The First Novel

I just spent four months writing a novel. I don't have a job or any hobbies, and during the winter here in Canada going outside is not for the faint of heart, so I just sat here at my desk writing. Making shit up.

The book itself is a story about someone trapped in a situation, specifically a magical spell, that they neither asked for nor can really get out of without help. It's the best thing I've ever written, which is to say I've learned more crafting this story and these characters than anything I've done previously, because I actually did craft this story.

When I started writing stories I was 13, a freshman in high school. I vomited words onto paper without much thought. I described my surroundings. I let the pen guide me into the dark recesses of my apparently rather disturbed mind. It was exhilarating and it was fun, and sometimes cathartic. But it was not craft.

I wrote stories about murderers and rapists, crazy pariahs trapped in webs of madness. These stories usually started from a place of pain inside me and rocketed through wild, bloody fantasies that bore me up on their fetid breath like a kite buffeted by foul winds. The stories do not develop a character or trace a history; they are not crafted.

For this story, my first novel, The Spell, I threw myself into WHY. Why does this character do what he does? Why would this other character act this way? Why is he here, not there; why does she think this, not that? Then I had to decide how much was important enough to mention to the reader.

I had a first draft to work with, which I finished in 2009, but it was written in the way I wrote everything back then: I just started writing whatever was there in my head. It was only 35,000 words long, 135 pages, and it stank. It was a self-serving mess of masturbatory metaphor built, top-heavy, upon a weak, ill-conceived plot.

I went back and threw myself into it. I admit freely this would not have happened if I'd never read the Wheel of Time books. They struck a chord with me like no fantasy novels I had read previously, and I thought, I am inspired. I want to write this fantasy story and really put some effort into it.

I added and added and added. I had back story for characters who were, themselves, back story. I added settings just for flavor, characters explaining things just to have them included. When I finished I went back through it and hacked at the bits, trying to fashion it into something that made sense, something that flowed well and was easy and interesting to read.

And now I realize it is too long. At 120,000 words, this novel is too long for a first-time novelist. Many agents would not even look at it.

I am not a writer who is attached to what I create. I have lost far too much writing in my life--to hard drive crashes and floppy disks being put through the laundry--to feel like I couldn't part with 20,000 words of this novel. It can be trimmed and the story will stay intact, I know this. I thought I was done, and that felt good, but I am not done, and now I have another daunting task. 

Now I get to learn how to edit, and edit ruthlessly, to chop flowers from the garden so that the edges of the beds will speak in cleaner, more drastic lines, uncluttered by prose, or by poetry. Now I get to go back and make the story the point of the novel, and not the writing.