How do I….

How do I keep with it? I have officially written one story of about 49,000 words. It’s not a bad story and needs to be edited. I look at it as a first step in the process. I can say I’ve written a novel. It’s not a short story (to long according to the Guru’s out there) and though its probably not quite long enough to be a trade paperback I’ll still call it my first novel. So I am officially part of the writer’s world.

Or am I?

Do you have to be published to become part of the Writer’s world? Do you have to have an agent? If someone asks me what I’m working on I tell them I’ve finished one novel and I’m getting ready to do another. This first novel will probably not turn out to be anything more than that novel in the drawer that all authors collect over time. So the trick now is to write a second book.

Or is it?

No really. That’s the goal right. Write one, write two, write three and so on and so forth. So, why can’t I get motivated to write a story and why am I struggling to find that perfect plot, the perfect character. Or better yet utilize that perfect character that’s in my head. I’ve tried writing a western, a sci-fi space opera, a military sci-fi, a fantasy, and finally a murder mystery. Nothing is clicking and the plots I come up with seem over the top and convoluted. So much so that even I’m bored about ten pages in. What gives? The first book went so smoothly. I was on fire and wrote every other day or so. Now I’ve noticed it’s like a week in between sessions.

I’ve visited blogs, I’ve visited Writer’s Digest.com, I’ve started reading some writing books and I’m devouring PI novels from Grafton and Parker because I think that is what I really wanna write. I mean really bad, I’m just having a hard time coming up with something original. So now I’m looking at the K.I.S.S. method, tryin to find a plot that’s easy. An introduction to the character…..and that leads me to the next problem. I wanna write a female main character. I even have one all picked out….but she’s just not working. There’s no flow, no feeling. So I’ve turned to a male character and he’s better but I feel sort of disconnected from him and I’d like to have that change.

So it’s back to drawing board I guess. I’ve picked up some books on developing character, one of them written by Orson Scot Card. Now its time to read them and see if I can breath new life into characters, the way I feel like I did with my first novel. I will say this, it is definitely harder than it sounds or looks. It takes a lot of hard work but I am determined to not be in the; “I had a good story once.” or the “I had this one character once and I was so gonna write.” camps. I wanna make this work, I wanna see my writing in print….even if I have to print it out myself!

Onward and upward and hopefully one foot in front of the other will lead to that perfect combination of character and plot that will then lead to being published! Thanks for listening.

It’s just like Playing the Lottery

I’ve been on a steady high from this far off light at the end of the tunnel. I have this feeling of accomplishment simply because I’ve made my mind up to pursue a certain path whether it helps me or not. Is it stubborn optimism or simply an uneducated fool of a choice? I don’t really have an answer to that but if I were to hazard a guess, it’s probably somewhere in the middle I suppose. It is, however, refreshing to be able to put aside the petty crap of every day life because of this dedicated belief that something better is going to happen.

My dedication however isn’t really one based on faith of a denial of reality. I think it’s more a belief in myself and the dogged determination to stay the course. I’ve told most people my plans. Told them these grandiose ideas that will take place over time and it’s an easy thing to do. The telling of an idea is so much easier, and sometimes more rewarding, than the actual ‘doing’ of the idea. Dr. Covey, of “7 Habits for Highly Effective People” fame, asserts that the speaking aloud of goals makes them somehow more real and easier to obtain. To that I say bulls**t. It’s easy to say it, it’s easy to commit to it, but it’s a whole other issue when one must get to the doing of it! I can sit down and say I only have five more classes of junior college left before I can finally move on to a real college and start doing real classes that actually matter to me and not Math051. The easy part is in the saying of it, the hard part comes when I have to climb down into the dirty, grimy, and muddy trenches. It’s much harder when I have to slug it out with that stupid classic of a story in Lit class or stumble through yet another 2+2=4 math problem that I could probably do in my sleep. I’ll post again when I reach week 10 of 17 and all I wanna do is hang the whole damn thing up and walk away!

But it’s like playing the lottery…or perhaps more accurately betting on your #1 baseball team (Go Padres!) or football team (Go Chargers!). You do the prep work, you research the hell out of the match-ups, the trends and then you take your educated guess and put it out there to see if you researched right, if you guessed correctly. Writing seems to be like that. You write, you write some more and then you write just a bit more for good measure. You educated yourself on the process, on how to bring life and dept to a character. You learn how to chisel a plot from nothingness and you find that right topic for that perfect moment. You study. You write. You succeed!?

I’m reading Stephen King’s book On Writing and he talks about his book Carrie. It’s interesting because he wrote it and he put it out there. Someone grabbed it. He made a few hundred dollars on it originally. It sold to paperback and he made nearly $200,000 on it. In 1974ish when this took place that was a lot of money. Heck that’s a good chunk of money now. So how did it work for him? I mean why Carrie. He’d written stuff before this. He wrote articles for men’s magazines and he’d studied the craft. He got educated and he was working as a teacher. Had he done just the right amount of research? Perhaps he didn’t get bogged down in the research and remembered to keep writing. I really don’t know, I mean he’s Stephen-Freaking-King so maybe it was just his time, his ultimate destiny. After reading this chapter though it really got me to thinking about how much of a crap shoot it is. You work and you work and maybe there’s something there, maybe even when you think its crap and you still sit down and you still keep pounding it out. Perhaps someone does read it and does think it’s good and WHAMO!!! You are sitting next to Stephen King,Dan Brown, and Robert B. Parker on an author’s panel at some convention in some small hick town in the hind end of nowhere.

So is it a crap shoot or a lottery? Maybe, maybe not. For authors like Stephanie Meyers it’s probably a crap shoot or lottery (although I do believe she majored in English) and for others like Mr. King maybe it’s more of an educated guess. For an author like Robert B. Parker perhaps it's sheer numbers. (He's published over 50 novels for heaven's sake) I’m hoping for educated guess because I’m just not that good with the whole lottery thing.