This place isn’t very active, not since the downtime
I normally don’t discuss my personal life anywhere online, but I want some activity! And this is largely responsible for my relative inactivity in recent months.
A novel is something I toyed around with as a youth, but I never had the discipline or experience to really achieve it. I completely failed at crafting coherent conflict with escalation, I couldn’t do scenes (nor did I understand their purpose), and I didn’t fully understand plot mechanics... The discipline was a difficult part. I couldn’t write a chapter without it somehow morphing into some sort of comedic erotica (the plague of a youthful undisciplined mind).
Fast forward more than a decade, I’ve written a lot of comedy and sci-fi on a professional level, worked with well established screenplay writers and novelists, and picked up a ton of knowledge. I am making my first attempt at a novel. I began in August when I drafted up a concept and an initial outline. From there I targeted a 65,500 word manuscript, I wrote 110,000; not necessarily a good or bad thing, only that I miscalculated the pacing. From there I knew my characters well, the locations, and what they were going through. I revised my outline - this took a lot longer than my initial rough outline. Earlisr today I finished marking up the rough draft with notes on character revisions for consistency, plot restructuring, and fixing up all the weak points in plot development. And I have an editor looking over it.
While it sounds all pre-planned, I ignored the notion that extensive re-writes were going to be necessary after the rough draft. While I do have a lot of writing experience, I have never written anything this extensive dealing with original characters. I have never worked with narrative and action description like this before. There’s a lot of learning even with all the awareness of what steps need to be taken. If I am, so far, to take one learning away. It’s that I should never never overestimate my abilities =P
Right now, it’s more of a hobby, I have no current commercial aspirations. I just wanted to see if I could do it. Has anyone else tried writing a novel before? What was your experience?
I normally don’t discuss my personal life anywhere online, but I want some activity! And this is largely responsible for my relative inactivity in recent months.
A novel is something I toyed around with as a youth, but I never had the discipline or experience to really achieve it. I completely failed at crafting coherent conflict with escalation, I couldn’t do scenes (nor did I understand their purpose), and I didn’t fully understand plot mechanics... The discipline was a difficult part. I couldn’t write a chapter without it somehow morphing into some sort of comedic erotica (the plague of a youthful undisciplined mind).
Fast forward more than a decade, I’ve written a lot of comedy and sci-fi on a professional level, worked with well established screenplay writers and novelists, and picked up a ton of knowledge. I am making my first attempt at a novel. I began in August when I drafted up a concept and an initial outline. From there I targeted a 65,500 word manuscript, I wrote 110,000; not necessarily a good or bad thing, only that I miscalculated the pacing. From there I knew my characters well, the locations, and what they were going through. I revised my outline - this took a lot longer than my initial rough outline. Earlisr today I finished marking up the rough draft with notes on character revisions for consistency, plot restructuring, and fixing up all the weak points in plot development. And I have an editor looking over it.
While it sounds all pre-planned, I ignored the notion that extensive re-writes were going to be necessary after the rough draft. While I do have a lot of writing experience, I have never written anything this extensive dealing with original characters. I have never worked with narrative and action description like this before. There’s a lot of learning even with all the awareness of what steps need to be taken. If I am, so far, to take one learning away. It’s that I should never never overestimate my abilities =P
Right now, it’s more of a hobby, I have no current commercial aspirations. I just wanted to see if I could do it. Has anyone else tried writing a novel before? What was your experience?