Sadly, that title isn't a lie, as I've recently discovered. On the 16th August, I finished drafting my Alice novel, Mad Rebellion. I flew through that draft, as far as speed goes for me. The problem? I couldn't turn off my brain, even when I was getting strain and stress headaches. I'd been editing and writing like crazy, getting up to 6,000 words a day. My usual is 2-3K but I was so full of that story that I had so much to pour into it. I couldn't switch off my brain long enough to recover from the last writing session before I started again.
But I finished it; I never ate the morning I did because I couldn't tear myself away from my laptop even for a second. My entire body ached from the tension of the ending. That was a story that I was so encompassed in and worked for me. The next day, I began drafting a new story, having finished editing another story for my critique partners. For the time being, I couldn't do more on anything but this new story that I'd been planning for a while.
EVERYTHING AROUND US is my first try at a serious contemporary. It's my recovery and survival story; it's encouraging not only my characters to find beauty in the world but for me to do the same. I'm using one of my loves, film, to add to it and explore each character's creativity. There are five central characters and I thought I could write them all. It started off with only Nicholas and Hazel leading this story--but then Ailee, Stuart and Hank all asked for their stories to be told at least once from their perspective. They wanted to share how they came to find out about the film club that brings them altogether. I sat at my laptop for four hours yesterday, trying to continue with writing it. The problem? It wasn't working. The characters that wanted to be central too needed to be secondary.
When planning new ideas, I think over a story for a while before moving it into my I Will Definitely Write This list. It moves from my brain into my notebook; it gets content and surroundings. That's how I make things work usually, because the story has had time to steep and become a fixed part of my need to write it. So I wrote and it felt halted and bland and I wondered why. Then I realised that although my extra voices wanted to be heard from their own perspective, they didn't need to be. I realised it wasn't working because I was trying to put too many voices in, whilst trying out a different way of writing--in both the sense of genre and voice. I've written three manuscripts in the third person and now I'm trying first person, in a genre far away from fantasy, as I'm used to.
Everything is different and I'm finding it hard to adapt to that but for me, this is a story I both want and need to tell. It's something I want to share.
Sometimes, stories don't work out, and that's fine. It's fine because there are so many other stories out there to be told instead, that do work for you, that do make you fire away on the keyboard like nothing else exists. I'm not yet giving up on this story because it's living in my mind and notebook so much that I can't let go, but I need to take out the extra voices and see where I go from there. When I realised it wasn't working for me yesterday, it took me a long time to get out of the mindset of not being good enough to write this story, that maybe I needed to open up to a collaboration, and just find the problem rather than blame my actual skills. I've pin-pointed the three issues I'm finding: genre, voice, person.
I just need to work out the voices that are going to tell this story, the ones who need to tell it most. I'm not used to going past two view-points in my stories and now I'm throwing in five, with a new genre to try at. It's too much, so I need to tone down my idea and focus how I can easily tell EVERYTHING AROUND US going back to my initial idea of it just being Nicholas and Hazel, and its how they see everyone around them.
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