Wolf

Writing poetry and songs is devilish work.

Takes a long time. A good long time and moves slow. Writing a single verse might take me a whole hour. And it’s a funny kind of hour because I know I’ll likely have to rewrite that verse a handful of times before the novel’s ready. And a smarter person would only rewrite it once, but this novel becomes more itself, twisting in all directions but finding its shape more and more.

Writing bombast and spectacle is far more fun and I got to do a fair amount of that today. Adding some early excitement to the novel so it’s not all slice of life and relatively slow, but instead becomes a whole barrel of snakes writhing and snapping at one another.

I have a theory, or a rule of thumb, I suppose you could say, that a book should have something to hook and rehook the reader every 15-50 pages. It needn’t be a big action setpiece, though sometimes it should be, and that setpiece will give you some breathing room to slow down once more. But you can also make these hooks little bits of information. Or, as David C Smith told me: dialogue is action. And so a conversation becomes a swordfight, a swashbuckling escapade.

Whatever the case may be, you want to give them something new to chew on, some novel toy or event. With this, you’ll keep the reader engaged and infatuated with your novel.

I imagine this applies to a lot of cultural pursuits, but I’m here writing a novel so that’s what it’ll mean most to me.

It sure is fun writing a big setpiece of awe and wonder, of might and magic though. It’s the kind of writing I largely avoided when I was younger, but I’ve leaned into it more and more as I get older.

It’s funny how much dumber we are when we’re twenty. We’re much smarter at fifteen and thirty, sadly, but all that dumb stuff I did when I was twenty did, strangely, prepare me to write a book like this.

Which is nice.

I mean, I wrote the original version of this book when I was 23. It was shorter than this rewrite of the novel is now, but it told a story of a life from infancy and on past death. And now I’ve covered about a single year – and mostly just a few months – in the same word count.

Perhaps that’s maturity, or simply monomania.

Who can say.

But the writing really does flow so much faster when I’m working on scenes with movement. When I run into the next song – since I’m determined to no longer skip them – I’ll get a bit stuck again, or at least slowed down tremendously.

But for now, we run and run and run!

Also, for those keeping track, the kickstarter tripled its funding goal! So we’re in a good place right now