While it's been a long time since I've read my own writing (!), I believe "Derysi" was the name given by those who created them (which was presumed to be the faerie folk; in Ranea the fae are definitely of the "do not screw with" variety). At any rate, in the current new draft, "Derysi" appears in a book that Mika's reading; in the original story he learns something about bats from going to a library and looking up information, and I've kept that. But that's precisely the sort of thing that would have the correct name.
As I keep writing, I suppose I'll learn whether it makes sense to keep the name in there or not. I haven't played around much with the idea that I mentioned in my last response about the language used for the non-human races; there could well be a distinction drawn between those who'd want to know what to call Revar other than "bat," and those who either didn't think about it or just didn't care. There's a lot of play story-wise that could involve species relations in Ranea, and while I don't want to make any of the stories into allegories about racism, being mindful of this could add a bit of extra depth.
While I tend not to do much world-building ahead of time, I've always done some level of outlining, and that's actually increased over the years as I realized that I really didn't do enough. My outlining isn't a point-by-point description of everything that happens in a story, but rather pretty close to the idea of writing down scene ideas on index cards and shuffling them around. I know some writers, including some very successful ones, hate the idea of outlining, for much the reasons you described. For years I didn't actually outline as much as write notes about what needed to happen next in a story, so my muse was always running a few scenes ahead of where I was.
At least for me personally, though, the longer the story is, the less likely that approach--or the "don't outline anything, just let it flow" approach--is to work. There's a middle ground between outlining in such detail that I feel like I've already told the story, and doing so little planning that I end up with writer's block a third of the way through a long story because I have no idea how the hell to get from where I am to where I want to be. Some people may be able to manage without the index cards to push around, but I am not one of those people. And I wish I'd figured this out about fifteen years earlier than I did!
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2008-02-13 18:16 (UTC)As I keep writing, I suppose I'll learn whether it makes sense to keep the name in there or not. I haven't played around much with the idea that I mentioned in my last response about the language used for the non-human races; there could well be a distinction drawn between those who'd want to know what to call Revar other than "bat," and those who either didn't think about it or just didn't care. There's a lot of play story-wise that could involve species relations in Ranea, and while I don't want to make any of the stories into allegories about racism, being mindful of this could add a bit of extra depth.
While I tend not to do much world-building ahead of time, I've always done some level of outlining, and that's actually increased over the years as I realized that I really didn't do enough. My outlining isn't a point-by-point description of everything that happens in a story, but rather pretty close to the idea of writing down scene ideas on index cards and shuffling them around. I know some writers, including some very successful ones, hate the idea of outlining, for much the reasons you described. For years I didn't actually outline as much as write notes about what needed to happen next in a story, so my muse was always running a few scenes ahead of where I was.
At least for me personally, though, the longer the story is, the less likely that approach--or the "don't outline anything, just let it flow" approach--is to work. There's a middle ground between outlining in such detail that I feel like I've already told the story, and doing so little planning that I end up with writer's block a third of the way through a long story because I have no idea how the hell to get from where I am to where I want to be. Some people may be able to manage without the index cards to push around, but I am not one of those people. And I wish I'd figured this out about fifteen years earlier than I did!