Writing begins on my first book this week, and I’m excited about getting it going. This is sort of Stage 3 of the process of getting this thing done.
Stage 1 was just reading. That’s it. Admittedly, I hadn’t read much of any fiction in several years, concentrating my energy largely on news writing since, well, that’s what I was writing. I felt like I needed to keep reading different writers in that style, continuing to pick up style notes, new ideas and influences that could help me improve. That’s what you do, right? But, about six months ago, I decided this was a shift in focus I wanted to make, from non-fiction to fiction. And I’ve got a good friend, Stan Mitchell — a terrific and successful author already — who encouraged me to make it, probably because he thinks I’m better at this writing thing than I am. Whether I’ll be any damn good at fiction is yet to be seen.
Stage 2 started about a month ago, when I began mapping this story out. I’ve scribbled down a number of ideas that have crossed my mind — some would probably suck, but I’ll just try to keep those to myself — and I picked one of the ones I thought was most promising to start with. First, I wrote out a one-sentence summary of the story, trying to keep it as short as possible. Here’s what I wrote:
With involuntary death nearly eliminated, one couple flees the group trying to correct God’s plan.
Does that make you want to read more? If not, I’m off to a bad start, aren’t I? After that, the plan was to expand that out to a paragraph, then to a page, then profile the main characters and, finally, write a full summary of the story from each main character’s perspective. That was actually pretty fun, as I learned a lot about the story from looking at it through each character’s eyes. Hopefully, those characters drive the story, and they’re hopefully interesting. If neither of those is the case then, well, again, I suck. And whether or not I suck is clearly up for debate, and will probably continue to be well after I actually put the proverbial pen to paper. Right now, I’m all talk and a lot of bluster.
Stages 1 and 2 have gone rather well. Stage 3 begins in a few days. That’ll be the longest stage, but it’ll be far from the last.
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