by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m really pushing my writing ability to the limit with this novel. As such, I find myself being thankful for how obsessive I am. I keep doing the same thing over and over again in a slightly different way in hopes of meeting the very high –and very arbitrary — standards I have set in my mind for elements of this novel.
Writing this novel is existential to me at this point — it’s not like I have much of anything else to do — so I keep working. Everything is going reasonably well, but I really, really am struggling at times with the various Rube Goldberg Machine elements of developing and writing a story as big as a novel.
The biggest issue I have at the moment is there are some structural elements to this novel’s beginning that I have to make seem essential, when they’re pretty much just needed so when Something Finally Happens (the inciting incident) you, the reader are so invested in the characters I’ve come up with that you get excited and want to finish the novel.
It’s just a real pain in the butt to write these structurally required scenes because you pretty much have to make up bullshit out of whole cloth that you know is doing nothing more than engaging the reader for the main event. Maybe I’m being a little to hard on these scenes, but they are a real pain in the butt to make interesting.
But they (usually) have / need to exist.
If they don’t you get to the meat of the story, but the audience just doesn’t care. This is why often time thrillers start off really slow, the kind of simmer for 20,000 or 30,000 words while you establish character, place and tone. Hell, if you’re Stieg Larsson, it’s not 30,000 words it’s 70,000 words you spend building up to some sort of point.
I just can’t afford to do that. I’ve got to balance things.
