Brain Fertilizer

I did another 1,000 words last night, after not having written for a few days.

Life keeps getting in the way. I can certainly see why you need to write a few novels first before quitting your day job: the discipline you develop while writing the first few around the rest of your life will help prevent you from wasting time surfing the net or building birdhouses when you finally decide to jump into writing full time.

What I'm learning is that I have more time to write than I take advantage of. Every time I sit down to write, I make some progress....so why, then, do I not sit down to write more? I dunno.

Some of it is just timing. I need to let what I've written sink in as I plan the next surge. But part of it is that I simply get frustrated with the slow pace of writing. When reading, I can surge through a large chunk of plot development in 30 minutes. In writing, I'll be lucky if I can get halfway through one scene. This shift in pacing is difficult. So sometimes I just don't want to return to the novel where things are developing so slowly.

Writing a novel is, to me, one of those "A Journey of A Thousand Miles Begins With One Step" things. I feel like I'm not getting anywhere, but when I look back, I'm surprised at the progress I've made so far.

Someone once said that a Fantasy novel is nothing more than a map with some uncertain area labelled "Here be Dragons". Or something like that. I'm not good at verbatim...

...but that's what a novel is like, I think. It is very difficult to hold a complete novel in your head at one moment. You can think of characters, scenes, beginnings, and endings...but there will still be a big vague area in the middle labelled, "Here be Dragons". It is fear of that uncertain area that prevents many novels from being written, I think.

Or maybe I'm just an idiot.

In any case, I'm whittling away at the uncertain area from both ends. The ending is shaping up nicely, and so is the beginning. The middle part, how I get from the beginning to the ending in an interesting and plausible way, that's the hard part for me. But I'm remembering about foreshadowing techniques, character revealing techniques, and reminding myself that the best fiction is "forging character in conflict". That's really helping see me through and keeping me on the path, methinks.