I’m one of those people who loves to write – or is it more that I love to think about writing? I find more and more I spend my time thinking about what I want to write and not actually writing it. If you ask me about it, I have every excuse under the sun to cover me. I was busy with work, family issues, I’m exhausted, I feel like I can’t get any peace and quiet, etc. Yet all of this at the end becomes nothing more than excuses.
I’ve read a lot of inspirational quotes on writing, and one of the ones that always hits me the hardest is that writing a page a day gives you a 365 page novel at the end of the year. Nanowrimo is all about writing a novel in a month. Yet I stare at my storyline, I write a few words on a page and I tell myself I’ll do more later. Later never comes. That’s why later, has to be now.
I think one of my biggest roadblocks is and has always been myself. I am constantly down on myself – which as I hear it is also a common writing practice. I tell myself, it’s not good enough – who would want to read that – I have to start all over. My husband loves to roll his eyes at me when I talk about my novel.
Now don’t get me mistaken, I’ve written a full length novel, but trying to write book two of the series is proving difficult. When I think back on all the book twos I’ve ever read, they’ve always come across short like a bridge. Even Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets feels like a bridge to something bigger – and happens to be the one I dislike the most. My best friend believes I dislike it because of the spiders in it (I hate spiders) but really I dislike it because it feels like we had to fill the gap. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. As a standalone the second is fine, but when you consider the first one is the introduction to this magical world that is amazing and existing all around us and the third is the grit of the story, we’re introduced to main characters, we’re given more on Harry’s story and more about Voldemort. The second is… there. It doesn’t stack up.
Of course, I feel the same about the two towers in Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship, out of this world, the Return of the King an epic but the Two Towers is just a bridge between the start of the journey and the end of the journey. I mean of book twos it’s probably one of my favourites but it still feels like we’re trying to get to what is next.
So by no surprise, trying to write my own book two is challenging and difficult as my fear of it being just a bridge gap to the third is high. Even as I plot it out, I feel like I spend the entire book tying the loose ends of book one and introducing everyone to the bigger picture. A bridge from it being a book to a series. So how do I get past that feeling? How do I accept that even the greatest books out there can feel that way to some people (like me)?
I don’t have the answers, but what I do know is that a page a day and I’ll have written the novel by this time next year. So here we go, a page a day and a documentation of how that is going. By this point next year I will have written another book – if it kills me.
Wish me luck!
