Background: I've been working on my novel ("With a Saber and a Gun" - a sort of historical fiction involving Chicago in the late 1960s) for a little over two years now. I have a great cast of characters, my MC's first kiss with my Leading Man is arguably the most romantic thing I've ever written, and the research has been absolutely fascinating. This is the story I always knew I would write someday, ever since I fell in love with history at the age of ten, something that has been inside of me since I discovered rock music, Beat poetry, and was old enough to start making well-informed rulings on social issues. I knew one day I would write a novel about a girl finding her place in the world in a very tumultuous and fascinating point in history, and would be a not-so-thinly veiled commentary about all I believed about sex, drugs, religion, the immorality of war, family, friendship, and love. It would by my fictionalized manifesto on social issues. This was going to be my "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (my favorite novel), the novel I always hoped to read but never found in my favorite used bookstore, and I would write it, (dammit), even if the only people who read it were my friends and family.
But after two years of slogging away on this thing, I couldn't figure out a way to tie everything together and, well, finally finish the damn thing.
Sound familiar?
About a month ago, I had The Breakthrough.
It happened while staying at a friend's house, while he all but ignored me and played video games. The notebook in which I have kept all of my notes, research, and a spattering of scenes I've been working on while my laptop is in the shop, is currently at home, and I'm still at my friend's house, watching him and his roommates play video games. Around Hour Eight of the gaming marathon, I was lamenting the absence of my beloved notebook to my girlfriend. I was telling her how badly I wanted to write and knew there was no way I would be able to type even part of what I had in mind for the third part of a five-part novel on my little iPod device. And that's when I got...The Idea.
I took advantage of the fact that I didn't want to type much on my little iPod device. I went outside, listened to the song where the title and much of the theme came from (I Ain't Marchin' Anymore by Phil Ochs, a protest singer of the time I'm writing about. Awesome awesome awesome song.), got myself into writer mode, and began to type.
What did I type, exactly?
I know it sounds crazy and someone is bound to make fun of me for this, but everybody has been guilty of reading soap summaries in the TV Guide, even if we don't watch them. I asked myself, "Okay, Jen, what happens in Part Three?" And I started writing the shortest, most concise sentences I could (again, because I didn't feel like writing twelve pages with my thumbs on a tiny little iPod) that would basically hash out every major event that happens to every major character in that section.
Later, when I go home and have access to my beloved notebook, I will be able to make a list of everything I wrote down, put it in order, and ask myself a series of questions about it.
Actual Example:
"Andrew dies."
Okay, how does he die? Who is told first? What are the reactions of his close friends and family members? How does my MC (his sister) find out? How does she react in the days and weeks to come? Does my leading man go with her to the funeral?
These are questions I will write down and force myself to answer before I sit down and then write it for real, and I will do this for the other four sections in the novel, even the ones for which I've already finished the first rough drafts.
I'm going to finish this damn novel once and for all. And you will finish yours, too.
Keep writing.
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