Day 34 – Strange Days

Strange day today — actually broke up my hour into three parts. I don’t recommend it. I was lucky today that I had a fairly clear bead on what I wanted to write, but if I was confused at all, it would have been a very slow, inefficient day getting back into the groove each time. But starting and stopping was beyond my control, and it all worked out, so I’m not complaining.

A good day in terms of settling on the Voice — yes, I am still struggling with that. I have been since the beginning, but I’m sure it wouldn’t make riveting blog posts talking about the same problem over and over. But today I made some progress, so I’m glad for that. Things are clicking into place.

Part of the reason  it’s coming together is that I think my “day job” writing is improving since I’ve developed my New Journalism approach. My writing is looser, but I think conveys more in a tighter space, if that makes any sense. In any case, it’s an unexpected side effect of this little project of mine: I see improvements to all my writing, which is kind of cool.

Today I questioned how far into the “non-fiction” style I am going to go. I played with the idea of making the novel into a collection of essays and articles, like someone putting together a scrapbook of writing covering a certain topic. But that would be too much like that book of postcards and/or letters from way back — the late 80’s or early 90’s maybe? (Anyone know what I’m talking about? They were huge for about 15 minutes, and then disappeared. I can’t remember the name…)

I think the concept’s been done a few times. Not that I couldn’t do it again, but when my mind went to that, I shuddered. Nothing against it, just not for me.

Anyway, I think it will be simply be like a non-fiction memoir of sorts. Style-wise at least — this is still a fictional novel.

Of course, that direction may still change. I love that actually about this whole process — I’m letting the format and ideas form and flow without much care about that yet either. I’m confident it will settle and gel eventually, without much too much force applied.

~Graham

(Novel Writing Totals)

Hours Today: 1
Words Today: 1,373
Hours Total: 33.5
Words Total: 46,618