In case anyone’s interested – – and maybe if no one is – – I wanted to give you an update on my first novel.
What’s that crazy-looking image, you ask? Well, it was a bit of a revelation for me, since I decided to be a bit more systematic in the construction of this thing. I’ve mosaiced the names and chapter titles, but what you see above is a grid I constructed illustrating in which chapters various characters appear. It helps my digital brain deal with this analog creation.
And, I’ve got to say, this is totally uncharted territory for me. You see, I’ve written professionally since I was just 15 years old, but every bit of the countless thousands of pages I’ve written has been about:
- Factual stuff (how-to-do-it type guides);
- Reporting on things that have already happened;
- Conjecture about things that might happen
I’ve never just dreamed up stuff out of the blue. It’s true that I did write a full-length screenplay, but at least that was based on a real-life story. I made up part of it, just for creative license, but this novel I’m writing is utterly and completely comprised of fictional tidbits from my head. It’s intimidating to try to do something I’ve never done on even a very small scale.
In a way, I feel a bit like a (very amateur) sculptor, chipping away at an enormous chunk of rock and not knowing if anything will come of it. I could wind up with just a pile of rubble at the end, with no art in the middle of it.
It wasn’t that long ago, with merely one chapter under my belt, and absolutely no satisfactory outline, that I figured it was a lost cause. Lately, however, in very tiny steps, I’ve starting to see the shape of something which actually might become fully-formed. My hesitation to plunge forward is a combination of fear and lack of talent (or at least lack of experience). But now this thing is knocking around my head, and every two or three days, another small idea pops in there which I add to the outline. I have come to realize, however:
- It’s very hard for me to think of characters, so I’ve decided to rely on basing characters on people who have passed through my life at some point;
- I cannot write from a woman’s point of view, and indeed pretty much all the characters are male. We can pretend this is because I am oh-so-masculine, but I fear it has more to do with the fact I have trouble getting outside my own head.
I’m even toying with the idea of “publishing” my first chapter as a premium post just to get some kind of sense as to whether it’s any good or not. Of course, my concern there is that one or two nasty remarks might deflate the already minuscule bit of self-confidence I have about executing this thing. We’ll see.
It’s an odd experience, though; I feel almost like an outside observer, wondering if I’ll be able to ultimately pull this thing off or not. If I do, it’ll be done this year.
