I have been very busy these last few months. Very, very, very busy. After about a two-month detour from writing my first novel, time spent prepping the pilot script and pitch materials for an opportunity that fell through at the last minute, I'm now back in a prose groove. It took some doing, but I'm here.
My novel, the first book in a planned pentalogy, is a labor of love. When people ask me how long I've been working on it, it's a difficult question to answer. Perhaps because there are several answers. Any writer can tell you that projects shift and change, stories grow in the telling, as Tolkien once said. So, how long have I been working on it?
I came up with the original idea for The Crossroads Chronicles, then a TV series called Crossroads, early in my senior year of high school, in late 1997.
I came up with the greater idea, of which the original idea was merely one element, about a year later.
I wrote the pilot script shortly thereafter.
I wrote several revisions and completely different scripts over the next few years.
I realized the story would be better served in prose than as a TV series, and made the decision to convert everything over in 2007, nearly a decade after I'd had the initial idea. I wrote the first three or four chapters when I realized that I was having far too much trouble, and that it was time to do what I'd been putting off for a long, long time: writing the backstory. Three years later, I was done. Trust me, it's very elaborate.
This past winter, I sat down and got back to writing the actual narrative. After some fooling with format and structure, I found my groove. I'm now back in the swing. It's coming along great, and I'm extremely excited.
Here's the funny:
I have another prose project, a story I've wanted to tackle for a while, one that I've only recently decided should be prose. Unlike The Crossroads Chronicles, which takes place here in the world we know, this project is a fantasy epic, which meant building the world from scratch. As one might imagine, that's a LOT of work. It was only a year ago that I finally took that idea, the vaguest of concepts, and actually started working out a story. As of today, I have developed that world significantly. I've got miles to go, but it's a solid start. I also have the basic story in mind, though the details are still very vague. I have a flawed, compelling protagonist, three supporting protagonists, one minor character of ambiguous alignment, and an antagonist group, if not specific antagonist characters yet.
Most people would think that this is a sign that the latter project is better. After all, it's coming together so easily and with such strength that it must be a stronger idea, certainly more so than The Crossroads Chronicles, which has been evolving slowly over nearly fifteen years. Most people would think so.
Most people aren't writers.
The thing is, stories are like kids: they're different and grow at different speeds in different directions. They require different amounts of attention, different types of nurturing, different levels of patience, and different degrees of analysis.
The Crossroads Chronicles is close to my heart. It's a story with characters I love and a message -- more than one, actually -- that I deeply believe in. And it's taking its time. And that's okay. It will mature and come of age on its own schedule, not mine. I've tried to force the hand of evolution. It never works. This new story, it's flowing nicely. I won't be starting on the narrative any time soon, probably not for a year or two at least, and I'm not worried about it.
Things will ebb and flow, and you have to let them. There's something to be said for discipline, for just sitting down and pushing through a problem or a block, but you can't run a current through a burnt out circuit. More and more, I've found my greatest strength in my craft is trusting in my instincts, the things that can't be taught, my writer's intuition, if you will.
I don't treat these projects equally. Like a good parent, I give each of my kids what they need (if not what they want) when they need it. And we're all of us doing just fine.
For details on this new project, see my next post.
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