![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
menewoodThis year I will finish a draft of my novel. I said this last year and I lied. This year, I will say it again and hope I'm telling the truth.
(In word count alone, it's possible I've written another novel. Between drafts and research, I've probably dedicated another 50,000+ words to the project. But that doesn't make a finished draft. And it certainly doesn't make a finished book).
In an interview I read recently, Susanna Clarke said that while writing Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, she had to believe each year that she was almost done. That next year would be the year, or perhaps the year after. It took her a decade.
And while I don't pretend to be the writer she is, or that my book is anywhere near on par with Strange & Norrell, I've been clinging to that anecdote with a desperate kind of hope. When I admit I'm still working on the project (to people who have now been hearing me ramble and/or whine about it for four years), I sense a kind of polite bafflement--mostly from non-writing friends, but sometimes from my more prolific writing friends, too. If you've been working on it this long it must be done. But each time I think I've finally wrangled my way through the horrible, muddled tangle that seems to rear its head between 25,000 and 40,000 words, I hit a new snag. I wish I could recapture the headlong tumble of that first draft when I was banging out thousands of words a day, not worrying about stitching everything together into a coherent whole. But it was a different book, then, and I was (at least in some part) a different writer and person. And I was variously unemployed or underemployed for all of that first year, which while obviously not ideal in many ways, turned out to be really great for neurotically, constantly working on a novel.
But I think I have pinpointed the direction I need to go in next. It involves (temporarily) abandoning the storyline I've spent so much time on so I can finally wrangle out what happens in the interlocking story it depends on instead of coasting on what a workshop leader generously called "vibes-based" plotting. And maybe as I work through this other storyline, the way forward in the main draft will become clearer. Already, I think I've recaptured some of that early, associative feeling. As I work this year, I think I may start to use this journal as a kind of record, typing up some of my thoughts and notes on writing, world building, prose, and genre and maybe sharing some of the various reading and research rabbit holes I inevitably fall down in the process.
(In word count alone, it's possible I've written another novel. Between drafts and research, I've probably dedicated another 50,000+ words to the project. But that doesn't make a finished draft. And it certainly doesn't make a finished book).
In an interview I read recently, Susanna Clarke said that while writing Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, she had to believe each year that she was almost done. That next year would be the year, or perhaps the year after. It took her a decade.
And while I don't pretend to be the writer she is, or that my book is anywhere near on par with Strange & Norrell, I've been clinging to that anecdote with a desperate kind of hope. When I admit I'm still working on the project (to people who have now been hearing me ramble and/or whine about it for four years), I sense a kind of polite bafflement--mostly from non-writing friends, but sometimes from my more prolific writing friends, too. If you've been working on it this long it must be done. But each time I think I've finally wrangled my way through the horrible, muddled tangle that seems to rear its head between 25,000 and 40,000 words, I hit a new snag. I wish I could recapture the headlong tumble of that first draft when I was banging out thousands of words a day, not worrying about stitching everything together into a coherent whole. But it was a different book, then, and I was (at least in some part) a different writer and person. And I was variously unemployed or underemployed for all of that first year, which while obviously not ideal in many ways, turned out to be really great for neurotically, constantly working on a novel.
But I think I have pinpointed the direction I need to go in next. It involves (temporarily) abandoning the storyline I've spent so much time on so I can finally wrangle out what happens in the interlocking story it depends on instead of coasting on what a workshop leader generously called "vibes-based" plotting. And maybe as I work through this other storyline, the way forward in the main draft will become clearer. Already, I think I've recaptured some of that early, associative feeling. As I work this year, I think I may start to use this journal as a kind of record, typing up some of my thoughts and notes on writing, world building, prose, and genre and maybe sharing some of the various reading and research rabbit holes I inevitably fall down in the process.
