write my novel

Worked on it for four hours on saturday and sunday and monday

For so long I’ve been enjoying the Southern fiction of other authors. Now I’d like to compile stories from my life, and friends’ lives, and write “my” novel. Not to publish and get rich, necessarily, but I can try, at least.
What do I know about this, anyway? I guess my 1st step is to write down all the collected stories and childhood memories I have that are silly and funky and essentially Southern.
Second step is to outline my characters… wish me luck… the sooner I start, the sooner I will finish, right?

I have known the beginning and ending for the first part of my novel for ever, but I was not getting from point a to point b. So I decided to try again, writing it in a different form. I wrote a little bit (almost) every day this week, literally reworking most of what I had written the day before, and then adding to it. It is a slow, and very different approach to how I thought I would write this, but the seedling is working. My plan is to finish this first part of the novel by August 31. I feel shaky, and double guess myself all the time. But I feel I am getting somewhere.

I have always loved to write. My Year 10 English teacher inspired me. He was this amazing teacher who made me feel as though I could write anything. When I was a teenager it was Poetry. Like most teenage girls I wrote poems containing all the angst and heartache of being a teen.

Soon I moved on to short stories. Which I have done on and off for many years.

A couple of years ago I met someone who had written a novel. It has never been published, but she wrote it. Finished it even. It had taken her years. It got me thinking.

Since then I have given this a lot of thought. For the last 9 months or so I have been taking classes at the local Adult Education Centre. I started working on one idea, but it kind of fizzled and I lost the motivation. Another idea came to me a couple of months ago, and since then I have been mulling it over in my head.

I have just completed another class and while I was doing it I got into my story again. I have been doing some planning and am nearly ready to start the actual writing process.

It will take a couple of years to write the first draft. I know that. But I am looking forward to the process.

Since doing a creative writing course I have got to grips with the structure of the novel which is the hard part as it can stiffle the imagination. My tutor has given me confidence by seeing I have ‘real and original talent’, thank you!! I sit on ideas now and a few days later they run away with themselves! When writing I feel emotionally destroyed from dredging my soul, but it is worth it all for sanity!

I had been having trouble with a plot element for my novel; actually, a pretty significant crux in the story. I think I may have worked it out through my freewriting through NaNoWriMo…it wasn’t through more “plot” per se…it was actually a change of perception, fine-tuning in a way, making things fit better.

I am extremely happy with this, and trusting more of it will come through NaNoWriMo.

I believe that much of the “meat” of the novel itself, in terms of themes and substructures, message, what I want to write about. I also have a general plot idea. Now I need to figure out what is going to happen, and capture ideas from other sources that can make my writing more robust.

I don’t want to be a “hyper-plotter,” but rather, really let my free-writing be the place where characters develop and answers come to me. I am going to really allow myself that month of free-writing, just free-writing whatever comes into my mind, so that I can reach “deep mind,” the place to draw truly creative associations between ideas.

It has been good for me to try to scratch out random ideas, while at the same time taking account of all the “conceptual” work I have for the novel, as well as sketch a rough plan of additional things to look into and read.

I think the freewriting/NaNoWriMo has really made me go back to the seed of what is it I want to write about for my novel. And for that, I am very happy. Getting everything out there…

I have committed myself to freewriting for a month (28 days to be exact, starting today) a novel of 50,000 words.

This is not a rough draft of my novel. Rather, it is an exercise in getting it all out there, much like a very rough sketch is the beginning of a painting.

I am giving myself permission to just freewrite, which to me is a (very) neccessary first step before writing the novel. I sort of feel that the novel I want to write is this amazing peak of a mountain, but that I am down in a valley far below it. I can see it, I know what I want it to be like. But the distance and height is so daunting it paralyzes me. Freewriting is a good way to just start training myself in going forward.

Freewriting is also helping me access that inner place in myself to produce real art, rather than just “Frankenstein” my way through a novel through bits and pieces of memorabilia, quotes, ideas, paraphrasing, and other forms of literary nesting which make me feel safer, but are far from being genuine. I really feel I am getting started on my true art with this approach.

For more on this, check out my entry Woah.

I’ll save this goal for November (obviously) and hopefully school won’t get in the way.