Right! Writerly folk!

[framlingem]

annathepiper, I am looking at YOU specifically. 'Kay?




I write poems. I write short stories. The longest thing I have ever written weighs in at a staggering twenty -seven double-spaced pages in a twelve-point font - I was seventeen when I wrote that, and looking at it now, the first two thousand words are completely unnecessary and are really more of a companion essay than part of the story.

This is because I have never yet had an idea I think would translate well enough to anything longer. I've always hated wordiness in novels, and to have a wordy short novel would be even worse.

I have an idea which I think would work well as a novel... but I have absolutely NO clue how to go about writing a novel, in terms of mechanics. Obviously having an outline would be a good idea, as well as notes on character background and world background (it would be a speculative fiction novel set at a hypothetical point in Earth's future, on Earth, so I'd have to extrapolate quite a bit), but in terms of sheer _mechanics_, I am up the creek.

How do I work in background without going into long descriptive passages? How do I pace it? All my stories hinge on one event - usually, they hinge on one _sentence_. Is writing a novel like writing a lot of directly sequential short stories about the same people? The best way to learn is probably by figuring it out, but I'd rather have a roadmap.

It's weird - I learned how to write short stories by reading a lot of them; I read novels voraciously (probably over a hundred and fifty a year. Fortunately, there are libraries and I can read things multiple times happily, otherwise I would be very, very poor.), and I still can't fathom it.

They say everyone has a novel in them. (Not everyone has a _good_ novel in them, though :p) I can probably do this over the next decade or so, and I'd like it to be decent because I really like the idea, and I've been thinking about it for weeks and I'm pretty sure it's not directly derivative of something I've read like most of my ideas. I was enamoured with the whale-farming idea for a bit, but then remembered Clarke already did that. Someone else ALWAYS already did something. But not this time. Leastways, I don't think so.