Another 8,557 Words
The suicide novel is progressing very well and I crossed the 30,000 word barrier last week, which also means I’ve passed the 100 page marker.
I suppose if I’d taken more creative writing classes my writing process wouldn’t be so unpredictable. I’d have outlines, research notes, character developments, and all the accoutrements needed to write the modern novel. Except, I have very little of that kind of stuff.
My research occurs as the narrative encounters situations or places I’m not familiar with. If I outlined the story before I wrote it, I could do the research in the beginning. Only, I don’t.
So, I write the characters into dark corners until I need to find a light to get them out. I guess the only problem I have with this process is that it works for me.
I’ve read about writing from an outline. Allowing the story to develop as the narrative expands the outline. I tried it once. I outlined a story from beginning to end; taking a character from Point A to “The End”. The only problem I encountered occurred once the expansion started, I felt constrained by the outline and the characters seemed to be hollow, as if there wasn’t any substance to them.
I suppose I could’ve gone back and practice outlining more, but I’m more interested in developing a writing career, not an outlining career.
And, so, I write as I do.
The current novel is constrained by a period of twenty years between the time the father runs away from home and when his youngest son, the only person who believed his father was alive, finds him in a tourist hotel bar in Rawlins, Wyoming. In the intervening years, the father tries his best to hide from his family while attempting to create a new life for himself, and his son grows from a too normal nine-year-old boy to a piano teacher at a small conservatory in south of Reno, Nevada.
At the halfway point, the father has run away, found his childhood teddy bear, found his younger brother’s gay lover, lived with a knife wielding insane serial killer who repeatedly rapes him, and committed murder. In the meantime, the son has received a cryptic message that his father may be alive, gone off to a fictional college in a fictional town on the western shore of the Hudson River where became friends with a gay jazz pianist who is nearly two years younger and the son of wealthy parents, is seduced by boy’s mother and is forced to live with the boy in exchange for continued access to the mother, and sees his world come to an end in two dramatic scenes of sexual excess.
The second half? I don’t know, other than the son will find his father. Whether he is the father he remembered as a child, remains to be seen.
I suppose if I’d taken more creative writing classes my writing process wouldn’t be so unpredictable. I’d have outlines, research notes, character developments, and all the accoutrements needed to write the modern novel. Except, I have very little of that kind of stuff.
My research occurs as the narrative encounters situations or places I’m not familiar with. If I outlined the story before I wrote it, I could do the research in the beginning. Only, I don’t.
So, I write the characters into dark corners until I need to find a light to get them out. I guess the only problem I have with this process is that it works for me.
I’ve read about writing from an outline. Allowing the story to develop as the narrative expands the outline. I tried it once. I outlined a story from beginning to end; taking a character from Point A to “The End”. The only problem I encountered occurred once the expansion started, I felt constrained by the outline and the characters seemed to be hollow, as if there wasn’t any substance to them.
I suppose I could’ve gone back and practice outlining more, but I’m more interested in developing a writing career, not an outlining career.
And, so, I write as I do.
The current novel is constrained by a period of twenty years between the time the father runs away from home and when his youngest son, the only person who believed his father was alive, finds him in a tourist hotel bar in Rawlins, Wyoming. In the intervening years, the father tries his best to hide from his family while attempting to create a new life for himself, and his son grows from a too normal nine-year-old boy to a piano teacher at a small conservatory in south of Reno, Nevada.
At the halfway point, the father has run away, found his childhood teddy bear, found his younger brother’s gay lover, lived with a knife wielding insane serial killer who repeatedly rapes him, and committed murder. In the meantime, the son has received a cryptic message that his father may be alive, gone off to a fictional college in a fictional town on the western shore of the Hudson River where became friends with a gay jazz pianist who is nearly two years younger and the son of wealthy parents, is seduced by boy’s mother and is forced to live with the boy in exchange for continued access to the mother, and sees his world come to an end in two dramatic scenes of sexual excess.
The second half? I don’t know, other than the son will find his father. Whether he is the father he remembered as a child, remains to be seen.
posted by Carl Holiday at
12:03 PM
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