Story time
Jessica's post in her journal about how she came to write got me thinking about my own weirdo journey, so since it's been a slow day in book-land (500 words on BMW, wowie!) I thought I'd blog about this.
It's Nancy Drew's fault. I started reading her books about age 7 or so, and became completely hooked. Nancy introduced me to her pals the Hardy Boys, who in turn led to Robert Heinlein and the wide world of science fiction and fantasy. By the time I was 11, I had devoured every Nancy Drew book out there and completed a mystery novel about two friends who live on a ranch out west (I was also really into horses, cowboys, Robin Hood and pirates but that all comes into play later) and who solve the mystery of a Wild West outlaw's lost treasure. It was cringe-worthy, but I finished it! And a sequel where they go to a rodeo and some nefarious person tries to knock the heroine out of the Big Race.
At 13 I discovered Star Wars and the world of being a complete and utter geek. If anyone remembers my Scorecard post, I wrote a Star Wars tie-in novel which, while not horrible for a 13-year-old, was nowhere near polished. This was my first experience with plotting, writing and characterization from A-Z, and it was so difficult, frustrating and time-consuming I just had to keep doing it.
The completion of the knockoff novel led to a long detour into fanfiction, that, while varied and exciting in it's own way, served as little more than practice (and not very good practice at that.) Fanfic writing did teach me one valuable thing--to take criticism, sometimes of the vicious variety. For this reason alone, I believe that most fanfic writers who transition to professionals are better-equipped to query agents, try to find a publisher and eventually deal with professional reviewers when they get published.
During the same time period I decided that I was going to be a screenwriter and completed three screenplays, two about cyborgs (that just sort of happened) and one a western. The western ended with a train careening into a gorge and exploding! in! a! fireball! Good times.
I picked up an original novel project again as an expansion on a piece of fanfiction. A paranormal romance, the first thing I had ever tried with a significant romantic sub-plot. It was co-written with a good friend of mine who is also a talented writer, and we got about 130 pages into it before the plot stalled, teaching me the hard lesson that no matter how much you love your characters, without a plot, they might as well be sitting around in a piece of literary fiction clipping their toenails and talking about The Meaning of Existence. (I still love you, Petunia and John, and one day your story will get written.)
Around this time (I was a sophomore in college) I wrote an original 3-part manga series with an artist friend of mine for a mythology class. It was a lot of fun and somewhere along the way the fact nudged it's way into my brain that writing would never again be a back-burner enterprise. I would always have to put it first, because such is the nature of the beast. I began to try writing this quirky werewolf/police procedural novel that had been tickling my brain, but after 3 drafts I set it aside in frustration and moved on.
After two quarters in my senior year of fiction-writing classes, one of which was a mystery writing course that was the best program I've ever taken and one a dull-as-dirt literary fiction/narrative nonfiction class (which taught me a ton about what NOT to do, so valuable in its own right) I started a fantasy novel that had been bugging me for a while. I pitched it as "What if Sauron was the hero of the story?". PRINCE OF BONES made it to page 135 before collapsing under the weight of its own concept.
Right after I gave up on PRINCE I sold a short story to an e-zine and started to think that hey, maybe my writing didn't suxxors after all and I wasn't deluding myself that I could make a career-style go of this. For NaNoWriMo 2005, I started a psychological thriller that got to about 5 pages before I realized that I was re-writing Silence of the Lambs and looked for something else to dust off. I looked at my folder of old WIPs. I saw that quirky werewolf novel and remembered that my idea for the plot wasn't half-bad. I started typing in the last week of November and finished NIGHT LIFE in April of 2006. Then I re-read it and found huge chunks didn't make sense, the story was weak, and there were massive inconsistencies. But it was DONE.
For about a month, I despaired that I could fix the book, that it would become my trunk novel and I'd have to do this all over again before I could think about publication. Fortunately, I happened to catch Underworld on cable and decided that, even if it never got published, NIGHT LIFE's werewolves could do better than that. I printed out the zero draft and seperated all the scenes, noting where additions needed to be made or crappy parts needed to be excised. Three months later, I had beaten the manuscript into submission and it was complete with plot, character, theme, movement and voice. I gave myself one week of querying and started on my next Idea-That-Wouldn't-Die, BLACK MAGICK WOMAN. As my avid (hah) readers know, NIGHT LIFE has been getting a good response from queries and partial reads, so hope springs eternal.
The best is yet to come. (I hope. I'm fairly sure. It would really suck if I peaked at 21.)
