I
have been trying for the better part of twenty-five years to
write a novel. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started,
stopped and started again. I bet I’ve got the bones of at least
five or ten tomes buried around here in various places. The
problem is simply this, I get started… then I go back and edit
while I’m writing. It seems I can always find a better way to
describe something or improve a phrase. By doing this I never
make any forward progress from that point forward. I seem to get
all hung up in correcting what I’ve already written and never
get further with the story. More good ideas of mine have died
that way than I can tell you about.
Well, those times are about to
change. Last year about this time I picked up a book on writing
by none other than Stephen King. Now, he should know a few
things about writing a book…. don’t you think? Anyway, one of
the points I picked up was to just forge ahead and don’t look
back with any thought about doing any editing until you get the
thing finished. Take a week or so off. Then you go back and look
it over and fix the things you find that are wrong. The other
suggestion he made and the one that really made the difference
as far as I was concerned was to just sit down and write. He
advises that you not set up an outline or be so rigid that you
can’t allow for spontaneous thoughts, which might work their way
into your efforts. I had originally laid out the whole thing,
chapter-by-chapter and quickly found that didn’t work at all.
First off, when I tried to stay in the structured format, I
didn’t feel comfortable just telling the story as I felt like
doing, I had to squeeze it to make it fit in some places or
make it longer than it felt natural. As a result of just
sitting down and writing, I have gotten right at 330 pages of
this thing done so far and probably have another 75 or 80 to go
to be finished. Not too bad for my first one over the course of
a year.
The closer I get to the end, the
easier it gets for me to write. I got up at 4:30 this morning as
I had a thought that needed to be put into place. Now, the
problem with getting almost finished is simple. You start
getting scared that you’re almost finished. Then you start to
get scared that no one will want to read what you’ve written and
so you don’t want to show it to anyone just yet. I haven’t let
anyone read any part of this thing since I started. Last weekend
I called an aunt of mine and read her a chapter. She said she
liked it. Then I go the nerve to read the same chapter to my
wife, who said she liked it as well. My problem is this…did they
say this because it’s really good and they liked it or so they
wouldn’t hurt my feelings? Kind of a two edged sword, isn’t it?
My neighbor has promised that she
will read it and be blunt and honest with me. I asked her to be
kind since it’s my first effort. She told me she was already
looking in the dictionary for words that mean the same as ‘dumb’
and ‘stupid’ so she doesn’t hurt my feelings. I’m telling you
this is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. You want to
write and you want people to read what you have written but
you’re afraid to hand out what you’ve produced in the fear they
won’t like it. How do you escape that? I guess you could compare
it to having a baby, you want one, but you aren’t certain how
this whole thing is going to turn out. I think it’s good, I
think it can be improved but then again I happen to like what I
write in these weekly columns. So what does that tell you?
