So after much prevarication, years of wondering if I’m good enough, several writing courses, dozens of different writers groups and much encouragement from a few well informed friends, I finally started pushing ahead with one of my books in earnest about a month ago.
Note – I don’t like calling it ‘Novel Writing’ even though that’s what it is. Just sounds a bit pretentious to me. ‘Oh yah darling, I’m working on my new novel. Yah Yah, it’s like so totally stressful!’
Call a spade a spade I say; a book is a book. Okay it just so happens to be a fictional book, but I just can’t come to terms with calling it a novel. A book sounds more solid to me.
Anyway, I often talk with writers and pretty much everyone says they’re working on a novel of some sort. I used to say the same thing but it was never really true. Oh, I’d often sit in front of the computer for hours imagining the weird and wonderful ways my hero and heroine would struggle through the most brilliantly told saga of all time, but that remained mainly in my head and rarely on paper or a hard drive.
You see it’s really easy to get lazy when writing. If you don’t do it every day, even if it’s just a few pages of crap, you’ll dry up and become one of the many people who chuck their idea onto their very own slush pile.
So how did I overcome this? I wish I could say there was a ‘light bulb’ moment, but there wasn’t. I just sat down a month ago and began writing a few pages everyday of what will eventually become a book I’d like to read. I have spent days, weeks and months for the past several years planning, re-planning, re-writing the first few chapters again and again and sketching character developments and plots. Eventually it all became so convoluted that I got pissed off and gave up. I then started planning another book and did exactly the same thing with that.
So there I was, 2 massively over-complicated plans but not really a scrap of decent material between the two of them. Eventually I gave up and left it all late in 2012. It was only when I went to a Novel Writing Meet Up a month ago that my interest was renewed again in one of my books. I read out the umpteenth rewrite of the 1st Chapter of one of my books, and to my equal surprise and delight…it was well liked. Not only that, the group gave me some important editorial tips to clean it up a bit where the language grated or the flow didn’t sound quite right.
It was brilliant and really useful.
It was also really annoying.
Now it meant I would have to finish writing the damn thing! I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, but I find writing to be very hard work. It is not easy for me and I have more days where the words don’t flow then days that they do. But the key I’ve found for me is to just shrug my shoulders and get on with writing. No matter what crap comes out it doesn’t really matter – that’s what editing is for anyway – as long as you just get on and do it. So no magic formula, no quick fix or cheat. Just simple plain hard work.
I know there will be days where I struggle to write anything I’m half happy with – hell I’ve already had several in the past week alone – but as long as I keep going, then eventually I’ll wind up with a book and even better – one that I would like to read!
After all isn’t that the whole point?
What’s it called?
The Empress
What’s it about?
An Empress-to-be and a horrible legacy all encircle a former knight of the realm struggling to come to terms with the death of his wife and child years ago. Set in the New Democratic Empire Of Great Britain of 2052, ‘The Empress’ is the first in a series of books following several key characters introduced here.
Why am I writing it?
Because I want to, and because it’s been rolling around in my head in one form or another for the past eleven years and if I don’t put it down on paper (metaphorically speaking of course) I will either:
A) Go nuts
B) Get depressed
C) Go nuts and get depressed.
As incentives go I think they’re quite good ones – I like being sane and I don’t like being miserable.
Funny old world isn’t it?
Estimated Time of Completion
The person who thinks I’m the best writer in the world AKA: Me, thinks that it will be ready by the end of the summer.
The person who thinks I often talk a lot of shit and have a long way to go before being considered ‘good’ as a writer, thinks that a first draft will be complete by Christmas time 2013. As that person is more of a realist in my head, I’m going to go with his prediction.
Who will be right? Watch this space to find out.
