BabaVader
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Blog - On writing and rewriting Owlnother World
🕑 Added 2022-07-15 22:07:30 +0000 UTCEdit: Here's the link for the rewrite as a gdoc with comments enabled. Thanks for the idea, David! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Iv-ksJeQxjUBOxeJhBRj9cFQrd8wfyifQYuesvaeRBA/edit?usp=sharing
Hello everyone!
Today, I bring you something different. Not a chapter nor a simple announcement. I have been talking on and off about the rewrite of Owlnother World and wanted to put down my experiences and thoughts on the matter in a more coherent way than several split-up author notes.
Let’s… start at the beginning. Last year, in February 2021, I attempted for the first time to write a story. Technically I had tried before but that was over a decade before and this time, I was trying in English. The only texts I had written in English up to that point were in School and whatever nonsense I spouted on the internet. Nothing of any real quality. So it came as no real surprise that my first attempt at writing was mediocre. To me, that was not acceptable. Not because I’m a perfectionist but because I had invested a month or so in world-building and plotting by then. I simply felt the quality of my writing did not match my expectations. And so, three months later I decided again, deliberately avoiding any planning and thus any expectations. That was the birth of Owlnother World. I could not have made a better decision.
Writing, to me, is a form of self-therapy. I can focus on something I truly love doing and work out issues I have with myself, my life, or anything really. But I soon realized, I wanted to try to live off this wonderful hobby. That’s when I opened up my Patreon. Part of that decision was also how successful the story was on RoyalRoad. Had I not gotten several weeks on the front page of rising stars (trending, back then) I would likely have just kept this as something relaxing for in between. Now, writing is more important than university to me.
To that extent, my expectations have risen once again. I want to produce quality work. Only now, do I have some idea of what I’m doing and can actually (somewhat) deliver. There will always be things I can ‘improve’ in my eyes and I know I have to set a cut somewhere. But right now, Owlnother World as it is on RoyalRoad has many issues that I really want to fix.
My first idea for that was making an edit/rewrite. I was not really sure how that would happen but I knew I wanted to do something. So I started going through the chapters, reading them back and… I cringed. There are so many simple errors in the early chapters. Not even plot-related or world-building-related, I am simply jumping around between present and past, using bad wording or double wording… it’s not good. It’s not truly bad, but it can be so much better. And so I started with fixing the wording. It wasn’t really all that fun, to be honest. I knew I would have to go back and fully rewrite as well as delete parts here and there but I pushed on for a bit.
I ended up at chapter twelve with that process before having a conversation with some other authors on Discord. One suggestion I had been given was to open up the original chapter on a second screen and then use a completely blank page to literally rewrite it. Every single word, no copy and paste. I knew I had to try. But I was unsure if I had to do it for the child-arc, as I call the first eight chapters. That part was mostly good, plot-wise. And the parts after that, the monkey battle, the ork hunting, all of that? Yeah, those needed fixing desperately. I knew I wanted to heavily reduce the murder hobo vibe from the pre-evolution chapters to be more in line with what the story turned out to be about: Making friends and doing magic. I simply did not know how.
Let me take a moment here to talk about something else: LitRPG. As a genre, it works mostly off the progression fantasy trope. Weak to strong, strong to OP or OP to ‘Gods fear me’. That’s all fun and nice but… It needs a way to progress. For Owlnother World, Fio took the [Assassin] Class. She had one way to level that up: Killing (without being seen). Her race, pre-evolution, only levelled up by holding territory, hunting prey or using owl Skills. Most of that has very little to do with what the story turned out to be about. And that is exactly where the problem is. I can’t have Fio easily progress through levels and not be a murder hobo. It’s just very hard to bring together. Unless I whip up some assassin guild that recruits her and sends her to level up or some other drastic option. So I had a thought… What if Owlnother World is not LitRPG?
At first, that idea seemed stupid. I know a big part of my early success is the story being a ‘numbers go up’ fantasy. I have some great world-building in the background that explains the system’s existence and some cool plans for integrating that into the story in the future. For the record, that will happen. The original version will be written to the end as it is now. But I wondered. What would the story be like without levels, Skills, Classes and [Identify]?