It's Nancy Drew's fault. I started reading her books about age 7 or so, and became completely hooked. Nancy introduced me to her pals the Hardy Boys, who in turn led to Robert Heinlein and the wide world of science fiction and fantasy. By the time I was 11, I had devoured every Nancy Drew book out there and completed a mystery novel about two friends who live on a ranch out west (I was also really into horses, cowboys, Robin Hood and pirates but that all comes into play later) and who solve the mystery of a Wild West outlaw's lost treasure. It was cringe-worthy, but I finished it! And a sequel where they go to a rodeo and some nefarious person tries to knock the heroine out of the Big Race.
At 13 I discovered Star Wars and the world of being a complete and utter geek. If anyone remembers my Scorecard post, I wrote a Star Wars tie-in novel which, while not horrible for a 13-year-old, was nowhere near polished. This was my first experience with plotting, writing and characterization from A-Z, and it was so difficult, frustrating and time-consuming I just had to keep doing it.
The completion of the knockoff novel led to a long detour into fanfiction, that, while varied and exciting in it's own way, served as little more than practice (and not very good practice at that.) Fanfic writing did teach me one valuable thing--to take criticism, sometimes of the vicious variety. For this reason alone, I believe that most fanfic writers who transition to professionals are better-equipped to query agents, try to find a publisher and eventually deal with professional reviewers when they get published.
During the same time period I decided that I was going to be a screenwriter and completed three screenplays, two about cyborgs (that just sort of happened) and one a western. The western ended with a train careening into a gorge and exploding! in! a! fireball! Good times.
I picked up an original novel project again as an expansion on a piece of fanfiction. A paranormal romance, the first thing I had ever tried with a significant romantic sub-plot. It was co-written with a good friend of mine who is also a talented writer, and we got about 130 pages into it before the plot stalled, teaching me the hard lesson that no matter how much you love your characters, without a plot, they might as well be sitting around in a piece of literary fiction clipping their toenails and talking about The Meaning of Existence. (I still love you, Petunia and John, and one day your story will get written.)
Around this time (I was a sophomore in college) I wrote an original 3-part manga series with an artist friend of mine for a mythology class. It was a lot of fun and somewhere along the way the fact nudged it's way into my brain that writing would never again be a back-burner enterprise. I would always have to put it first, because such is the nature of the beast. I began to try writing this quirky werewolf/police procedural novel that had been tickling my brain, but after 3 drafts I set it aside in frustration and moved on.
After two quarters in my senior year of fiction-writing classes, one of which was a mystery writing course that was the best program I've ever taken and one a dull-as-dirt literary fiction/narrative nonfiction class (which taught me a ton about what NOT to do, so valuable in its own right) I started a fantasy novel that had been bugging me for a while. I pitched it as "What if Sauron was the hero of the story?". PRINCE OF BONES made it to page 135 before collapsing under the weight of its own concept.
Right after I gave up on PRINCE I sold a short story to an e-zine and started to think that hey, maybe my writing didn't suxxors after all and I wasn't deluding myself that I could make a career-style go of this. For NaNoWriMo 2005, I started a psychological thriller that got to about 5 pages before I realized that I was re-writing Silence of the Lambs and looked for something else to dust off. I looked at my folder of old WIPs. I saw that quirky werewolf novel and remembered that my idea for the plot wasn't half-bad. I started typing in the last week of November and finished NIGHT LIFE in April of 2006. Then I re-read it and found huge chunks didn't make sense, the story was weak, and there were massive inconsistencies. But it was DONE.
For about a month, I despaired that I could fix the book, that it would become my trunk novel and I'd have to do this all over again before I could think about publication. Fortunately, I happened to catch Underworld on cable and decided that, even if it never got published, NIGHT LIFE's werewolves could do better than that. I printed out the zero draft and seperated all the scenes, noting where additions needed to be made or crappy parts needed to be excised. Three months later, I had beaten the manuscript into submission and it was complete with plot, character, theme, movement and voice. I gave myself one week of querying and started on my next Idea-That-Wouldn't-Die, BLACK MAGICK WOMAN. As my avid (hah) readers know, NIGHT LIFE has been getting a good response from queries and partial reads, so hope springs eternal.
The best is yet to come. (I hope. I'm fairly sure. It would really suck if I peaked at 21.)
Congrats, Caitlin! :D
Posted by
Anonymous |
9:11 AM
Cool, i blogged my own stories =), anyway i am a fan of Nancy drew books ^_^
Posted by
Anonymous |
4:05 AM