My Great Novel is Just a Story

Now I know this, writing it has become so much easier

The book I’m writing at the moment has been 25 years in the making. I came up with the idea after I gave birth to my second daughter who was born on 29 February, which is a leap year day, and was unusual because she would only have a ‘real’ birthday every four years. Always a fan of supernatural and horror stories I began to think about what if…..

The characters came and the foundations of the story came and I started writing. Then I would let it sit for a while because it had to be perfect. I felt that the story was beyond my writing skill level so I had to up my skills in order to do this story justice.

So I did that. Wrote for a magazine (only one story got published) and then just kept writing - blogs, short stories, website content, articles, did a Masters Degree (lots of writing there) — whatever.

Then I came back to my great novel. The book that was going to be the making of my career. The book that was going to be famous and make me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

I wrote pages and pages of perfect dialogue, totally in the bubble of my imaginary world, I could see it all before my eyes like a movie and all I had to do was transcribe the action. I was able to capture it well I thought.

Then I lost it all and I can’t find those pages anywhere so I have to re-write all that.

I’ve put what I have in Scrivener and sent a backup to Google Drive and have started to make some sense of the format. Something was stopping progress and when I was able to sort those things out, words started flowing again.

Firstly, the antagonist wasn’t defined. I knew kind of who he was but not really and so when I went to describe him and give him dialogue none of it rang true. Actually it completely sucked. Then I had an epiphany while eating lunch with my kids on Mother’s Day and I blurted out “Oh my God He’s XXXXX” I can’t tell you yet because it will ruin the whole story, BUT what I can tell you is that the revelation of who he is, led me on a lot of research which only solidified him and I was able to write him much more authentically.