A Blogging Experiment
Aug. 16th, 2005 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marfiskWell, for me it is at least. I'm going to see if I can manage to track the process of a novel in case anyone is curious as to how I work.
The novel in question is called "Bring Out Your Dead."
The history of this novel so far is as follows:
I subscribe to the nonfiction Chapter A Day emails from Suzanne Beecher
One week, she offered up this book:
THE NOSE
A Profile of Sex, Beauty, and Survival
by Gabrielle Glaser (nonfiction)
I have not read any more than the emails, but it spoke about funerary perfumes. This triggered an idea that, while circling around a funeral, has nothing to do with funerary perfumes.
I find nonfiction is a fertile source of ideas, but I was certainly not on the hunt in March of 2004. I played around with the idea, wrote a few scenes, a couple notes, but I was in the middle of another book so I put this one aside.
Then, I applied for a fellowship at Stanford University. Though not a literary mainstream novel, to me, this novel concept has a literary flavor, and I thought, a good fit for a program to teach me how to express my themes more consciously. While waiting on word, I put the novel on hold, knowing the temptation to write it would be too great if I started outlining.
Not too surprising, I did not win the fellowship. However, I was in the middle of another book at that point and put Bring Out Your Dead on hold again for that one. Inspiration struck again and once more this book was pushed to the side.
You'd think with all this delay that I was not truly tied into this idea and that my subconscious was telling me to set it aside. That's not the case at all. Bring Out Your Dead has plagued me, slipping in when I least expect it, demanding a place in my plans.
The reasons behind my hesitation were/are simple. This is a complex novel with three separate threads running simultaneously that I plan to write through a single POV so neither the character nor the reader will know the whole tangle until it plays out. Will I stick to this concept? Who knows, but it is what the book demanded.
The novel in question is called "Bring Out Your Dead."
The history of this novel so far is as follows:
I subscribe to the nonfiction Chapter A Day emails from Suzanne Beecher
One week, she offered up this book:
THE NOSE
A Profile of Sex, Beauty, and Survival
by Gabrielle Glaser (nonfiction)
I have not read any more than the emails, but it spoke about funerary perfumes. This triggered an idea that, while circling around a funeral, has nothing to do with funerary perfumes.
I find nonfiction is a fertile source of ideas, but I was certainly not on the hunt in March of 2004. I played around with the idea, wrote a few scenes, a couple notes, but I was in the middle of another book so I put this one aside.
Then, I applied for a fellowship at Stanford University. Though not a literary mainstream novel, to me, this novel concept has a literary flavor, and I thought, a good fit for a program to teach me how to express my themes more consciously. While waiting on word, I put the novel on hold, knowing the temptation to write it would be too great if I started outlining.
Not too surprising, I did not win the fellowship. However, I was in the middle of another book at that point and put Bring Out Your Dead on hold again for that one. Inspiration struck again and once more this book was pushed to the side.
You'd think with all this delay that I was not truly tied into this idea and that my subconscious was telling me to set it aside. That's not the case at all. Bring Out Your Dead has plagued me, slipping in when I least expect it, demanding a place in my plans.
The reasons behind my hesitation were/are simple. This is a complex novel with three separate threads running simultaneously that I plan to write through a single POV so neither the character nor the reader will know the whole tangle until it plays out. Will I stick to this concept? Who knows, but it is what the book demanded.
