Entries by Jay Allan

How Stories are Born

March 12, 2020 /0 Comments/in /by

This is a question that probably gets answered a hundred different ways, so let me start out by saying that I’m talking mostly about my own stories. I’d wager a lot of other authors are similar, maybe most even, but I’d also bet many are different, too, and that’s great. But I tend to have a pretty specific flow of ideas, one that is more or less the same every time.

Not surprisingly, I start with an idea.  

Now, I write quickly, usually at least, but that doesn’t mean I put my story thoughts together in short order. Quite the opposite, in fact. I have lots of narrative elements floating around in my head all the time, and while I can usually write pretty quickly, I can’t produce that much. So, what makes a story idea develop into something more…and ultimately an actual novel, or more likely, a series of novels?

Well, first, there is time.  

As I mentioned, I can put out 5 or 6 books a year, usually, but the actual storylines, or at least the general outlines, have probably been floating around in my head for years.

Yes, that’s right…years.  I haven’t sat down and written anything I haven’t been thinking about for at least 12 months, and often for much, much longer. That doesn’t mean I’ve figured everything out, but it does give me at least a basic starting point, and quite possibly one that’s changed an awful lot over that year (or two or three or more) that it’s existed. The truth is, a finished novel is usually quite different from the original idea I’d jotted down.

Second, I have to consider how something works once I start trying to take it from a basic starting point to a finished novel. The dirty truth is, sometimes I’ll start something new, and I’ll find it very difficult to proceed at a given time, while other books will go far more easily. It’s a hard thing to understand, at least from time to time, as some things I thought would be easy prove to be difficult…or the reverse. It’s hard to determine what will go easily, and what will give me a hard time until I’m actually trying to work through them…which is why I have three or four started series that have ten thousand or twenty thousand written words, but ended up being abandoned, at least for a while. 

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Third, fan reactions are always crucial.  

I’m fortunate that I don’t need everything to be at the peak sales level all the time, but I’d be lying if I said that reader reactions weren’t important. If I’ve got two things going on, and one has twice the fanbase of the other, I’ll definitely show some preference to the stronger series. That doesn’t mean I won’t write the lesser work, I absolutely will, but it does mean I will probably write a number of the more popular ones first…almost certainly to the disclaim of at least a few old stalwarts who want to see the lesser book sooner.

Most recently, this has become the case with my  Blood on the Stars series which has exploded to a 16 book strong saga, with 18 total planned. With such a voracious readership of this particular universe, it makes sense for me to keep writing the story while fans keep asking for more installments.

Lastly, and strangely both good and bad, there’s my own reaction to each story.  

I’d like to say these are always good, but the truth is, sometimes one storyline is just better than another at pulling itself out of me and coming together, while a different one seems to get hung up on this and that. It’s not always that one is demonstrably better than another in some definitive way, but often one is just easier to work my way through at a given time. With luck, maybe the other one will open up over time, and be “ready” to actually launch in a year…or a couple years. The truth is, I’ve still got story ideas that date back to before I published my first book, and some of these have just proven to be more difficult to write.

Am I going to run out of story ideas? Nope, not in my lifetime at least. It’s one of the questions I get asked the most, and one at least, to which I can give a satisfying answer. I can’t say for sure my stories will remain interesting, or I will retain the same audience size (or even increase it), but I can say for certain that I’ve already got more ideas than I can write, especially since most of them are for series and not individual books.  That’s the first step…and assuming they’re mostly decent ideas, probably the most difficult one as well.

I’ve done okay so far, and with any luck, I’ll continue to pick and write good books. Maybe my sales will even go up, and not just stay the same!

Jay Allan

Jay Allan is a USA Today bestselling author of roughly 30 science fiction and fantasy books, including the bestselling Blood on the Stars series, Crimson Worlds series and the Far Stars trilogy published by HarperCollins Voyager.

A lifetime northeasterner, Jay currently lives in New York City, where he writes from his apartment…and continues to fill small notebooks with ideas for future books.

He has been a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy for many years, a writer of the same far more recently. His tastes are varied and eclectic, but most often he will be found reading military and dystopian science fiction, space opera, alternate history, and epic fantasy. He is also an avid historian, and is as likely to be reading non-fiction as a novel.

Jay writes a lot of science fiction with military themes, but also other SF and some fantasy as well. His works tend to feature complex characters and lots of backstory and action, always with an emphasis on world-building and extensive detail.

Join Jay's reader group on Facebook to keep up with the latest in his work.

Have Series Taken Over Fiction?

January 2, 2020 /10 Comments/in , /by

Series to the left of me, series to the right.  Every book seems to be part of a series today. Readers who prefer standalone novels are faced with what must seem like endless series books, from trilogies to never-ending sagas with 20, 30, or more volumes. I’ve contributed to this trend myself, with the nine books of my Crimson Worlds series and the fifteen (on the way to eighteen) for my Blood on the Stars series.

