This Just In

So I'm taking some of my editor’s advice this week and reading: Writing the breakout Novel. She felt it would help me tighten up some of the loose ends in my story and boy was she right. In the first couple of chapters along I could recognize the parts of my premise that I needed to dial up and questions like: What if? That builds the conflict to that "holding your breath" moments.

It's also addresses my largest concern, which is taking the larger than life world of True that I see so vividly in my head and putting it on the page. This book and a stack of others will be the focus of my blogs from the coming weeks. It feels a little backwards to have written three novels before even studying the craft.

It's like being assigned to major surgery for the first time and instead of researching how the procedure is conducted you browse through a bunch of success stories and tell yourself "All right I think I know enough to get the job done." Then your patient flat lines within the first five minutes and you stand back scratching your head like you don't know what went wrong.

"I’ve read a hundred books, why isn't mine as good as theirs?" The answer for me isn't the story, it's the presentation. So in a way the steps I have taken aren't in vain. Knowing that I could start and finish a novel was motivation enough for me to decide this something I not only want to do, but that I'm capable of doing. At this point in my writing life, I'm hooked, and willing to do whatever it takes, even if that means reading more books about writing novels, than I did my entire college experience, even if it means starting from scratch with the novels I've already written. Writing might not be as important as surgery, but the two are required to generate a pulse, which is exactly what I plan to do with True.