You Write Like A Girl

First some people couldn't accept William Shakespeare wrote all those fantastic plays. Now Mary Shelley can't have written Frankenstein because she was too stupid and young. Oh, and feminine. People will always leap at conspiracy theories in which a small cadre of shady government power brokers maintain elaborate secrets about aliens or assassins or blood lines across generations, but no one person can write a great novel or play. It's beyond human capacity. Whatever.

A couple days ago I had an idea for a new novel. I was falling-in-love for the first time excited. I have not had any worthwhile ideas for a book in ages. In the course of a few hours the book blossomed in my head, the characters, the structure, lines and passages that I wrote down furiously. I felt (as you often do at this stage) that I could just sit down and write it in one lump. But it never happens that way. I did write the first few pages, where I discovered some possibilities and or problems with tense and structure that I'll have to sort out. The reality is I may not get to this for some time, unless I just drop everything else; I've been revising the second book of the BDE with the intention of ramping off that into the third and final book. I also felt like I could just sit down and write that one, three years ago. But I have something to look forward to, and I'm excited to be writing and thinking about something that isn't the trilogy. It's consuming; it's like getting lost a dense forest and forgetting how you came in and how you'll get out.

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