The Elements of Novel Writing

Hello Fellow Writers!

Yesterday I bought a laptop. I got an Acer notebook, which was ridiculously inexpensive, and it has the new Windows 7 and I added Microsoft Office 2007. Finally, I have Word! Not just Open Office! I'm slowly figuring out how to type on this new keyboard. I'm all thumbs. I feel like I just learned how to type! I have to press the delete key every few seconds as my fingers hit the wrong button. I'm sure after I write for a couple of hours my fingers will learn the new smaller keyboard. I need to get used to this new laptop before NaNoWriMo begins on November 1st. I can't be wasting time on typos!

Today I am going to a NaNoWriMo kick-off at Panera Bread in Poughkeepsie. It will be cool to meet other writers who love challenges. I got no writing done yesterday. I suppose it was because my mother in law is in town, and we went out and DH and ran errands, etc, but ultimately there was a time after everyone was in bed that I could have written and instead, I read. "Shutter Island" by Dennis Lehane is amazing.

I found a video from Andrea Rains Waggener, the author of a novel entitled "Alternate Beauty". She spells out the elements of novel writing. While the concepts are simple, they are not easy - at least not as easy as Ms. Waggener says! Still, her video is worth the 6 1/2 minutes it takes to watch. This is her website: www.writinghelppartnership.com



Today I will write a bit before I head out to Poughkeepsie for the NaNoWriMo kick off. I'm a bit stuck, I think, and that's why I didn't write yesterday. The problem is I feel like I have a finished novel with "The Movie Star's Very Personal Assistant," but I'm coming in at just over 45K words and I need 50K words. What to do?

Wish me luck and good luck to you too!
Yours Truly,
Shoshanna Evers

Dennis Lehane - How he did it

Hello Fellow Writers!

Yesterday I put my additional chapter into "The Movie Star's Very Personal Assistant," weaving it in so it fits seamlessly. The problem now is that I have 45K words and I need 50K. Arrgh. Since my mother-in-law is visiting, she watched the baby while DH and I went out to see "The Stepfather". It was a good thriller, there were just way too many noisy kids in the theater.

I'm reading "Shutter Island" by Dennis Lehane. I'm really enjoying it. The first couple of pages I was going, uh oh - is this book going to be boring? But nope. Within a few pages I was absolutely hooked and I stayed up late reading. They made the book into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Here is an excerpt from an article by Linda Richards about how Dennis Lehane became a writer.
Read the whole article here because it's so interesting.

There was never any doubt in Dennis Lehane's mind that he was going to be a writer. It wasn't so much a matter of "if" as much as "how" and "when." Lehane wrote his first novel while he was still in college as "a goof, as a fluke, as something to do because I was bored. And to entertain myself." The overworked creative writing student felt he needed a break from all of the "really literary, avant garde short fiction" he'd been writing. He says he wrote that novel in three weeks and tossed it into a box. He was 25.
About a dozen drafts later, while Lehane was at grad school, the novel was accepted for publication and saw print in 1994 as A Drink Before the War, the first book to feature Lehane's dynamic Boston duo, private investigators Angie Gennaro and Patrick Kenzie.
Lehane says now that he understood exactly what he was doing when he signed his first book contract: he understood the course he was allowing his life to take. "You're leaving one camp and stepping into another. Why mess around?" He knew that the publication of A Drink Before the War would label him, perhaps forever, as a genre writer: "And there's no way out of that, so let's just go all the way. And I'm so glad I did. Oh! Thank God. It's been the greatest accident of my life."
Accident or not, Lehane has kept a firm hand on the professional aspects of his writing as well as the creative, understanding as he does the reverberations that a small thing can have on an entire career. "Where you enter the ladder," says Lehane in relation to a writing career, "I think, indicates how far you're going up it." With that ladder in mind, Lehane resisted going the paperback original route as well as manuscript changes to A Drink Before the War that he didn't agree with because, he says, he didn't really have a lot to lose. "What were you going to do to me? Make me poorer? I didn't think that was possible." The idealistic young writer stuck to his guns and stepped onto the ladder on a fairly high rung. He has, he says, no regrets.

Lehane says "That's the fun of writing. Flannery O'Connor called it 'happy accidents.' That moment when, all of a sudden, your character does something that you didn't intend him to do and you realize it had been oddly inevitable since the first time you introduced him. And you go: Yeah! That's why I write. That's the high."
I totally get that same 'high' from writing. Today I'm going to buy a new laptop so DH has computer access next month during NaNoWriMo since I will be writing pretty much nonstop. I will also be having my parents over for dinner. Still, I hope to figure out a way to add a few thousand words to my WIP.
Wish me luck, and good luck to you too!
Yours Truly,
Shoshanna Evers