About that Novel I said I was writing.
I haven’t given up. But, as is perhaps common to all writers, I hit a snag. Although I was groovin’ along rather nicely, my main character had to get deep inside himself and dwell on the parents he never met and the reasons why he never met them, and how he felt about all that. Which meant that I had to do all that. And so I pondered.
After a while, this lead me to review the whole project and I decided that the novel was bland. I know that Ernest Hemingway said something to the effect that “The first draft of everything is crap,” (I paraphrase, he used a different word than “crap,” but this is a family blog 😉 ) I’m thinking that even if it was crap, it can still be interesting. This wasn’t.
And so I am shelving this particular venture. Not giving up on it at all, just this expression of it.
The novel was basically an autobiography. Not mine, obviously, but the main character’s. I had thought that writing it in character as an autobiography might be the most expedient way to jam out a novel. A life tells a story, and so I created an interesting life, and he was going to sit down and write it.
I had written a lot of backstory, the main character’s bio and character sketch, a history for the whole reality I created (world-building is fun), and little histories for various planets.
As I’m looking over this creation, I feel that perhaps individual episodes in this guy’s life could make for better standalone stories (short works and novels) as well as other elements in the project’s backstory not involving this guy.
And so we’ll see. I also was kinda drawn to look over an earlier project, which I had also written some backstory on (although not as much) and that looks interesting. I may switch to that, but I have to do some thinking as I have to commit to one of them, or else nothing is ever gonna get done!
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