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

[drakkenfyre.livejournal.com]

As in, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be there. Because lots of my friends really believe that something totally clicks in you after you've finished your first 100,000 words.

Good luck!