This is my fifth post for the New Year. While that’s a good thing – it helps me sharpen my writing skills, and it has become quite fun lately – it’s also a distraction of sorts. It’s a digression from what I should really be doing.
I have been trying to finish my very first novel, whose working title is The Tower. I wrote down its first few lines on a few sheets of scratch paper, in a cafe somewhere near Santa Monica, on a rainy Presidents’ Day morning back in 2005, nearly five years ago. I already had the basic premise in my head: A dystopian future, a man with a mission, and a plot. The details – everything from the scenario, characters and what not – have all undergone such a great metamorphosis that they are hardly what I pictured in the first place. That is not such a bad thing. Through the years, I have been learning and constantly re-learning what I should be doing and what I shouldn’t. I’ve learned a lot about character development, creating awesome scenes with subtle, imaginative, and non-cliched descriptions. Perhaps the hardest-learned skill I’ve found is how to develop mind-bending plot twists that create elements of surprise and thoughtful insights.
Does that mean I’ve achieved mastery of writing? The jury’s still out, as to how captivating my work will be. As of this writing, I have already begun a second draft. The first draft isn’t quite done yet… but I’m so impatient! Lately, my writing has stagnated a bit; I have felt the energy level dropping. Intuitively, I feel the trail getting cold, because the leads are poor. When you make so many revisions, changes, or additions, and try to incorporate them midstream, it can be chaotic. I am currently at about page 320 in the first draft, and Chapter 32 – and as far as my characters are concerned, lost in the forest, literally! So it’s probably high time I get started on the second draft. If I’m to re-energize myself in my writing, then everything has to make sense… at least to me, as the writer.
So back to the novel I go! This novel (and my writing, in general) means a great deal to me. It is the one thing that I can do, which can bring me for- tune and success, which does not require a specialized bachelor’s degree, nor licensing, nor grades of any sort. All I need are my brains, my hands, a good, sturdy computer, even a raw gift for words, and plenty of imagination and time, to be able to finish this work. It will be a great novel. I’m working on it to be truly one.
Copyright Anabasius 2010
The Anabases 