I have not spoken about this to many friends or even family, but for some time I have had a science-fiction adventure story brewing away.
The book’s origin story is somewhat banal; I had joined a writing group to test the waters of creative writing while I living and working in South Korea. This Suwon Writers Group had us meeting weekly and we usually had a ‘prompt’ that encouraged us to write for an hour or two and then divulge it to the group for feedback.
This social writing experiences was my first real foray into the creative writing sphere since my teenage years of abstract poetry writing.
One such prompt produced an intriguing opening scene — something that captured my imagination and made me want to explore this world. I continued on to write the first few chapters during this era of my life but mentally shelved it soon after.
I had just graduated from my Masters of psychology and was looking for gainful employment when the COVID pandemic hit. The lull of things provided a huge window of free time… yet I invested that time in leisure rather than productivity. This case, I think, was shared by most people.
However, the story that was now mostly in my head and now several year old, had never died. Instead, from time to time and month to month it would come to the fore and I would work on it and through it mentally, storing the story elements and progress somewhere in my memory core.
NaNoWriMo is National November Writing Month. It is an event with some history and has been around for quite some time. The goal of the event is to write 50,000 words in the span of November. Do note, a standard novel is about 80,000 words, which means that you will have written over half a novel in one month!
Well… I committed to do it. I succeeded. And this is what I learned from the experience:
· I can write without much difficulty. I do get stuck but it usually passes quickly. Having two story threads (or more precisely 2 main characters) allows me to hop between them whenever I get stuck on one. I imagine that having more character perspectives to work with is a great way to overcome being stuck. The brain has this wonderful capacity to sort through blockages on its own after a sleep or two.
· My writing is not that good. But that’s okay because like how a potter shapes their clay, I need to throw the slab down on the wheel in order to have something to work on. I predict the editing process will be even more lengthy and difficult than the raw writing process. That is likely where many budding and established authors get discouraged and stuck. Editing will have a whole set of different challenges. I’m not there yet.
· Holding yourself to goals gets you productive. And it’s the short term goals that really work (for me). I had to write roughly 1666 words a day to keep up with targets, and I knew that missing too many days would make catching up too difficult and stressful, robbing me of the fun I have writing and further exacerbating the problem.
· For a story to be interesting there needs to be real risks and real danger. Introducing real risks and dangers to your characters means sacrificing elements of the story you thought you could hold onto and use as the writer. What sets adept/accomplished novel writers and fledglings apart is likely the ability of the former to have different layers of stakes that are sacrificed in different ways. I am having difficulty with finding something more useful than: there is danger, character faces danger, danger is solved, but the character was injured, character goes to hospital to get better now.
· The neatest thing about writing regularly and more in depth following a story was the fact that my cognitive experience is very similar to reading a book. As I write, my brain generates a world that I am immersed in as much as any read! My brain shifts back to the words on the page from time to time but the bulk of writing time is spent in an imagination space. Is this what delineates writers (with potential) from others? I am not sure. But one thing that is certain is that I am enjoying writing as much as I enjoy reading. And that right there is the lynchpin of my motivation and workflow.
· My final reflection is that (I’m not sure I am doing this right) I am able to write because I am writing for me and not because I have an audience in mind. I wonder how much more difficult it is to write when you have an audience lording over your head with incredible expectations (G. R. R. Martin and the delay of his book for years comes to mind).
Alright. If you’ve made it this far you naturally get a treat. So I am going to leave off this already long-winded post with an introduction to my sci-fi book very tentatively titled Into The Beyond
A young woman is awoken by a ship’s intelligence system as the ship reaches a critical condition and is on the brink of destruction. The woman escapes only to find she was not supposed to be still alive. She sets out on a journey to the far-reaches of the galaxy to unravel the mysteries of her death and to discover and forge a new identity. Meanwhile, a scientific expedition to a stable wormhole prompts a singer to quit his career to unravel the happenstances and absence of explanations surrounding his mother’s disappearance during a previous expedition. He couldn’t expect that his quest to find answers would throw him headfirst into the deep waters of the wild and dangerous realm of cyber-criminals and information brokers.
That’s all for now!
Cheers,
Reuben
P.S. Cheated and wrote the last 600 words I needed to finish NaNoWriMo by writing this.
