A Writer's Biggest Secret
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 at 09:49AM I’m noticing that the thoughts I have about what I’m going to write tend to be much different than what I actually write.
When I sit down at the computer and start tapping on the keyboard, ordinarily I have some roadmap in my head of where I want to go. But then I start veering off course and venturing into destinations that I had never planned on visiting. Almost always these little jaunts are more interesting and intriguing than the place I had planned on going. The result is that I end up tossing that roadmap by the wayside.
I started thinking about this after I wrote my last blog entry, Putting a Cork in the Whine. I have no idea where that came from. It was nothing like what I had plotted out in my mind. But that, I think, is what made it more fun to write – and hopefully more fun to read. At some point my imagination just took over and took me to a place that I never thought it would go.
This happens all the time when I’m writing a novel. I’ll start out thinking that I’m going in one direction and suddenly I’ll find myself going in the opposite one. Almost always the opposite one is the better one.
I’ll give you an example straight from the pages of my current project, a tragicomic coming-of-age road story about two teen boys set in the late seventies. While driving through Southern Wisconsin, one of the boys discloses to the other that he has started dating this girl that they both work with. He breaks the news as gently as possible because he thinks his friend has a crush on her. It’s an awkward conversation that I decided would be even more interesting if I made the friend he's confiding this information to gay. The friend is jealous but not at all for the reasons the other thought. This opens up a whole new layer to their friendship but before I came to that scene I had no thought of making one of the two main characters gay.
This is why I could never work from an outline. It would be out the window before I even got anywhere. It's much more fun to roll down the windows, crank up the radio and just drive without any preconceived notion of where you're going.
That brings me to where I was planning to go with that last blog entry. Writing a novel is a long, arduous process. You’ve got this great story to tell but you have to keep it all to yourself until you finish writing it. Even then, you still have to get it published before the world knows about your great story. And getting published also can be a long, arduous -- and oftentimes fruitless -- process. An unfinished or unpublished novel is a writer's biggest secret. Sometimes it's one that is never revealed.
This goes against all your instincts. Think of any great story that happens to you. You can’t wait to tell others, right?. Now think of a story so great that you’re willing to invest possibly years of your life into telling it. But you can’t share it with anyone else until it’s all told.
I’ve never been all that good at keeping secrets. So if you’d like an insider’s peek at my current project, contact me by e-mail and I’ll send you a sample of it. By no means is this the whole story but it hopefully will be just enough to give you a flavor of it and hungry for more.
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