Novel Writing - Day Two

One can spend hours creating character bios, backstories, and outlines.  All good, maybe even essential.  But not really writing the story.  A lot of that went on yesterday.  Got my first actual possible gripping writing today.  A page and a half.  Do that two hundred times, and you have enough words for a novel.  Okay, so I can see this is going to take a lot of writing.  A lot of sitting at the keyboard.

When designing as an architect, I'd know when the design was becoming real.  At first, there'd be this tiny model, a form of some kind.  Nothing specific.  Then a floor plan but only at like 1/16th inch scale which is pretty small.  I'd work on it and work on it, struggling really, getting fed up, wondering if I could even do it, then one day, the plan would suddenly jump to 1/4" in my mind and I'd know I had a workable plan.  I'd be "in it".  From there, it could be drawn and built.  Then it was real.  I cannot explain this phenomanon, only describe it.

With the story telling, it is the same.  When the story is far away, abstract, too much descriptive writing without dialog, telling, not showing, that means it's in its infancy.  By working at it long enough, at some point one finds oneself inside the story, living it.  That shift says there is something real here, something others might want to read.

The other day, I ran across my first fiction piece, from 2006.  It was a memoir with all the names fictionalized.  The names changed to protect the innocent so to speak.  It was pretty hokey, felt like it was happening "over there".  Didn't put the reader "in" the story.  I submitted it somewhere, I can't remember where, and of course, it was rejected.  Reading it now, realizing how bad it was, felt kind of great.  Because there has been all this work in between.  Classes, workshops, writing exercises, reading novels, studying screenplays and movie plots, and lots of writing.

Since that first piece there've been several attempts at writing a novel.  These remind me of the first time my Dad let me get behind the wheel of the family car.  So clueless I ran us off the road into a ditch.  Fortunately it wasn't a very deep ditch, no damage was done to the car or us.  One piece submitted to a critique group was judged, "sickening" by one participant.

I'm not a big fan of critique groups these days.  I believe writers are their own best critics.  Good writers anyway.  I've met many good writers who say they just write without getting outside opinions.  There are many ways to be a writer, no one right way.  The key is to keep on writing.

So, back to the novel.

More later.