It has hit me, and I have under a week to make it go away. It's coupled with my fickle mind which is constantly telling me that the novel idea I have is bad, so have this new idea. I want it to shut-up so I can continue the project I have going, but at the same time this inability to write at all is making me think again about switching.
Have you ever had an idea about what to write just to have it blow up in your face? Sometimes this happens to me, and I try to just take it in a new direction, but eventually I take it in four or five directions and nothing seems to be working anymore, and the whole project gets scrapped. A good example is last year's NaNoWriMo. Around November 15 I decided that I was taking my novel the wrong way (bear in mind that's half of the month and 25k words wasted) so I started over from scratch. I hate the novel I ended up writing, but I wrote the full 50k before the end of the month. This year I told myself I wouldn't do it, but it seems like that is what is going to happen. It might be planning. Stephen King doesn't plan out any of his novels. He comes up with what he calls the "seed" and goes wherever that takes him. I think I might just do that this year, and scrap whatever outlining and planning I've done.
I think the important thing is that I get the novel written. I really want to have a novel done by the time I'm 21. Yeah, I have written the one novel, but I want a novel I'm proud of, that I want to revise and edit and show to agents and friends and hopefully get published. If you say it's impossible, Bret Easton Ellis is the obvious example of you being wrong, along with the author of Eragon. Ellis had his first novel, Less Than Zero, published when he was 21, and the author of Eragon got his when he was only 15. It can happen, and I hope to be one of them.
0 comments:
Post a Comment