Sofia Abbas

As some of you know, I currently have four different book projects that I’m slowly chipping away at aside from my fanfic stories. I like to have various stories going because I don’t really get much time to write for fun and so I feel like I have to take advantage of every mood I’m in when I do have time to write. This way, whether I’m in the mood for drafting, editing, outlining, angst, fluff, fantasy, or romance there’s always something that I can be working on. 

The four projects are Mirrorworlds (part of which is published as a fanfic under the title ‘Mirror’), The Nest (which is also partially on AO3), Windfall, and a still-untitled historical fantasy story set in the early period of Korea’s Three Kingdoms period (삼국시대). All of them are in different places and have had their own set of challenges.

I’ve learned a lot about what works the best for me through writing them, so I’m planning to create a series of posts focused on what I’ve learned about writing through each of them. 

For this first post I’ll focus on the Three Kingdoms story, and my initial approach to planning out a new longform story/book. Of course, what works best for me won’t work best for everyone, but hopefully reading a different perspective is helpful to anyone who is interested in writing something similar. 

Writing Dreams…Literally

The Three Kingdoms story was initially inspired by a dream I had many years ago. The exact details of the dream are fuzzy as dreams are wont to be, but it revolved around three generations of women in a family who were all queens of different kingdoms and lived through periods of rise and fall. At one point in the dream the three women met on a staircase while one person was climbing up, one person was climbing down, and the other was coming out onto the landing. 

I’ve always loved stories that play with perspective and time, especially when the reader is introduced to many separate characters whose stories end up intermingling with one another’s. For this book, then, I wanted to tell the stories of three different women who are living during different times although their stories are linked by at least one or two common threads beyond their similar experiences.

The idea ruminated for a long time before I decided to anchor it during the Three Kingdoms period, specifically during the early years covered in the annals of the Samguk Sagi (from 57 BC until about AD 30). The Samguk Sagi is a historical text written in the 12th century. I don’t have any qualms about saying that, in my academic, professional opinion, at least half of the first century or so of each of the three kingdoms’ annals are essentially ‘fake.’ 

Historians of this time period agree that the early annals certainly do not reflect what was actually going on in the Korean peninsula at that time, but disagree on when exactly the stories and myths of the Samguk Sagi became a part of the ‘true’ narrative of Korean history. 

Regardless of its historical accuracy, the Samguk Sagi is simply a fun text to read. Maybe that’s just because I’m a historian, but there’s something undeniably magical about the short origin stories of kings being born from bird’s eggs next to accounts of official gifts of horses and a preserved ancient poem purportedly from a love-sick ruler. The first time I read the Silla Annals, I couldn’t help but think how fun it would be to write a fantasy story that was technically compatible with every word of the actual historical text — and this is what sparked the idea for my Three Kingdoms book in its current form. 

On one hand the book is historical fiction (although I think the term historical fantasy feels more accurate), lining up with the written sources as we know them. On the other hand, it’s a fictional adaptation of an already fictional text. I don’t claim any historical accuracy, of course, because the characters and magical world are my own creations, and yet on the other hand there are aspects of the story that are more accurate than the Samguk Sagi itself according to modern scholars’ understanding of that time period of Korean history. 

Thus for this story, the inspiration developed over a long period of time and is scaffolded just as much by my initial dream as by the Samguk Sagi itself. The inspiration came about very differently compared to the inspiration of other stories I have been working on, though. In this case the staircase feature of my dream gave me an idea of where the story would end, which I usually actively try to avoid. I don’t want the reader to feel as if the plot was contrived, I want the ending to feel like a self-evident truth that could never have been avoided because of who the characters are and the circumstances they were living through. 

I try to write all my stories as character-driven as possible, and I still believe this is the best way to write a story that I myself will enjoy. To me these stories feel the most real and authentic, and thus the most satisfying to think about and return to again and again. I want characters who take on a life of their own. Everyone has different ways of achieving this goal, of course, but for me I like to create characters and worlds and then sort of ‘put’ the characters into a circumstance and let their own characteristics and experiences dictate how they react. 

The Three Kingdoms book is a challenging project for me because it can’t quite work that way. I did try to let characters drive as much as possible about their own fates but, with three different perspectives that I want to tell concurrently rather than sequentially, the way I actually tell their stories has taken a lot more work than the details of the stories themselves. There’s still a lot of space left in each narrative of personal development, and a major subplot that I still have to figure out. 

For Mirroworlds and The Nest (and most of my fanfictions) I started off knowing the major steps in a character’s development (or the development of their relationship). The physical details of the scene and where/when it takes place were usually only finalized when I actually started writing. For this book it’s the complete opposite. I know where characters are at any given time and where they have to be going, but I don’t yet know exactly how that aligns with their personal growth or how they feel about the change. I know a few major outcomes and deaths, but I don’t know exactly how the emotional buildup to these turning points occurs. 

It’s a new way to write, for me, but it’s fun in a different way. I have all these fragments of a story spinning around in my mind and I have to patiently slot them together and rearrange them until they make sense. I’m using logic to map out the timing and geographical movement of the three characters, but at the end of the day I think it’s important to stay in touch with my instincts and the ephemeral sense of right and wrong that we sometimes can’t put words to. 

The story is meaningful to me if only because it’s simmered in the fringes of my mind for years, but slowly it’s starting to take shape like a ship emerging from the ocean mists. In that metaphor, a writer could be the shipbuilder, the crew, the ocean current or the lighthouse itself. Each role implies a different level of agency and passivity, and yet none of them are exactly wrong.

Usually I prefer to be a shipbuilder, constructing the pieces and setting the ship afloat to see where it goes. This time, though, I’ll try my best to be the lighthouse beacon calling the story home.