For some reason when I promise to write about a certain subject “soon” or “next time” that post either never happens or takes weeks to actually appear. This is one of them.
I first mentioned at the end of January last year that my friend AV and I were going to each write a novel, projects we had picked up and put down many times with no real push to actually complete them. Our goal was simple — to nag and support each other through the process in order to make this time different.
She ended up diverting to another goal, but I kept writing, and while neither of us finished 2011 where we thought we would be, we still managed to accomplish things with our projects we never had before. It wasn’t a perfect year, but I would definitely call it a success.
At the time I wrote this post, Microsoft Word said my story had 52,546 words and the little blinking cursor sat near the top of page 88 (single-spaced). When I work on my laptop I use OpenOffice instead, and oddly enough they disagree on what the meaning of “word” is, giving me numbers that are a few hundred apart. I’ve always been obsessed with checking word counts, whether I was writing my sports column for the school paper, or a research assignment for a political science class. Still, I find these number pretty staggering and borderline unreal. Eventually I think I’m going to end up with around 90,000 words. My characters still have a lot they need to do.
Whenever anyone asks what the book is about I rarely have a good, concise answer. The problem is partially that it’s not actually done yet, but with an entire outline in my head it’s hard to sum up all the major and minor pieces before losing the person’s attention. But here goes.
Caleb, the narrator, has a mind-numbing job he’s vastly overqualified for, yet can’t seem to find anything better. He spends frustrating day after frustrating day wasting his life and knowing he’s wasting it. He goes home to find a letter in his mailbox, one with an envelope covered in hand-drawn circles of different sizes. It’s from Sophie, a girl he never expected to hear from after she moved away with her boyfriend, one who grew up on his street and occupied his idle thoughts while she dated guys he never thought were good enough for her.
The story follows their reconnection and explores the ideas of how people respond when their lives aren’t going well, who we push away in the face of adversity and the battle between the urge to dream and the safety of chasing more realistic expectations. Style-wise, think “High Fidelity” and “500 Days of Summer.”
The notebook I use to write on the Metro
As hard as it has been at times, I find this project fascinating. Except for a few short pieces in a high school creative writing class I’ve never really written any fiction before. My day (or night rather) job is exactly the opposite, so it’s fun to be able to completely control what happens in my little made-up town and have my characters say whatever I want them to say (within reason, or course).
I hit a very rough portion late in the summer when it became clear that the first 50 pages or so needed a major overhaul. Thanks to some excellent advice/cheerleading from AV, I slashed a bunch of stuff that wasn’t working and added back in new sections including two extra characters who have now become pretty vital parts of the story. I’ll have to do a lot to what I’ve written since then, but at least this time I think I’m on a pretty good path already.
Before this project the thing about fiction that scared me the most was the prospect of writing dialogue. Now? It’s my favorite. I could literally write a conversation between Caleb and Sophie all day. Hopefully that’s a good sign about them as characters, but I find myself in some sections telling the two of them to wrap it up so I can move on. The people at Starbucks don’t find that weird at all.
That’s another thing I’ve learned — I write in public places far better than I do at home. I think there’s some aspect of social pressure at work, since if you have a laptop or notebook in front of you people think it’s odd if you just sit there. So I write.
Hopefully I’ll be done in the somewhat near future so I can move onto the editing stages and whatever comes after that. I’ll keep you posted. Though given my track record on this one, that may take a while.