Why so many series?  

Well, there are a couple reasons. We’ll hit the obvious one first. Series make more sense for a writer from a business perspective. From built-in readership for subsequent installments to the ability to promote multiple books at once, authors find it far easier to build true careers writing series.

That’s a little mercenary, perhaps, but it’s far from the only reason. Series wouldn’t be more lucrative without one unavoidable fact: Most readers love them. There are a lot of advantages to longer stories, narratives that unfold gradually over a larger number of books. The ability to more deeply develop characters and storylines is vastly increased over a longer series. It’s hard to imagine if Game of Thrones would have become the cultural phenomenon it did if it had been a single book and one two-hour movie that came and went.

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Readers become attached to characters, and they want to see their stories completed.  

They want to learn more about settings and fictional universes. It’s a lot easier to dive right into a new story that also has some familiarity, some understanding in place when the eyes settle on page one.

Series are nothing new, of course. From the early days with things like the Lensman series through the years to Poul Anderson’s Technic series (and its James Bond in space hero, Dominic Flandry) and beyond to David Weber and the lengthy and beloved Honor Harrington epic, series have always been with us. The move in recent years to faster publication and reduced wait times for new books has enhanced the appeal of these longer tales, eliminating in many cases the wait of a year or more between volumes.

Many stories go on because readers still want more, even years after an author believed a series was finished, and in some cases, even after the original creator has passed away.  

Classic stories like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune have continued decades after the original books were written.

The series juggernaut isn’t going away anytime soon, so dig through the books that cross your path, find a story that grabs your attention, and settle in for a long and wild ride.

Jay Allan

Jay Allan is a USA Today bestselling author of roughly 30 science fiction and fantasy books, including the bestselling Blood on the Stars series, Crimson Worlds series and the Far Stars trilogy published by HarperCollins Voyager.

A lifetime northeasterner, Jay currently lives in New York City, where he writes from his apartment…and continues to fill small notebooks with ideas for future books.

He has been a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy for many years, a writer of the same far more recently. His tastes are varied and eclectic, but most often he will be found reading military and dystopian science fiction, space opera, alternate history, and epic fantasy. He is also an avid historian, and is as likely to be reading non-fiction as a novel.

Jay writes a lot of science fiction with military themes, but also other SF and some fantasy as well. His works tend to feature complex characters and lots of backstory and action, always with an emphasis on world-building and extensive detail.

Join Jay's reader group on Facebook to keep up with the latest in his work.

FTL – Science Fiction’s Fudge Factor

May 20, 2016 /2 Comments/in , , /by

Hyperspace, warp drive, folding space…over the years, authors have come up with lots of ways to travel faster than light, a virtual necessity if we are to portray any plausible kind of interstellar civilization.  Yes, you can build a good story even with years of transit time between even close systems.  Generation ships and crews in suspended animation can be interesting, and of course, we can restrict the action to a single solar system.  The Expanse is a great example of this kind of action.  But sooner or later we want to break away from the gentle warmth of Sol and explore the galaxy.  And we need to leave light behind in our dust (cosmic dust) as we do.

 

This is where the fudging begins.  Without turning this into a physics symposium, let’s just say that even the wildest imaginings of our knowledge of science tell us it is impossible to do this, especially for something like a spaceship full of human beings (as opposed to a few sub-particles).  So what do we do?  We make something up, of course.

 

Here is where we branch off in options.  Some authors make considerable effort to create systems of faster than light travel that at least seem plausible (they’re not).  Others don’t even worry about it.  They may call it a hyper-jump or a Jaworsky Field (after the fictional inventor), but they don’t even try to explain how it functions.  It can also be a naturally occurring phenomenon, a warp point, for example, or something manmade (possibly by ancient aliens now mysteriously vanished).  But one way or another, we will get the spaceships from system to system.

 

Sometimes, however, there is method to the madness, though it is often driven by plot rather than science.  For example, look at something like Star Trek.  The Enterprise flits all across space, seemingly unconcerned with refueling or even maintenance, at least unless someone sneaks onboard and scrags the dilithium crystals.  This is a great system when you want your ships to be able to get anywhere, to function at maximum efficiency even when they are lost and cut off.  But what if you want the reality of travel to impose greater restrictions on your space fleet?

 

Other systems are based on more of a fixed system using point to point travel.  I’ve used warp gates in my Crimson Worlds series.  These largely unexplained natural phenomena allow travel back and forth between two systems that are lightyears apart.  A system like this offers a number of advantages, especially for the writer of military science fiction.  It takes space, in all its three dimensional glory, and reduces it to a series of connections.  It rationalizes battle lines, and it creates a value structure for systems, making those with larger numbers of gates leading to cool places worth fighting over.

