Feels like we are the only two of our kind trying to do this crazy career. It’s such a hard slog to get it done as well… but why would we want to do anything else?
I actually learnt something in Fiction class today. The teacher began speaking about how it’s so easy for everyone to write an email or a letter, but when you sit down to write something else, it’s freakin’ hard! And when you do write something, you start waffling on about how the character woke up and what they ate, what they put on, what the sky outside looked like etc. but the point is — WHO CARES? That’s right, nobody. Your reader won’t care. Why? Because you wouldn’t start an email to a friend like that; your friend doesn’t give a hoot what you wore today or how the sky looked or what you ate for breakfast, they just want to know the juicy stuff, they want you to get right to the point! So the point is, you have to write your prose as if there’s an audience. If you’re writing in first person, you have to figure out who the heck is on the receiving end and why. The teacher also told us to start writing something in first person, but the “I” wasn’t allowed to be us, because “frankly the lot of you are boring and I don’t care about your lives”. I kid you not, he said that. But he had a point! That’s apparently the worst thing you can do: to write in first person and to make that character yourself. Anyway back to what I was talking about. So I sat down and thought, right! In my novel, who is the audience? And it came to me so quickly, I think I must have had this idea before, and then I started to write in first person as if the story was a letter that the “narrator” was writing to the audience, explaining their adventures and why they did what they did, just as if he was writing an email. And it all came out so easily. Now, I’m not going to leave it 1st person because I hate that POV but the story came out without any effort at all. Amazing… give it a try!
Scratch that last post. Changed it back to the second series again. Or an extra add-on book. I guess it’s always handy to know you’ve got something to write once your series is over. It’s just a little daunting.
Really good evening of editing and going back over an old draft. I thought this draft was going to be a future book. Turns out, it’s a prequel. I love that fact, because it means I get to work on it straight away instead of waiting a couple years to… And also because I am just in love with the story. That is so rare, to be in love with a story you wrote. That feeling inspires so much hard work, you have no idea. I hope everyone who wants to write a book some day, feels what I’m feeling right now. It makes all the slogging-it-out every day completely worth it.
“But Hogwarts IS hidden,” said Hermione, in surprise, “everyone knows that … well, everyone who’s read ‘Hogwarts: A History, anyway.”
“Just you, then,” said Ron.
Goblet Of Fire, page 148
I love these books so hard. Nick and Jane and I always make these kind of jokes and do the pause like Hermione does. Hilarious.
What a day, in which I woke up not feeling my novel anymore, then got to the coffee place and sat down with my laptop, started reading old draft which is going to be a sequel series to the novel I’m currently writing, then got so lost in what I was reading that I was excited again - only, for the wrong book series! - and then I got home, sat outside at the picnic table and edited the draft for a couple hours in the sunshine, came upstairs and got into a warm bed to draw up a big character list, and then relayed the whole thing to Katie about how I’m not feeling the current idea for some reason, which then required me to explain to her the entire plot of the current series I’m writing which exhausted me just thinking about … and once I was finally done doing that, it all came back to me and I realised what I have to do. What a day!
Chapter one is done. And by chapter one I mean it’s probably chapter three, and by done I mean it’s most likely not-done at all. I had a really good writing session today with the ipod playing at my usual coffee joint and was so in the zone that I didn’t even realise the whole album had played until it got to the end and the last song ended. Won’t say which album that was, but I do love it. Anyway, typing up the results of today’s work and it’s probably not even a whole chapter but it’s moving the story closer towards where it needs to be. This means nothing to anyone but me and possibly Katie. As much as I love writing a book, I can’t wait for it to be done already. Writing is hard. Which is a really odd thing to say, considering I write probably 8,000 words some days without even realising it’s actual fiction writing.