Hello there,
I am writing a new novel and I have been enjoying writing it so far. But now that I have to hand in a large section of it to my university class, I am stressed. The novel is lacking strong direction at the moment. I am too close to it. I need to do a lot of work on the main character.
I have read that other authors more experienced than me have this problem. They get to a certain point in the narrative and they don't know where it is going. I guess it is a positive thing. I need to develop more fully what exactly I am trying to achieve in this novel. What do I really want to explore? The problem with this is, I have not had the mind space to fully explore the main character. This is what I need to do. A meeting with my tutor as well will probably help me. That is what I like about university is the fact that you have people to ask questions about your work. This subject has been really good in taking everything more seriously, more post grad students and less undergrad students. Nothing wrong with them but I need to be around other people who are serious about writing.
So, a crisis of plot for me at the moment. But I think these moments are good in writing a novel, cause these issues need to be clarified in your mind otherwise it will fail. It is all necessary for the deepening of the work. A novel takes a long time to write. The problem is you have to survive in the mean time. A novel takes a lot of thinking time. I don't have much spare thinking time. But we just have to fit in where we can, don't we? In this age of instant everything, instant messaging, instant pop corn, instant coffee, a novel is not an instant anything...anything worth reading has taken a fair while to create.
3 comments:
HI Suzanne - Tom kenneally today (at UQ) likened writing a novel to being a melanesian sailor setting off towards the land of the long white cloud. They know their destination exists, and have a vague idea of what it looks like, but they don't know where the wind and currents might take them on the way. His other piece of writing advice was to quote Yeats : "Only begin", suggesting in passing that doing writing courses was a way of avoiding writing! (How true I thought, and unenrolled from Swinburne when I got home). Would you mind taking my survey of writing courses by the way, it's available from the Writers Blog. I'm hoping to get a really big cross-section of people from all over Australia, regards Barbara
also another problem with the writing process is hat sometimes you get to the point where you just have to make stuff up and let it gradually fit into the story, its hard as writer to do that, even though i haven't written a novel, i know that stories that are long have a long process, its pretty stressful, but good luck:)
Barbara, Tom Kenneally's comment about writing courses is very true.
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