On Writing a Novel

On writing a novel.  A few years ago it struck one day.  The memoir and personal essays were going well, that was nice, but there was this other thing nagging.  Fiction.

I'd been to Write On The River and come back thoroughly inspired.  But to do what? What was the next thing.  There was this itch.

So I took  Susan Wingate's novel writing classes.  Steep learning curve.  Cool fellow class mates.  Delightful conversation.  Risk taking encouraged.  Fun!

Winter being what it is in the San Juans, last year I treated myself to Cary Tennis' Creative Getaway.  More inspiration. Awesome class mates. A new way of thinking about writing. More risk taking encouragement. Fun! A strategy for writing a novel. Bingo!

I came home and wrote some more blog posts about winter in the San Juan Islands. Then one day, writing about winter got me thinking. What if next winter were to be the Winter of the Novel. Yes. Take that winter! You suck, and I'm going to kick your ass by writing a novel.

That was a great idea.  Now winter is here.  It's time to write or get off the keyboard, as they say.

Here's the aha from the first stab:  It's possible to work on the first seemingly brilliant outpouring until all the facts are straight and all the characters are accounted for, the structure is pretty good, but the initial life force of the thing is barely hanging on by a thread.

Lesson learned.  Save a copy of what's left of it.  Leave it alone before you kill it altogether. Use that copy and proceed forward, this time without all the editing. See if the life, the spark returns. Remember what Anne Lamott says about "short assignments" in Bird by Bird.

More later.