Spontaneous Commission

So I finished writing the current novel a few weeks ago. I've set it aside for a bit so that I can forget it, so that I can read it as a reader and not have my brain skim over and be careless because I'm too familiar with the words. This is definitely more draft quality than finished piece and the problem is that I'm not a natural re-writer. I will have some pain to go through. I always have the feeling that once I've written something, even just once, I've already told the story and working on it again and again diminishes something in the process. I wish I could help it but I don't think I can.

In the meantime, though, I want to work on the next book but I don't know what it should be. I have over forty three thousand words of the book I had started working on before this one; I stopped there because I had begun writing it without a clear picture of what the central conflict would be. As I went on, it became clear that both the protagonist and the antagonist had strong story arcs of there own but there wasn't anything in the story that would put them in opposition. At least not in any convincing way that I could think of.

I'd like to salvage something from that effort, which would probably entail creating a new hero (I like the bad guy too much to dump him) and a new story idea. But I don't have this at hand and I'm jonesing for the daily writing of actual pages.

I kicked around a beginning for what would be a sequel to the just completed book but I can't quite commit to the effort. On the one hand it would be easy because the characters already exist but on the other, I still need a story to tell. I wrote a couple thousand words where some guy in a small town unloads a story about the murder and mutilation of his friend to my protagonist. He doesn't want to hear it and steams off to his rented room above a store along the small main street in town. I know his voice and I think this book would need to stay in the first person in order to be consistent with the last one but I miss writing in the third person.

And I've always wondered about new authors who plan to write a series. What if you can't sell the first one? You probably sure as hell can't sell the second and third no matter how much better they may be as books or how much better you may have become as a writer.

I know from many "false starts" through the years that you can't just start writing for writing's sake, you have to have some idea as to what the core book is about and what you want to say. You have to know a certain bit about your characters and what their individual voices are. I call all this the prep work and it's important, especially at the stage where I'm at now (whatever it is). It doesn't matter how well you can say something if you don't have anything actually worth saying.

So I'm waffling right now. I'm hoping there will come a day when I can develop an idea for a book easily as opposed to the hell I go through now. There are so many things you want to accomplish with each book: a certain uniqueness, a freshness, characters that aren't cliched, that you can relate to but that haven't been written over and over many times by many authors, a certain style to the structure, and to the writing. In other words, not the same old thing but not something so different as to be unrecognizable. Cliches in fiction maintain because once upon a time they weren't cliches; they may be tired now but they still work in some structural fashion. When you throw them out you have to replace them with something different that fills the same function.

Much easier said then done. I want to write when I need to plan. My wife says I'm tormenting myself. I'm sure it must all seem so easy from the outside but there you go. At times the writing life is an incredibly personal hell. Now that sounds like a cliche. I should throw it out and start over.