I’m happy to say that soon after my last blog post, I finished my
story plan, and started writing my novel. Named it Saviour.
I spent the last 47 days working on that thing, and in that time
wrote 11 chapters, 42,251 words, 234,482 tikky-takky keyboard characters (a lot
more considering all the backspacing I did). Still, it wasn’t finished. Very
far from it.
There are some sections I am very proud of, some I hate. There
were moments of pleasure when I came up with a clever description, or threw in
something devious and fun that gave my juice to work with, and one part where
the words got me so emotional that I cried for my protagonist.
But the amount of work involved… So huuuuuge. My story plan was so
big, and I didn’t understand the amount of word-work that would translate into
when it came to writing. Such a monstrous endeavour. Barring extensive
rewriting and replanning, it would probably amount to a trilogy’s worth of
content. And its acts wouldn’t work that way.
The stress was relative to its size. The pressure, often
crippling.
Creating worlds, religions, characters. I had to do so much
research. Medieval farming methods, practice of taoism and managing its
paradoxes, ye olde type clothing, materials, occupations, farming,
blacksmithing, hunting, etc etc.
And every decision needed to be the right one, because it’s all
well and good to say it’s a first draft
and nothing should be set in stone, but if I design something in some way,
and in 20 chapters’ time it conflicts with a crucial event, the amount of
rewriting that would require is terrifying.
I’m back at uni soon. Getting a job after that. Impossible.
And even as I wrote it, I knew that I was good, but not good enough. Not publishable good enough. Editing usually fixes that, but that would
take longer than writing the thing, and writing it was going to take me an
eternity of hellish stress on its own.
Last night, I came to the conclusion that I can’t do this story
any more.
Last night I knew it was time to give this one up, put it on the
shelf and let it gather dust.
And last night, I started something new. Not even intending it to
be a story. Just took a random idea from a random place and ran with it.
No purpose. No stress.
Just writing, letting my mind take me wherever it wanted to take
me.
No second-guessing.
No pressure.
And it was the best fucking thing I’ve ever written.
Rough around the edges, sure. But it was a pleasure to write, and a
pleasure to read. That’s what writing should be, that’s what it needs to be, for me, if it’s going to
survive while I have other commitments taking up my time.
As if I’m going to want to sit down in my spare time and face a
page of words that make me despise myself (because I’m not good enough to do
the grand ideas in my head justice) and
fret about the gargantuan amount of shit I'll have to do in the future to fix it
up, when I’m already stressed about
exams and essays and lab reports/work?
I’m not hating on myself. I am an amateur writer, after all. Of course I’m not able to write a huge
novel from the get-go. That’s a huge undertaking even for a pro.
I am fully at peace with this. I don’t regret the work that I put
into Saviour. If nothing else, it served as a furnace for tempering my craft. I
learnt so much about structure and grammar during this, critically reading to
find out how authors I respected found ways around the problems that I was
facing, and incorporating that into my own work. I learnt skills about how to
give subtle, unobtrusive back-story, incidental character description to avoid
boring chunks, practiced finding the right words to give a sentence the impact
that I desired.
It made me a far better writer than I was before, and that’s
exactly what I should be focused on right now.
I needed to take the wrong path before I could figure out what the
right one was.
Right now, that's
Scumbag. I've taken a vastly
different approach to storytelling than I did for Saviour. First-person rather
than third-person subjective, present tense rather than past. It’s got
swearing, attitude, a despicable protagonist. Lets me be more emotive, more
exciting.
So with Saviour set aside, I approach the future more
optimistically, and much more excitedly. I’m going to write want I want to
write, whatever that is. If this new story doesn’t work out, and I'm not even aiming for it to be a story, I’ll set it aside
too, and start anew with another random idea, because being a writer is my dream, and I know I'll never give up.
It'll be much
easier to keep this kind of thing up while I have other commitments, and
really, that's all that I'm worried about for now.