Now, there are a whole lot of new issues cropping up with the removal of the system. But those are much more bite-sized than: where does a friend-shaped owl get [Assassin] levels? It’s mostly the question of identity and proving sapience. Those are honestly not really problems at all. They bring a very interesting new avenue to the early parts before Fio can communicate. The goblins and the orks can treat her much more like an animal, and the behaviour of Meeny and Ignas is much easier explained as well. I haven’t seen much in the way of negatives. The murder hobo part is a negative to me. The new problems are challenges that can enrich the story.
That is not to say I have decided to do the rewrite in full without the system. I plan to go until the end of volume one at least to see how it plays out. That’s chapter 30, by the way. Right now, I have about 5000 words written in the systemless version going to about the mid-point of chapter five. There are many parts early on where Fio is exploring or explaining the system which have simply been cut so the childhood arc is looking to be a little shorter in word count. I expect that to happen more often in the future and am looking to add more scenes where I need to but I don’t want to needlessly stretch the story just for the number of pages.
If volume one is 40k words instead of 60k, I’ll be fine with that. And if it doesn’t work out, I’m going to use the same approach of a blank page to go with a system version. I am sure I can figure something out for those issues. Maybe she’ll change her Class away from [Assassin]? Or the dwarves hire her to kill thaumaturges? Or something?
Now, if I add this blog to the word count of this week I’m already at 10k. That’s 25% more than a normal week and I still have two chapters to deliver on Sunday. I’ll end this with one big thank you! Your support makes my writing so much more fulfilling, quite literally as your money buys my food! Attached to this post is the first draft of the systemless version of Owlnother World as PDF and EPUB. I could upload it as a normal text post as well if you want, but Patreon is not fun to read on…
Anyway, thank you for reading all the way through! Here’s to many more words written!
Have a nice weekend, ya’ll, and be good to one another!
Cheers!
Comments
Baba Vader
Yup, the first draft will definitely reach the end. It's another 100-150 chapters, most likely. After that, I have Dole, which is LitRPG, and like 3 more ideas which are all LitRPG as well. The only story I have planned as standard fantasy is more of a traditional book, around 100k words in length. That's like 2-3 months of writing. What I'm trying to say is, I love the genre. I still have a lot to learn, though. The 'going in without a plan' is fun but doesn't work for balancing a story like this.
SDCard
I do agree that the murder hobo thing was a bit concerning at the beginning, but I am a bit conflicted about removing the litRpgs aspects, since I generally prefer reading LitRpgs over standard fantasy stories. The system was one of the reason I decided to read the story and looking forward to new mile stones, higher evolutions and classes are what mostly keep me reading stories like this one. Removing those aspects would remove what I like about power progressions stories. I am glad the LitRpgs version will be continued though :)
David Brims
You have a definite point, Vladerag, but I'm still gonna say it's doable, for the simple reason that there's overlap between the System and Magic. If you take away the System, you can get Magic to do a lot of what the System did. Need people to be able to perceive whether someone is Sentient, or whether they are acceptable to allow into a town, etc...? Maybe they can perceive that with magic, or just supernatural perception. Maybe not everyone can do it, but it can still be done. I just think there's an overlap that can solve a lot of these issues. A good system of magic also acts like scientific law. As to the progression/reward side, it can still be done as well. Wuxia like Yrsillar's Destiny cycle have clear progression/reward elements that are similar to species evolution without needing LitRPG. Of course, those are naturally very different from LitRPG which would have implications for the story. So all that said, the story will feel different, and maybe it will naturally go a different direction. Who can say until he writes a bit more?
