Wednesday, June 24, 2015

The Making of a Novel

The Making of a Novel

I know most of the readers of this blog are aspiring and/or present authors. You know how all this works; you don’t need me to spell it out for you. So forgive me that I am. And maybe when you hear the reasons you’ll understand. 1. I wish someone would have done this for me. I had to figure all this out the hard way, through many, many mistakes. 2. I want to keep track of the process. When I first started dating my husband, I kept three journals, marking down all we said and did. I just knew it was something I wanted to remember. It’s the same with this.

So here I go; I plan to write weekly (in addition to my regular posts) from the very early stages of crafting a novel to its (hopeful) completion.

The name: I always come up with a title for my novels before I write them. That doesn’t mean that will stay its name until the end, though. I’ve changed more names than I’ve kept. Right now, the name of this novel is Pathfinder

The genre: The inspiration for this came from a picture of my thirteen year-old nephew, so it will be a middle-grade fiction.  I plan on incorporating the picture in the cover somehow.
The preparation: I’ve never written middle-grade before, so I’m reading that genre like crazy. I’m also watching. I watch how people that age speak, interact, what they’re feeling, what they’re afraid of. I spend time each day remembering myself, my own life, what I was like when I was that age.

The plan: NaNoWriMo has always been a wonderful tool for me. I’ve used it multiple times to motivate/spur on my work. I’m doing camp NaNo next month to finish up Bloodbrothers, which I hope to release in September. After that full time work will begin on Pathfinder. I plan on writing the outline over the next couple of months, which I will share here on this blog. November NaNo is when I hope to get most of the writing done for this.  But you never know. If I’ve learned anything in this whole writing thing, I’ve learned to just go with it. Formulas almost never work.

Next week I’ll talk about character development. At this early stage, I’m getting to know the main characters; who they are, where they live, what makes them tick.

I hope you decide to join me.

-Mel

2 comments:

  1. I especially agree with the part about preparation and listening to how people talk. I once read a novel about a young woman who was in her 20s and talked like a college professor in her 50s. It made the character a lot more unrealistic, even though the story was good. What was strange was that the author was young, so I'm not sure why she made the character sound like that.

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  2. NaNo spurred on two of my novels. I need that kind of motivation.

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