Finally Under Way!

After several fits and starts, plenty of wallowing and brooding, and heaps of procrastination, I am finally getting up and writing every day!

After some research and introspection I was able to identify my strengths and weaknesses as a fiction writer. This was not an entirely comfortable revelation, but better late than never!

Strengths: imagination, style, ability

Weaknesses: plot structure and general planning

This came about as I set out to write an outline for my 3 Day Novel entry this year. The last four times I competed I had a character, a vague idea of setting, and one cool occurrence or theme, and just ran with it for three days. This had been my technique for all the fiction I wrote. I'd get a really cool idea for a specific part of a story and just write until I couldn't think of anything else to write.

I thought that the "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration" formula meant having one great idea and then sweating over an incomplete story until you had figured it out. And I suppose that's true, but a more helpful way of interpreting it is sweating over an outline and character sketches and all that "boring" preparation, and then writing it.

I can't believe it has taken me this long to figure it out. How many creative writing classes have I taken? Sigh. I suppose even if you are exposed to the best teachers and resources, if you have a certain attitude or if your mind is already made up about "the way things are," you will only hear what you expect to hear. I always scoffed at the technical side of writing (the plotting, planning, and building) because I thought that the entire process had to be this beautiful, mystical, purely creative thing.

Turns out I was wrong--the prep work is drier and sort of like "engineering" your story, but it makes the actual writing much easier and more fun.

I researched a lot of different techniques for outlining a novel, and settled on The Snowflake Method. I predict that I will try out different ones (index cards, flow charts, etc) and end up with a hybrid method that works for me. For my 3 Day Novel I did sort of a modified Snowflake outline, because I felt that the level of detail achieved in the later stages would amount to cheating on the contest, even if I didn't write any actual prose.

So I've finished that outline, and I'm just going to let all those ideas marinate in my subconscious until 12:00 AM next Saturday.

Until then I'm working on a short story. It's set in an intergalactic cantina, and it's sort of a combination of bawdy bar stories and the myriad ways relationships mess with us.

I have another novel started, but I just couldn't bring myself to work on it more until after the contest next weekend. But it'll be good to have something started and ready to work with, because I've found that a three-day writing marathon really primes the pump and I want to keep the momentum going when it's over!

I have two "old" novels are languishing in my hard drive. I wrote the first one, a sci-fi novel, I think in 2006 for the most part. I sent queries to a couple dozen agents, had one request for a full manuscript, and then nothing. My second novel was for young adults, and that too received one request for a full manuscript, plenty of rejections (I'd estimate about fifteen) and then nothing.

However, I did hear from my aunt, who is a great reader. I'd sent it to my 12-year-old cousin to see what she thought, and my aunt read it too. She had really quality feedback about it, and after having left it alone for months and months I can see exactly what she is talking about. But I don't feel inspired to go back and "fix" it.

While doing my research on outlines I read a list of "rules" one prolific author had created for wannabe authors. One of them was to always finish what you wrote, and to edit it again and again until it was in its best form. But my instincts are telling me otherwise. I want to look at those first two novels as good practice, and go on to write better ones.

Now that I've discovered the "secret" of creating a solid outline first, I'm excited to see what happens when I write a first draft based on that, rather than just winging it. I'm also very excited to check out the CreateSpace thing on Amazon that a friend (and NaNoWriMo success story) told me about.

Despite the hours and days spent stressing and feeling lost, I now declare August a huge success! I spent a lot of time adjusting my attitude about work and writing, caught up on sleep, and I'm finally (in the last week of the month) living out my blessed "free month" the way I intended.

Looking back, it's obvious to me that this type of shift would take a good three weeks. You can't (or at least I couldn't) go straight from a full-time corporate soul-squelching work setting into full-time fiction writing without an adjustment period.

The motives are so completely opposed: in one situation you are doing what someone else tells you to do, for money. In the other situation you're doing what you want to do, for no money (yet). I'm looking forward to finding the perfect balance of the two in the coming months!