My first order of business is to say that I have updated my last blog post to include the name and author of the book I referred to. It was Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay, 1979, and I am aghast! The book is nearly fifty years old!
And now, on with the show.
Until I retired in 2019, I had never attempted to write anything longer than a short story, or a long sermon. When my husband suggested that I “finally” write a novel I was skeptical that I could continue a narrative long enough for a 75,000 word-count. (That’s the “sweet spot” for a romance novel.) It seemed an impossible task that I did not even want to attempt.
But I had time on my hands and so I purchased a tiny writing table and set it up by a window overlooking my garden, and I began to write in elegant longhand in a book with beautiful, creamy, blank pages. The sentences flowed, and the words unfurled, without a single spelling error, and all the commas were in the right places. Do you believe that? I hope not, because that might have been how Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott wrote, but it was not, and IS not the way I write at all!
I have no idea how those Regency and Victorian women produced all those words in their heads and then wrote them so neatly into their tiny notebooks. The process of writing for me is a process of constant editing and revision. And I thank the good Lord for computer Word programs with spellcheck and grammar checking abilities. It turns out that there might have been a few gaps in my elementary and high school education, especially when it comes to commas! (Basically, I hate commas because however I try to use them, it always turns out to be the wrong way.)
But what I find truly mysterious and miraculous, and possibly holy, is the way characters sometimes create themselves as I write. I will have a rough outline for the plot, but as I sit to write each episode into existence a character will go in a direction I did not expect! It is a process that cannot be explained by logic. The closest I can come to an explanation is that these characters are all a part of my own psyche, and they have been developing their personalities as they tumble around in my head. And then when I put them into a specific situation they react with their own personalities.
Writing is a mysterious and surprising thing, and I love the whole process!
PS it is possible to write comments to these blog posts. I look forward to some of you expressing yourselves here. Just watch those errant commas!
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