 

FTL systems can also be used to regulate the pace of travel and warfare in space.  Perhaps ships can “jump” anywhere, without the need for warp gates or the like.  But they can only go so far, and then they need to stop and refuel…and possibly have repairs done.  This can drive the plot in a powerful way.  Why is this backwater world so important?  Why are there giant battleships in orbit?  Because it is on the invasion route into the heart of a space empire!  This can be used to create something akin to the “island hopping” campaigns of World War II, as fleets maneuver to secure bases along invasion routes.

 

So the next time you pick up a new space opera, stop and think about whether there was more than made up science in the author’s mind.

 

JAY ALLAN currently lives in New York City, and has been reading science fiction and fantasy for just about as long as he;s been reading. His tastes are fairly varied and eclectic, but favorites are military and dystopian science fiction and epic fantasy, usually a little bit gritty.

Jay writes a lot of science fiction with military themes, but also other SF and some fantasy as well, with complex characters and lots of backstory and action. He thinks world-building is the heart of science fiction and fantasy, and since that is what he's always been drawn to as a reader, that is what he writes.

Worldbuilding in Science Fiction and Fantasy

March 2, 2016 /2 Comments/in , /by

Worldbuilding.  It’s a term that gets bandied about quite a bit when discussing fiction, especially in genres like science fiction and fantasy, but for all the endless times it is repeated, I think sometimes the importance is overlooked.worldbuilding

It’s very fashionable to say things like, “character development is the important thing,” or “it’s the story that matters.”  And, of course, those things are absolutely essential.  But they’re not the whole story.  Not by a longshot.  Not in science fiction or fantasy.

A work of historical fiction set, say, during the American Civil War doesn’t need worldbuilding…it’s world is the world, and beyond pointing out some historical facts the reader might not know, the author can focus almost solely on characters and storyline.  But science fiction and fantasy demand more.  These stories take place in worlds that are the creations of their authors.  They may be set in the near future, based heavily on the real world, or they may be wildly different (a galaxy far, far away), but either way, the reader needs to understand this setting, and the only way that’s going to happen is if the author fleshes it out.

Imagine a work like Dune, without the immense detail of the empire, stripped of the customs, institutions, and history so carefully laid out by the author.  What is left?  A good story, some well-developed characters?  Yes, perhaps.  But an enduring classic of the genre? Doubtful.sandworm

Or Asimov’s Foundation series…with its galactic empire and its ‘world as one giant city’ capital.  The characters come and go in what is mostly a series of short novellas, but the overall plot of the fall of empire ties them all together.michael-whelan_isaac-asimov_foundation

On the fantasy side, could there be a better example than the Lord of the Rings?  The three books cover little more than a single year’s activity, yet Tolkien’s work wouldn’t be the classic it is without the massive worldbuilding that gives us thousands of years of fictional history interspersed with a few months of real time action.lotr

In science fiction and fantasy, the setting is like a character itself, often as much a part of the story as any hero and villain.  When I think of the books that have resonated with me in my forty-odd years of reading science fiction and fantasy, it is those that offered rich worlds in which I could lose myself that became the favorites I pull out every couple years to reread.

Writers pursuing effective worldbuilding sometimes get blindsided by terms like “infodump,” and efforts to show the reader the true vision of a fictional universe often falter on such endless attempts to oversimplify good writing into arbitrary ‘rules’ and nonsensical little blurbs like, ‘show, don’t tell.’  Should a book start with an encyclopedia-like multi-page blast of pure background information.  No, not usually at least.  But is it important to share the true scope and vision of a fictional universe?  Absolutely.  Do readers want to know about these worlds their favorite authors create?  Definitely.

There is no question that worldbuilding has to be done well, subtly, and not like a tank smashing through the wall.  Information needs to be doled out slowly, steadily, not in one massive torrent.  In a series it can come over several books.  But when it is done, and done well, the rewards are enormous, both to the author and to the reader.  The best fictional universes take on lives of their own, and they begin to feel real, at least to the readers who become ever more immersed in the escape they offer.

As an author, more often as not, I’ll begin a new project with a clearer idea of the setting and the realities of the universe than the characters themselves.  I want my heroes—and my villains and bystanders too—to feel like they’re from that setting, and not some generic creations I cooked up and dropped in…which is why worldbuilding remains the core of my writing process, and always will.

I’d like to add a note on another kind of worldbuilding, the kind that is behind this web site.  This is my first blog post for DiscoverSciFi, and I’m very excited to continue to share ideas and motivations with all of you.  I’ve got a long list of topics for future posts, and I know my co-author partners here do as well.

One of the things I love about participating in something like DiscoverSciFi is the chance to create another way to reach readers.  Authors today have the opportunity to be closer to their readers than ever before, and I think this is a great thing for publishing in general.  I get a lot of emails from fans, and I answer them all.  There is no substitute for input from those who read and enjoy your books, and no better source for new ideas where to take a story than those from fans.  I’m excited to see where this DiscoverSciFi journey takes us.  I’m sure it will be a great ride!

Jay Allan

jay@jayallanbooks.com