It feels like I've been down this road before. I am weary and tired and ready to just kick my feet up and relax until I realize that I've only just started.
I finished my synopsis for my novel... again... last night. This is a process that I began on my first novel that never saw the light of day. The story was entirely too complicated to keep it all in my head, so I began by writing down a synopsis of each and every chapter - working through the novel in such a way that I knew I wouldn't encounter any roadblocks while writing it. It took me two drafts of that before I was able to start writing my novel - a process that lasted nearly five years before I gave up the whole enterprise as being flawed from the outset.
Live and learn.
Or did I? No, for my second novel I finally decided to start working on my magnum opus time travel saga. Lanz Franco, to me, was going to be a story where I crammed in every time travel idea I'd ever had and yet somehow managed to make it fun and thrilling - like Indiana Jones with time travel. The somehow managed part was the bit that made me realize I needed to write a synopsis first. Doing all those mental gymnastics of cause and effect and effect and cause that only time travel stories can really play with and still trying to keep the story about a character who is in love with his wife... well, that kept me up at nights - plugging away on a synopsis.
After nearly a year of working on the time travel story I finally figured out how to make it work - but the story was so complex that I realized I would have to spread out the complexity over three books. So, as soon as I finished one synopsis I went to work writing the next two synopsees. And finally, after a year and a half, I had all three books in synopsis form and was ready to start.
For nearly a year I toiled on the novel and it was coming along just fine... until I reached the half way point. And then, casually, I realized that I needed to figure out this character's origin story so that I knew his background a little more. So I started thinking about this character's origin and... well... I realized that his origin was WAY better than the story I was writing and that it really illuminated the entire time travel saga. SOOO, painfully, I decided to scrap the story I was working on and go back and write this character's origin story as my first book.
Of course, this meant coming up with another synopsis. And then to add complexity to my madness, I realized during the writing of this synopsis that I needed two more books to bridge the gap between the origin story and the trilogy of stories that I already had synopsized. Six books in all.
Ugh! BUT the good news is that I am finally done with the first synopsis of the first book and it doesn't need to be rewritten and it only took me about two and half months to complete.
So tomorrow, I begin writing my first novel... again... and hopefully, this time, it sticks!
P.S. I should have learned guitar and written a number one Country Song, "Mama, Don't Let Your Baby Grow Up To Be A Science Fiction Writer."
2 comments:
Well, rewriting and editing is part of any writer's gig, isn't it? Keep at it. It will magically appear one of these days, and you'll love it!
Cheers.
I do love my novel. I think it'll be great despite my fumbling attempts at writing it. But this time I've got to get to the end of the process without any more setbacks. I'm hoping that after doing all the mental gymnastics, it'll come across as a good, fast read that will hold your attention from beginning to end. If you like history and science fiction, this one should be fun.
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