by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Things are growing dark in the United States. So dark, that my options sometimes seem to be either staying drunk all the time or staring out into space thinking about how, exactly, I will escape the coming Trumplandia dystopia.
But, luckily for me, I have the novel I’m working on. It gives me hope. That’s all the hope I have right now, in fact. Hope that when I finishing writing the novel we will have reached some sort of endgame with Trumplandia and people will want a novel that helps them understand what the fuck just happened.
After months and months of development, pretty much all I have to do is write. I’ve finally given myself the right to write crap without judgement. I also am pushing any problems that I can’t figure out right now to the second draft. So some things I just don’t know about — like exactly how to structure subplots — I’m going to work on in between the first and second drafts.
Given that this novel is me raging against the Trump Era in a very accessible, breezy read I definitely have a lot of motivation to buckle down and keep going to the end. Writing a novel seriously is a massive undertaking, especially if you don’t, really, know what you’re doing. At this point, I’m simply using my gut and whatever native storytelling ability I might have.
At best, this novel will be “finished” at some point in, say, mid-2020. Should I sell it, I suspect there will be six or months of post-production. If I don’t ultimately sell it, I’ll just self-publish and turn my attention to a screenplay. I have a shit ton of movie concepts that I can work on now that I have a better understanding of how to pace out a plot. I believe you have to know structure before you can fuck with it. Plot structure is so built into the average person’s enjoyment of a movie or a novel, that you diverge from it at your own peril.
Anyway, I love writing and the process of writing and I generally write a lot without thinking about it. It’s like shedding skin for me. the difference now is that for once I have some sort of strategic goal to it all.
Having said all that, there’s a chance I might dabble in song lyrics again. I like the idea of art for art’s sake and all things being equal writing song lyrics when I don’t know anything about music — I can’t even play an instrument — is kind of a fool’s errand. The only reason why I might do a little of it is there are simply so many song concepts and titles being spun off the Trump clusterfuck it’s hard to keep up.
I hope to focus on writing the novel this weekend, however. It’s a lot of fun and I feel — at least at the moment — rather inspired.
