Notes on a Resurrected Novel
I recently published two stories on Fiction Hub that I extracted from a novel that has been long underway. I have the first three chapters and planned to published them in a series. My original plan was to write the novel in ten chapters, each focusing on one character and each capable of standing alone. When read together (and possibly in any order) the story comes full cycle.
I lost the last seven chapters and most of my notes. I had saved them to a flash drive because my computer was starting to fail, then misplaced the drive. I thought it was fate and probably all for the best. At my age I have a hard time managing my own daily life much less the intricate lives of my six main characters.
I found the drive today and read over the lost chapters and decided, hey, this could work. If I can just get back on track (after I finish the two books that I am currently working on) and if I live long enough, I am going to finish it.
I don’t joke about the vagaries of memory that some of us seniors suffer. I didn’t remember having written a series of notes on my characters. They will not necessarily be part of the novel, but a way for me to understand each one. I don’t know if anyone else does this — I imagine many writers do — but I decided to share one note as an example. I know that reading my notes helped me recover the “feel’ of my characters and remember what I was intending with them.
Kenneth as a writer [Kenneth is my main protagonist.]
“So you are a writer,” Victoria’s mother said when she met him. “Is there something that you wrote that I might have read?”
Not likely, of course, although thanks to Amazon my books are as close as One Click away. I doubt that she has read her own daughter’s. Some people read, others shop or watch TV.
Kenneth had little idea how Dona Amalia spent her days, only that it was not with a book. He should find out, he told himself, all people, not some people, are the fiction writer’s fodder.
The other comment is often, “I should write a book. You wouldn’t believe the things that have happened to me. My life would make a good story, but I don’t have the time. Maybe you should write it down.”
Meaning that writing fiction is stenography. Some writers may be able to take the raw materials of their lives and batten it into a novel, but they are an odd variety of alchemist: They actually succeed in converting dross into gold. David Copperfield is — and is not — Dickens. Tolstoy battered his copper-coated youth into a warehouse of precious metal. D. H. Lawrence, Maugham, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, Wolfe — the list is long — chipped ore from the quarry of their daily lives and extracted from it something precious.
Dr. Mohr [Kenneth’s writing workshop instructor in Chapter 3] claimed that all writing is autobiographical. That whatever you see or say or think or write is influenced by who you are, how you live, what you have experienced. Of course. But I believe that I must try to exorcise those things. I write to become someone else. I am not a stenographer; my fingers would slip in the blood that is on my hands.
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I plan to take down the two stories that I posted, but if you would like to skim them before I do that, here are the links.
