by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m in a complete creative vacuum writing this novel. I have no idea if I’m doing a good job or not. Occasionally — especially lately — I will write a scene and then lean back, rub my chin and go, “Huh, not bad.”
The latest clusterfuck in all of this, however, was when I gave the first chapter to some “readers.” The whole thing just didn’t hold up, it collapsed and I through everything up in the air and started again. The reason is — I have two equally important structural things at work with the novel and I struggle to figure out how to appease both of them.
On one hand, I need to show a little “events before the story” and on the other I want to just get into the story so I don’t have a lot of characters just having a smoke break, not really doing anything. These two demands are equal in my mind and sometimes I just can’t make a decision as to which way to go.
But I believe I may have cobbled together some sort of compromise. And, in the process, I have discovered something that was missing in this story — I just wasn’t making the stakes serious enough. But I now have fixed that aspect of the story some.
I now go into some scenes knowing, “TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY. THE PERSONAL STAKES ARE HIGH FOR THESE PEOPLE.” I hope, at least, that will improve my copy.
So, I’m going to crawl my way back to the end of the first chapter pretty soon, I think. I’ve come up with a pretty good sequence of events that get me to the inciting incident. I hope. One thing I’ve come to believe is nobody knows nothing about the specifics of writing a novel.
You have the general three act structure, but other than that, you’re on your own. I’ve been trying to read as many books as I can about how to write a novel, but they’re often contradictory in the advice they give. So, really, you just figure out how YOU develop and write a novel and go from there. That’s really all you can do.
