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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Your problem is a little puzzling to me. But maybe what you have isn't an idea for a novel at all. See, "whale farming" isn't what I'd consider an idea for a novel. It needs to be a *story* embryo, an idea about at least two characters and a conflict or problem. Now, if you don't have that, I can see why you are having trouble. You don't have to know ahead of time all the twists and turns and details of the story, of course, but you at least have to have in your mind "Character One really intensely wants something and does something and this causes a problem with Character Two, who..." and then you work to fill in the blanks. An outline is optional, but you at least have to have in your head that little story idea, with an understanding of the possible conclusions (what failure would be, and what success would be).

But as for mechanics, if you have read a lot of novels you have surely noticed how other authors work in background and pace the action. It is not something to worry about ahead of time. If you're writing along and realize that something is too wordy and nothing interesting is happening, then you cross it out and decide whether that information is really necessary or whether it can simply be ditched. If it's necessary, then you figure out a more interesting way to work it in.

Anyway, that's how I see it.

Donna