Starting a Novel

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I think I’m going to do it. I really think I am. I’m almost afraid to type this out, because then that means that I’m really going to hold myself to it. Oh well. Here goes.

I’m going to write a novel.

I have wanted to be a writer for a very long time. As a child, I would immerse myself into the world of fantasy and horror, and I devoured books nonstop. I read at the dinner table, during long car rides, at school, on the couch after school. Whenever I could squeeze in a moment to read, I read.

At some point, I thought, hey, I want to write. too. I want to bring other people into new, magical worlds, and I want to share the ideas and thoughts that I have swirling around in my mind.

I even went so far as to start a few books, although they are all now lost to the shadow of time passing. I do remember that a book I got pretty far into was about a young woman that was pulled mysteriously into a fantastical new world (I had just finished reading Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Mirror of Her Dreams). That magical world was filled with…yobbits. Yes, you read that right, yobbits. Oh, autocorrect, please stop changing yobbits to hobbits. They absolutely are anything but hobbits, alright? They’re yobbits, and they’re small and fuzzy, and they drink hot chocolates, uh, yamteh drinks, and they’re going to take our heroine out on an amazing adventure looking for gold, or rather, help her find her one true destiny.

As you can imagine, I left that piece of dreck in the dustbin of my childhood and then never really kept on with my actual writing. I did keep on with my dreams of writing. I even had my future all planned out. I would finish college and move to a small garret in a Paris apartment, and I would type amazing prose at warp speed using an antique black typewriter. Of course, those were merely daydreams, and I never actually put pen to paper to write stories.

In college, I found myself too pulled into the hard work of dissecting other author’s masterpieces like James Joyce’s Ulysses and poems by Robert Haas, failing embarrassingly at my organic chemistry classes, falling into and then out of love with my paleontology professor (from afar, of course), drinking gigantic lattes at Cafe Strada, and just generally living the life of a young girl at university.

And then, I went to work. From my very first job out of college, I was copyediting. I spent all day, everyday editing other people’s words. I read all manner of materials, from continuing education registered dietitian manuscripts, to embedded computing systems news reports, to finally 17 years of technology research. Day in, day out, I looked at the words that others had unspooled from the creative depths of their minds onto the pages in front of them. And I spent all of my efforts and energies to tame those words so that readers would be able to consume them efficiently. I did take small breaks in that long copyediting stint to do some healthcare reporting. I found the networking and social skills needed for that to be actually immensely draining at the time. At the end of my corporate copyediting career, I also dabbled in some graphic design work, which I enjoyed and was fairly good at. But at the end of everyday, I was exhausted. The last thing I wanted to do was to look at more words. My reading fell by the wayside, and writing? Haha. I had zero energy to do any of that.

Now, of course, I am on my freelance copyediting journey, and I am enjoying it immensely. And without the bureaucracy of corporate work, I actually have energy after the work day is done. In fact, that revitalized energy and enjoyment have actually inspired me to sharpen my pencil again; wait, I mean download the Scrivener app and set up a new novel project.

Yes, that’s right, I’m going to actually work on a novel. Now, I don’t know if it’s going to be a novella or a novel, but I do know that it’s going to be longer than a short story. I have been working on several short stories recently, and while I’ve met with a ton of rejections at this point with those (I’ve also written a bit about that rejection journey), it has given me a lot of practice actually writing a narrative.

For this new novel, I have decided on writing a detective story that follows a middle-aged woman protagonist (could that possibly be an author stand in? Nah, couldn’t be). I’m now at the stage where I’m picking a mystery and determining whether it will be based on real life or completely fictional. I’ve also started the fun job of creating a list of suspects, and I’m so looking forward to crafting the setting. Equal parts cozy and spooky.

This first part is filled with stutters and stops, and procrastination, to be honest, but I’m going to push myself to make a little bit of progress each day.

Are you working on a novel? Share your progress and tips below!