Bare with Me While I Write my Book
The difficulty with writing fiction is I have to make everything up. It’s a lot of work and I often feel like a fraud. When I write about myself, all I have to be is honest in a way that’s creative and, most importantly, entertaining. It’s not easy to write about myself per se, but writing about myself tends to come more naturally then just making up a bunch of stuff and calling it a book.
So yes — I’m trying to write a book. Well, that’s not entirely honest. I’m trying to write a book while also simultaneously trying to write a novella. Writing fiction for two separate projects is mentally taxing. But it’s a great exercise. It helps me discover and develop my process as a creative writer. My creative writing is like a fat guy learning how to ride a bike. It’s going some place, but we don’t know how it’s going to get there.
The novella started out as an idea to do better. I was reading a free eBook. Well, it was a free smutty eBook. And I thought to myself, I could write a better story than what I’ve just read. So my novella is a reworked, a rewritten, a retelling of this story. Except for a couple of shared themes, my novella (as far as it’s drafted at this point) has grown into something quite different than the free eBook that inspired it.
As a creative writing exercise, my novella has become invaluable. I’ve never written anything in the third person. I’ve never written from a female character’s point of view. I’ve never considered the interiority of my characters, expect me — my own character. I would love to see my finished novella shared with anyone willing to read it. However, if it never leaves the hard drive of my computer, drafting it has certainly helped develop my creative writing skills. My fat guy has learned how to stay balanced on the bicycle.
My novel needs to happen. Not because I think it’s best seller material. Not because I think it’s a story worth telling. I need my novel to happen so the drunk idiot that was my twenties gets distilled out of the creative chambers of my brain. I’ve been thinking, note taking, drafting, failing, redrafting, and editing bits and pieces of this novel since 2011. My fat guy has been spinning on a stationary bike.
I do need to be more fair towards myself and my writing. I’ve set reasonable and achievable goals. There has been progress over the last few months, and it’s propelling me forward. That’s not to say that is hasn’t been a difficult endeavor.
Let’s get into some of the challenges I’m encountering in my creative writing.
My novella has a female protagonist and at the climax of the story, she’ll have sex with the handsome male interest. Cool. But how do I get from point A to point B to my characters having simultaneous orgasms in an Airbnb without my story reading like this: and then this happened, and then this happened, and then, finally, this happened. My protagonist needs to evolve (or devolve — depending on your point of view). And my protagonist needs to be relatable (as far as I understand women), but not cliché. What are the problems my characters encounter? Where are the tensions? My novella needs to be a smut story worth reading. Its success will be measured in the moisture and blood flow in the fun bits of my readers’ anatomy.
I feel that if I can write a novella that’s interesting as far as the arc of the story, then I can write a novel — there’s just more words involved.
The novella can fail. Its characters and their story is just a bunch of stuff I made up or robbed from other stuff. But the novel… It has be successful. I’m drawing on a significant amount of personal experience and personal emotion to drive the fictional story. My novel’s protagonist is a blonde bastard, who smokes cigarettes, drinks whiskey, and rides a motorcycle — it’s me in my twenties. I need dip my keyboard in holy water and exercise this drunk demon out of the creative chambers of my brain. If you’re a close friend reading this note, at some point in our friendship you’ve probably attempted to wrestle, cajole, trick, force, plead, and/or convince a drunk Jonah-in-his-twenties to go to bed. Well now I’m Jonah-in-his-thirties attempting to draft, edit, and write Jonah-in-his-twenties to go to bed (the bed is metaphorical for publishing a novel, if you weren’t quite following along).
I do want to expend energy writing about the weird animal bone I found on the curb outside my hotel in Pemberton or the milf dressed up like a pirate in the rich-people-only campsite at Harrison Lake. But my energy budget for writing demands that I focus on my novella and novel.
And here I am spending time writing neither my novella or my novel. However, I tell myself that I’m writing nonetheless—and writing always has value.
