and no, I don't just mean this, I went to Nick's "Write Your First Novel" workshop last week. If I can boil down a few things about it, and do so much less articulately than the man himself, here they are:
- Articles of War started as a short story, morphed into a collection of interrelated short stories from the POV of bystanders who brushed with Eddie Slovik, got cut back to a 20-page short story with two of the voices from that collection, built back out to a novella with those two voices, pissed people off with its incompleteness and so was developed further into a 350-page novel called Yours for Victory. Oh, then one of the storylines was excised, and the ending rewritten, and the novel became Articles of War, in its slim, 180-page furiosity. In other words: This novel writing is not a sport for the inflexible among us.
- Don't stress if you're writing outside your experience. You might not literally know what it's like to be in a foxhole during WWII, for example, but you might know what dirt feels like against your chin, you might be able to capture the smell of it. Don't panic. Don't feel like you have to know everything about the experience, as nothing about experience is truly singular, anyway. In the meantime, freely steal details, images, and scenes from oral history and memoir (AD's note--as long as those oral histories and memoirs weren't written by Stephen Spender. See Lighthouse disclaimer, section 7, line 5).
- Sometimes chaos is necessary. This is a huge relief to yours truly. Still, having a sense of where the story might end gives you the moving target, as it were, making the whole endeavor more active, fruitful, pacific, sane. Maybe.
Soooo, get writing. It might be a far-fetched story, this idea of your writing a novel, but again, could it ever be more far-fetched than this?
(What can we say? We try to be above such things, but we're in Denver, for god's sake. Apologies to the appalled. But not really...)