Vladerag
The issue between the [Thaumaturge] Class and thaumaturgy was just the first example. As Baba Vader points out in their reply comment, you also have an issue with how Sapience is recognized at all. And a lot of other things. [Identify] is an important feature in any first time interaction in this story. Without the System, how would Fio discover and learn about the tiers for mana nodes? How would the Dwarves have established that Fio is trustworthy without the Captain's Skill? Why would Fio even bother to fight the Orks at all and how would the struggle between her instincts that seem to come from Class and Species and her human memories be written without the driving benefit of xp? That entire character arc doesn't make sense without the System. Or in the recent chapters, what is a witch and how does it differ from a thaumaturge if the System isn't around to make a distinction? Come to think about it, the Dwarves culture would actually have to be rewritten to make sense in a world without the System. This isn't even going into how Fio would even know about species evolution, or that they could evolve, or what a Beast Core or Node really is. A good LitRPG has its System as something akin to one of the Laws of Physics. To remove the RPG elements and tell the same story would be like removing Gravity from a story and trying to do the same thing. I'm not saying it is impossible, but I think that for the most part it would be a radically different story and that without clear progression, it wouldn't be as interesting. The explosion of LitRPGs has a lot to do with what amounts to an exploit of human psychology. Our brains "reward" us for completing "tasks," and although that is oversimplifying a rather complex topic, it holds true enough to work in video games. Well written stories have the reader reach a level of understanding and projection onto a character, so that in many ways your brain treats what happens to the character as if it was happening to you. In that way, a LitRPG trips all the same psychological triggers that a video game would. Removing that without replacing it with something else strikes me as a risky prospect even before you get to talk about the practicalities of doing so. Although, this is all just my opinion and things like this really aren't set in stone. It is entirely possible for my thoughts on this to be wrong and that the systemless version of this story will blow the original out of the water.
Baba Vader
Thanks for the feedback. Those issues are something I am definitely aware of. The main issue I find with the story right now, though, is the murder-focused beginning. There are solutions for both sides, I just want to explore this one for a bit. The big problem of the systemless version is the lack of [Identify] which would show clearly if someone is sapient or not, a [Thaumaturge] or not and all of that. I feel like I can make use of that to make parts of the story more interesting. As for [Assassin], I don't think it would bring much to the story if I don't have it level up at a somewhat decent speed. And to do that, the tone at the beginning needs to be different from what I want. Or I have to change the system 'balancing'. I'll definitely take a closer look. The LitRPG version isn't off the table. Right now, it's pretty 50/50.
David Brims
@Vladerag is correct that this will probably require some big changes to the plot, or at least a lot of thought before continuing. The Thaumaturge problem specifically occurred to me as well. My first thought for a fix there is if the way rogue Thaumaturges are detected by the dwarves is connected to the way flux affects Thaumaturges (and how flux DOESN'T affect Fio because of her connection to the Empty), then she wouldn't raise the associated red flag for them. Maybe she'd seem weird and radiate magic, but not seem insane/dangerous? That's if it's still a perceptive Guard Captain assessing her. Or maybe they use an artefact and she just doesn't raise a red flag with it. And with the humans, if she can prove she's a dwarf citizen it maybe it wouldn't be an issue? Ludwig can still make an assessment of her without having to do an [Identify]. Just because the story is rewritten as not-a-LitRPG, doesn't mean that relative magical power in the story is not perceivable. You probably don't need a character to be able to [Identify] Fio for them to sense and marvel at her great magical power.
Vladerag
Also, and I hesitate to be "that guy" and point this out, but are you entirely sure your audience is reading for the same reason you are writing? Power progression is an interesting thing to write, because the higher levels of it usually work best when it is appreciated by someone other than the protagonist themselves. Someone from a different perspective, a separate character, marveling at the strength of the protagonist is a common trope for a reason: it works very well. I cannot honestly say I actually care very much about most of Fio's friends - her advantage in flight means that she isn't stuck with them as long as characters in other stories are. Presumably, in chapter 239, I will get the payoff in the form of the Church's reaction, and I have to confess I am rather looking forward to it. Now, this isn't to say you should compromise your vision for your work and bend it to what people - myself in this case - would like it to be. But it is something to be aware of.
Vladerag
I am distinctly not a fan of this version, mostly because it starts opening holes in your later plot. If you remove the LitRPG elements, than there isn't any distinction between being a [Thaumaturge] and being able to use Thaumaturgy. Which means both the Dwarves and the Humans would want nothing to do with Fio. I don't think you can remove the "RPG" elements without a pretty drastic shift in your plot, nor do I see why being an [Assassin] is an issue for an owl. That is basically what they are, her mere act of hunting will level her class with time.
