Other Things

Okay, so I went to see what other things needed doing besides the voice blocks (see a couple days ago).  One of them is vitally important.  Vitally, from "vital", meaning concerned with or necessary to the maintenance of life.

If I want my story to be alive, my characters to be alive, and I do, then it is vitally important my main character's conflict become very clear in the first fifty pages of the novel.

Now, I'm not going to tell you who my main character is or what their conflict is, partially because I want you to read it when the novel is finished.  But also because I learned at Write on the River it is possible to "talk out your story".

What does that mean?  It means saying so much about your story before or during the writing that it evaporates in the telling, gone like the breath you can see when it's freezing out.  I know this is true because I've done it.

And because the guy who told us about it at the conference was a really cool writer of Western novels who I never would have picked had there been another better option. Westerns? I thought.  Yeah, me too.

But now I think about it, Larry McMurtry writes Westerns, so I shouldn't have judged so harshly.  Also, this guy had some of the best advice I've ever received about novel writing.

Revealing in the first fifty pages the main character's conflict is easier said than done.  In order to do that, I've got to call on some other "other things".

More later.