A couple of weeks ago I read an article about the November Writing Challenge (you can sign up for it here, but 10 days have already passed!).  In essence, the challenge is to write an at least 50,000 word novel in the month.

No, I didn’t sign up for the challenge.  I’m knee deep in book #6 of the Corrosive Knights saga and the last thing I need to do is distract myself from it for a month writing another work.

When I read about the challenge, perhaps on io9.com or somewhere like it, I was fascinated by the commentary section and the various bits of advice people gave would-be authors accepting the challenge.  Though I wish I could find the actual comments, one in particular, which I’ll paraphrase below (sorry, don’t have the actual quote handy), struck me as interesting:

Leave things where they lie and write forward.  Do not go back and revise, rather write around what you originally put down.

In the context of writing a 50,000 novel in a month’s time, this is good advice.  Because of the nature of the challenge you don’t want to get stuck repeatedly going over sections of your book and/or rewriting great parts of it as the deadline looms large.

But as the advice presented is framed towards this particular writing challenge, its easy to point out it doesn’t relate to the type of novels I write.

Of course, I can’t speak about other authors.  If you are to accept what Stephen King wrote in his book On Writing, he claims to write exactly one draft of his novels, puts it away for a little while to “mellow out”, then goes over it one time before it is ready to be published.  Given the copious amounts of books he releases, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is indeed the case, that he writes along the lines of the advice presented above and then moves on to the next work.

As much as I wish I could write like that (oh, the number of books I’d have out there by now!), that’s not the way I do it.

I’ve posted bits and pieces of information on my writing here and there and I’ll likely do so again in the future.  For me, writing is not unlike creating an oil painting.

The painter starts with an idea of what it is they want to paint.  Perhaps it is a landscape or a city.  Perhaps a person or group of people.  You have some ideas of how things will fit together and you come up with a rough drawing.  Depending on how good you are, the drawing is done quickly or, more than likely, you work out spaces and where things lie on your canvas.

Your original idea(s) likely change during this stage, sometimes radically.  After a bit of work you reach a point where you have your drawing down on the canvas (if you do things that way) and you’re ready to lay down colors.  During this process of blending colors together you may have additional discoveries, either done on purpose or found by accident, which step by step further fill in your work. When you’re done, the picture you’ve created may well be very far from what you originally envisioned but if you’re successful, what you’ve completed is far, far better than that original concept.

So it is for me with writing a novel.  Usually I start out with a few rough ideas.  I may have a concept of a novel’s beginning and its end or maybe both and then have to come up with what lies between.  Rarely do I have ideas of things that happen somewhere in the middle of the book.

As for characters, I usually have an idea of the ones I want to use and their interactions, but this is often subject to change.

In the case of the Corrosive Knights novel I’m currently writing, I started out with an idea of the novel’s beginning, though this wasn’t set in stone, and its end, which was far better defined.

When I started writing the book and, unlike the advice presented above, I would very often go back over my work as I realized certain plot points worked better another way.  This is how I wound up with almost 30,000 words of material which I may wind up discarding completely.

A waste of time?  Most certainly, but the overall work is better for these unused experiments…if nothing else, they made me realize I needed to do better.

Returning to the characters, the original big bad villain of the piece, I realized, was better served being heroic (though not the novel’s hero).  Further, I added chunks of information originally conceived for the next book in the Corrosive Knights series but which I realized worked better in this one.  These chunks of information fill in historical blanks that finally give the series the 20,000 plus year history I was intent on telling.

Sometimes I wish I could transport back in time and with my latest novel in hand and present it to myself as I was beginning the work.  How would I react to being in the novel’s embryonic stage and then seeing it presented in full?  How would I react to the knowledge that the journey begun with a few small ideas would flower into something so full?

And after admiring the work done, I’d just have to tell myself who won the upcoming Super Bowl.

Might be worth a few more bucks! 😉