Hothouse creativity

I've taken a break from editing Auroradawn this week.  I rashly signed up for Nibfest 2014.  The challenge is to write 5,000 words in a week, from a given start.  I write fast, but I thought that 5,000 words in a week, plus time to edit, would be a challenge even for me.

In the end I wrote the first draft in three days over the Bank Holiday weekend.  And it was totally different  from the way I write a novel.  This was a pure make it up as you go along writing experience.  I don't do that with novels.  I'm going to invest four to six months of my life in writing a book, and I want to know before I start that I'll have something recognisably like a novel at the end.

But with the Nibfest I played. I'd just finished reading Karon Hurley's God's War, and that book influenced my thinking.  So I decided to do my own take on the mercenary retrieval theme.

I started with my heroine, who is a personal protection expert and not a mercenary, being asked to go on a dangerous mission by her queen.  And when I started the narrative I had no idea why she wanted this person back, or what the problem was.  But as I wrote I discovered my main character's family, backstory, relationships, and past work history.  And gradually the secret the queen was keeping emerged.

I kept my hand moving, not stopping to think things through, intent on finishing the work in time to edit and polish it.  What emerged was the first five chapters of a novel, the set-up for an SF adventure story.  At this stage I'm not sure if I'll finish the book.  I'm still working out whether these are characters I'd want to spend a whole series with.

Now the hothouse creativity is done the bigger questions have kicked in.  I'm asking questions like 'What's the full story arc?' 'Do these characters have the potential to live in a series?'  And the key question: do I like these people enough to want to spend several years with them?

I'm not sure of the answers to any of these questions yet.  But that's the point of this kind of hothouse creativity,  if I'd stopped to work all these things through before I started writing I wouldn't have a piece of fiction that is different from everything else I've written and pushed my boundaries.  And that in itself is a reward for the effort expended.