Not that anyone’s counting (well–except me), but I have now, to date, “finished” over eight manuscripts (of mostly crap). That is–eight full-length novels, numbering at least 50,000 words each. Most are closer to or over 100,000 words. Note that I am also not counting manuscripts I haven’t officially ‘ended’–I have a few more of those (and they’re mostly crap, too).
It makes my head spin just thinking about it. All these words and pages don’t just come out of thin air, although it looks like it. The cliche idea of a writer who, after a moment of inspiration, sits their ass in front of a chair in Starbucks and belches out words, is just that: a cliche. (If this is how you work, and it actually produces results, then I just want to say that you should not be ashamed. Hats off to you, walking cliche; we need more people like you to distract from the emerging fact that the rest of us write in our underwear, sometimes with morning drool or coffee grounds on our shirts, and most, most definitely some form of eye-crust on our faces).
No; for many of us, the process begins long before we actually sit down to write. An idea comes to us, and we sit on it, and it grows and grows until we can’t ignore it anymore. We excitedly pull out a fresh file or paper and we write that first chapter in an evening and it’s great. We continue on…second chapter…third chapter. And it’s still great, only now we get this nagging feeling in the back of our minds that novels are supposed to go beyond 10,000 words, and oh gosh, what am I going to fit into the rest of this white space before that fantastic ending?
Each of those eight novels I’ve finished, so far, represent a journey. This is the remarkable difference between a finished novel and an unfinished novel. The unfinished novel plays on an idea. Sometimes, it barely skims off the surface; sometimes it goes a little deeper than that. But the finished novel means that at some point, the writer said, “Okay, we’re in this for the long run,” and they stop looking ahead.
For me, I’ve noticed that this transformation happens when I get ridiculously involved with the characters, the world, and the plot. More stuff starts happening in my head than what you see in print and I reach a point where I just can’t not see it through. I, like my future reader (I hope), want to see how the rest of it unfolds. It’s like if I’m hiking and I’m three hours into the woods; there is a promise of fantastic sights to come, evident from the crest of the mountain or a new angle the sunlight is pouring through, but to reach it, I have to trudge another four hours. It’s both exhausting and wonderful.
Do you like sarcasm, drama, and lots of talking before sword fights? Do you sometimes wish your epic fantasy had more feelings? Then please support my hungry brood and give The Agartes Epilogues a try! It’s like a soap opera with dragons!
