, I priced both it and its predecessor at five dollars a pop, though several ways remain for someone to read them for free.

One advantage I enjoy about e-publishing remains the fact that I can easily update my books with any changes I wish to make, though I would never change anything major, only a choice in punctuation or something equally lightweight.

E-publication offers a list of disadvantages.

You have no agent, no editors, no proofreaders (no, editors and proofreaders no longer serve the same function), and no professional feedback. The author must trust her or his product as-is.

Few people consider e-publishing “real” publishing. I understand this opinion. I’ve read some truly terrible self-publications.

I’ve seen equally terrible, traditional publications.

A self-published author must perform all her or his own promotion. These days, though, the same holds true for traditionally published authors.

I have, as an e-published author, grown quite fond of social media Would it surprise you to learn that I started a blog to two?

I will, next week, discuss my novels. I’ll try not to spoil too much in the process.

What is Darkwana?

Welcome to my latest blog, Darkwana.blogspot.com. Here, I will discuss my most ambitious project: Diaries of Darkwana.

I’ll backtrack for those of you who've never heard of it.

My name is Martin Wolt, Jr. I aimed, all my life, to entertain people via my fiction, to create characters the world would love and with whom they would bond.

A billion years ago, or thereabout, I wrote a terrible, fantasy series called Hunting Sakura. My interest in Japanese mythology helped fuel the idea, but the books I produced for it didn’t work at all.

I tried to write a short story that explained how kitsunes arrived into Sakura’s world. That short story turned into a full-length novel, which ended up in my digital shoebox while I worked on my next project.

My eventual return to that shoebox led me to take another shot at a series separated from Sakura, one that sprang from the short-story-turned-novel. I ended up with a similar novel I called Daughters of Darkwana.

This served as only the beginning.

While I tried to polish Daughters, I couldn't help but ask “What happens next?” in regards to Daughters surviving characters. I started to outline a sequel, and then another.

I took a step back, decided which morals served as my story(ies)’s premise, and realized that I had a much larger series on my hands than I originally thought.

I outlined an entire, fifteen-novel series. The sheer size of the project overwhelmed me—for about two seconds. I afterwards nosedived into it as only someone with no social life could.

One of the other sergeants at my Army Reserve unit hooked me up with a security company that needed someone to work 12 hours a day, all alone at a UPS hub, from 6pm to 6am. I took the job. It left me nothing to do but work on my series.

I brought my laptop to work and spent a concerning amount of time writing my series. I realized, along the way, what I needed to make it snap.

I knew so many people who loved manga, comics, fantasy movies, fantasy shows, but they avoided most fantasy novels. These people read books, but they cowered from those phonebook-sized novels filled with unnecessary information.

Plenty of fantasy fans loved all this extra information (world building). No shortage of it existed. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and other such works offered rich, fictional history and culture in their worlds.

Not everyone wanted that stuff, though.

“I love the story," someone might tell me, "but I hate to read all this information that’s not important. Who cares how the capital city got its name? I don’t need to know the elves’ favorite songs and how they’re sung. Just tell me what matters.”

Few fantasy authors answered these cries. I decided to become one of them. I already exercised a minimalist’s writing style.

I wrote all fifteen novels in my Diaries of Darkwana series, and afterwards took an ax to them. I shaved out every single line that didn’t feel important. If the story worked without a scene, the scene went to the chopping block.

I managed to knock the books down to about three hundred pages apiece.

A return to school afterwards coaxed me from my security job. I enrolled at the University of Central Florida, earned my Masters in creative writing, and moved to Seattle, certain of my inevitable success.

Almost every literary agent, editor, and publisher to whom I sent my work responded with the same infuriating response, which went to the tune of:

“Fantasy is a male genre. About 70% of your characters are female. That won’t work. No one will read this.”

Other concerns existed. Japanese mythology felt “untested.” People questioned my demographic's existence. A few people even sited a “furry issue” with my kitsune (humanoid fox) characters.

I thank goodness that I live in such a wonderful, electronic age. I self-published Daughters on Kindle and Nook (I eventually took it off Nook, but you can still find it on Kindle. I had my reasons).

I decided to spend a year on each novel, polish it up, and publish it electronically. You can now find the second book in the series, Dreamers of Darkwana on Kindle. The third book arrives the first month of 2015. I'll release the final book in 2027. A bit of a commitment, I admit.

My project continues to grow. I’ve started to beta-test a prototype for a card game based on the series. I hope to produce a short run of the product soon (perhaps with the aid of Kickstarter).

I’ve considered the creation of Twitter accounts for a few of my characters.

I created, as the final project for my Masters degree, a film script for Daughters (I had to scoop out even more scenes to fit it into a 100 page script).

Now, I offer this blog (as well as several others), in which I will chronicle (don’t you love how epic that word makes everything sound?) my writing process, as well as those that regard self-publishing and promotion.

I will, most of all, discuss the world of Darkwana. As I mentioned above, I took a lot of world building out of those novels, but all that world building still exists in that world. I have, consequently, plenty to discuss.

I also want to discuss some of the inspirations for my characters, settings, and plots. I believe those muses merit mention.

I hope to see you here next week. Thanks for reading!