Writing (Badly) In The Past

I recently looked over some stuff I had written a few years ago. It was called Earth War, and I had planned to make it the first in a trilogy, Conflict: Earth was the working title for the series. It was to follow the perspective of two individual characters and one group. The two individuals were Sergeant John Armstrong of the New York National Guard and Lieutenant John Aron of the New York Air National Guard. The group were patrol officers Andy Harris and Michael Warren of the New York Police Department. Each party’s actions would affect each other and drive the story along. Even if it didn’t seem like it, eventually all the threads would be revealed. I thought it was an interesting concept, and I got pretty far, all things considered. I even wrote supplementary material to flesh out latter parts of the trilogy. I decided to look back on them, to see what I needed to change, and would I could let be. To say reading through made me cringe would be an understatement. It was terrible. Here’s what I didn’t like about it.

First off, I didn’t do my research. I didn’t know much of the layout of New York, so I basically made up settings as I went along. Comparing what I had written to the Google Maps satellite view of New York, most of my geography made no sense. A building collapsing onto a street that, in real life, doesn’t have a building as tall as I made it out to be. I described a forest that is nonexistent. This wasn’t as bad as the other things I wrote.

The plot was poorly constructed. I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t execute it as well as I needed to. For example, here’s what happened to the pilot. He gets shot down by an alien aircraft and ends up parachuting over a boat. A woman named Sophie pulls him onto the boat. They have a brief conversation, and then he gets knocked overboard while she gets abducted. When he sees her smashed boat, he tries to kill himself, for some reason. Then he inhales too much eater then passes out. He finds himself in Atlantis(!), currently engaged in a deadly civil war. After getting himself involved in the war, he manages to get both the loyalists and rebels to stop fighting after give a sappy, cliché speech and warning of the alien attack.

The solder fares a bit better, but not much. He is knocked out when the alien aircraft that shot down the pilot strafes the road he and his squad mates are on. He comes to as the only survivor, and wakes up just in time to see an alien get shot to death. An alien tank appears, and is about to shoot him, when an Abrams TUSK (Tank Urban Survival Kit), part of a convoy, shoots it. The convoy picks up Armstrong and fight off alien air and ground forces to escape the city. The bridge they are on partially collapses, and Armstrong is knocked over, along with the Bradly Infantry Fighting Vehicle he was in. He exerts himself getting to shore, then manages to escape alien forces operating near the beach. He finds a small group of people hiding in nonexistent caves, and they direct him to a safer place. I describe a humanoid figure wearing a boot, supposed to imply the death of those people, but the text contains no implication in the first place.

Overall, there are a lot of flaws with this writing. What I’d change is I’d start from the beginning, and outline where I want the story to proceed. I’ll do research to make it better reflect reality, and work more on prewriting characterization, something that was nonexistent for the original work. I believe this will improve the storyline immensely, and I’m looking forward to see where it will take me.