So it’s been a crazy summer. I’ll leave it at that. I did finish outlining the novel and am in the process of creating my characters and settings. I have been going at a snail’s pace but I decided that is OK. I have realized that I need quite a bit of imagination time until the story is solid in my head, without any holes in it. That’s what makes me crazy — the holes. I have gotten excited about past ideas and started writing my ass off without fully outlining and imagining what I needed in order to create a strong story. I would write tens of thousand of words, go back over it, and realize I had made mistakes in my haste. Or maybe the story just changed from the original idea. Maybe it grew. Maybe the story became better or worse.
This time around I am laying a strong foundation, however slow it is for me during summer of 2013.
But now it’s Labor Day weekend and summer is over. I did write a first chapter of my novel. I hate it. It’s horrible. It’s very short. Why? Because it came to a screeching halt due to the lack of imagining. Not so much that I don’t have the idea. I do! But I need to put it all on the page to make it make sense to me. Then I can actually start writing a proper chapter.
After years of writing short news stories under the gun in a broadcast newsroom, I am learning and adjusting to a new format. In news writing, everything was formulaic. Each day, I gathered facts to create an inverted pyramid to be written in such a way that it would be read on air in two minutes or less.
Now I have freedom and don’t know what to do with it. I like this problem!
Writer Heather Larson 