Writing Now, Champagne Later

Frankly, between the Democratic victories and Rumsfeld’s startling resignation (four years too late, but anyway), it’s been a little hard to focus on my novel today. But—writing first, champagne later. It’s interesting to contrast this with the previous national election: two years ago I had barely begun working on this very novel when the disheartening election of November 2, 2004 knocked a day out of my schedule. But what can a writer do? So I kept drafting and stayed on target with NaNoWriMo. And here I am with 80,000 words two years later.

The final panel of LWC:NYC indirectly gave me a great deal of encouragement about my project—all three of the novelists on that panel mentioned having spent three, four, five years on their projects. Since I’m only two years into this one and it feels like there’s about one more year to go, I found that very reassuring.

Major advances on the novel in the last ten days: I have an awesome (top secret) title, a clear idea of the story and themes (I can even summarize the thing in thirty seconds now without misrepresenting the manuscript), a highly-developed notion of every single character, and the most important thing of all: A COMPELLING NARRATOR THAT CAN TELL IT and incorporate every viewpoint and storyline that is involved into the SINGLE VOICE. This latter breakthrough is huge, and I largely owe it to the influence the Writer’s Studio has had on me over the last couple weeks. All of these advances have been much, much more important than brute word counts could ever have been.

More on the novel tomorrow, and how the final panel of LWC:NYC caused me to rethink and dramatically reorient my approach to its composition.

posted: 06 November 8
under: Open Folio