I haven’t tried to write fiction since my college short-story writing class in 1981. And now I’m in this I novel-writing class, rewriting Jerry’s novel.
I ended up ditching what Jerry had in Chapter 1 except for three sentences, so the rest was on me. I kind of enjoyed plotting out the beginning and the end of the whole thing, but writing my first chapter was just odd. Everything I wrote seemed at creative extremes. Either it was something no human would ever dream of doing or saying, or it was something I felt had been done or said in some novel I’d read before.
I was feeling quite creative at one point, and I thought, “Oh, I should put an orphanage in this boom town, and there should be a scene where one of the oil drillers walks toward the orphanage with a child, and goes in and then comes out alone and goes down the street alone and walks in to the tavern.” That seemed subtle and inventive for about an hour until I realized MAN ABANDONS CHILD TO BE A DRUNK, well, what in my life could have inspired that? So that was cut because it seemed heavy-handed.
It was interesting to workshop it with other people. The scene I felt might have too many characters got the note that it was confusing, and there might be too many characters. The instructor even felt it the pace might need to be slowed down.
“Slowed down?” I thought. How would I do that? And then I realized novels aren’t blog posts or haikus, and you don’t have to edit things so tightly, that you can spend a sentence or two describing things.
Also … and I say ‘Also’ because I originally typed ‘Another odd thing that I noticed was that’ but I deleted that, because ‘Also’ works, and I still believe in editing. Also, the one or two spots that made me smile made my fellow students try not to laugh.
Next week’s homework is the second chapter, which I’ve already done, so I’ll spend my time adding back the descriptions I hacked out of Jerry’s first chapter.