Backstory
Here’s a brief, in-flux look at novel-writing’s place in my life.
Unlike many schoolmates, I never knew what I wanted to be when (or perhaps if) I grew up. I figured I’d get a well-rounded education and follow whatever path life opened for me.
During my last year of college (and my first summer out), I worked as a clerk at a nearby big-city paper. Between typing up baseball box scores and photocopying thousands of pages for editorial meetings, I wrote the occasional small piece, mainly “cheap eats” restaurant reviews. An editor who was impressed by my skills had me take a copy-editing test. When he said I’d done well for someone with no formal training or experience, I knew I wasn’t yet ready for the big leagues.
For the next ten years, I wrote and edited for several trade magazines you’ve probably never read. So much daily practice, combined with editors’ tips and a strong helping of The Elements of Style, turned me into a by-gosh wordsmith. I also developed a hankering to write long fiction (a common syndrome among nonfiction magazine scribes).
The Thing About Novel-Writing as a Career
Some folks decide to become novelists, and then they think of stories to tell. Others sense stories eager to be told, so they write. (Kind of like teaching, which I did for ten years after leaving trade journalism: some students major in education and then have to decide on a subject to teach, while I loved math and eventually lived my way into a math teaching career. I also taught writing to middle schoolers one year; it was a blast.)
As often as I’d considered the writing life, I didn’t have any stories that urgently wanted to be midwived (midwifed?) into this world. Now, conversely, I’ve got two. One’s drawn from my rich experiences running various middle-school classrooms. The other is based on true (and disturbing) events that happened in my state, not directly involving me but still affecting me as a member of a particular cultural minority.
My Novels’ Own Worst Enemy
Both of these “kids” want to be born. I keep putting them off, though – throwing obstacles into my own path, finding more pressing uses for each moment of each day than sitting before a keyboard and, as Red Smith said, opening a vein.
Kids need transportation to/from school. Dishes want to be cleaned or put away. Groceries beg to be bought. Bills nag to be paid. I have to open the door a dozen times daily so the cat can go out and in and out and in and so on. And above all, the danged internet just won’t let me go. (Honestly, I have a part-time self-employed investing job that pays some bills and keeps me on the PC for hours each day. Still, spending that time for a bit of money is probably a poor tradeoff.)
Writing? Yeah, sometimes!
Amid all that, I did find inspiration for a few key-pounding sessions – about one a year, for each of the two works. I’m up to about 3,500 words on each: stream-of-consciousness stuff for the middle school story, reasonable draft-quality prose for the based-on-events one.
In each of the past two years, I attended a writing conference about an hour from here. I lugged along what existed so far of my novels. While some of the sessions were fun and inspiring, I never found a good reason to show anyone these manuscript pages. Maybe next year. I probably should join a writers’ group, but hesitate to do so until I’ve proven I can invest the time and effort entailed in being a good group member.
Meanwhile, my teenage son took the National Novel Writing Month challenge last year, and while he didn’t reach the specified word count, he did complete some sort of book (which he hasn’t let me read).
And yeah, this blog can be one more activity to explore instead of noveling! I hope, though, that inviting anonymous eyes to assess my progress will spur me to move forward. So thanks for checking out FirstNovel.com … and just for being you!