People say that if you write a little bit here and a little bit there, eventually it will add up. I guess “People” were right. Though I feel like I haven’t been working on my novel much, Scrivener begs to differ. It says I’ve written 40,000 words. What’s more surprising than the number itself, though, is that I feel like I haven’t actually started writing. I might have 40K words, but I suspect that only a fraction of them will end up in the finished work.<\/p>\n
That’s because I’ve been writing blind. I started with a good premise, but a premise is not a story. It took 40,000 words of exploratory writing just to begin to understand who my characters are, what they’re doing, and why. I have a broad outline now, and every day I work on the details. Once I know exactly what has to happen, then I can start to build the scenes using some of the blocks of text that I’ve already written as the foundation. Then I’ll really<\/em> be writing.<\/p>\n This lengthy process makes me feel both slow and inefficient. I think that NaNoWriMo skewed my ideas about how much time and text it would take to make a novel. I’ve got 4\/5 of the text required to win it, but probably only 1\/10 of a novel. I’ve been working on it for 7 months (seven times as long as NaNoWriMo!), but I’m nowhere near being done. How lame am I?<\/p>\n But, according to author Philip Roth, I’m probably right on schedule. I was listening to the radio on the long drive back from CT last night, and I caught part of an old interview with Roth (who died this week, sadly). In the interview, Roth said that his novels took two to three years each.<\/p>\n He also said, “The book begins to make its demands. The demands are intellectual, they\u2019re imaginative, they\u2019re aesthetic.” I’ve never read any of his books, but I think I know what he meant. My novel is demanding. It presents themes and asks me to expand on them. It begs for allusions and homages. It insists that I do enough research to give it at least the veneer of scientific plausibility.<\/p>\n I do the best I can to make it happy, but this appeasement takes time and a lot of thought, often much more thought than writing. That’s probably just as it ought to be, too. Should I ever finish this novel, regardless of how it turns out, I hope that a reader would be willing to say, “It’s clear that she didn’t just dash this one off. She took time and effort and tried to do the idea justice.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People say that if you write a little bit here and a little bit there, eventually it will add up. I guess “People” were right. Though I feel like I haven’t been working on my novel much, Scrivener begs to … Continue reading