Tag: Seventh Son

Note: When I started this series I thought it would be one post, maybe two. It turned into six. So I’ll be posting one of these every day this week.

Part 1: How I Got Started

A friend and I were talking the other day about things one could do with one’s life.
“Is there anything you really want to do?” I asked her. “Something you’ve always dreamt of?”
She didn’t even pause to think.
“Write a book!” she said.
Well, you know what my reaction to that was bound to be.
“Do it!” I shot back at her.
“But,” she said, “where would I start?”

I think there’s a lot of a people who have that dream in their life: “One day, I want to write a book.” Oddly enough, I was never one of them. Not because I didn’t always love books, but because it never occurred to me that someone like me could write one. To write a book you have to be really special, don’t you? You have to have some inner drive that makes you pick up the pen, that forces you to write or you’ll burst. You have to have the talent that just, I don’t know, crystallizes into a story. Writers are born, not made…

Or so I thought. But then I switched schools during my undergrad, and my new university had Creative Writing classes. Well, why not? I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. And it didn’t. I did well and had fun, and found that I’m not a bad writer. In Creative Nonfiction class, in particular, I found my voice, and not long after that I started a blog. However, the class that was aimed at teaching us to write novels left me with the conclusion that I was never going to be “a novelist”—I didn’t have what it takes. I didn’t have the stamina to complete that long a manuscript; I’d lose interest by Chapter 4. But more to the point, I didn’t have anything to say; the stories I had in my head were too boring, too silly; nobody would want to read them. Real writers write literary fiction. (Just to be clear, this wasn’t a prof telling me these things; I discovered them all on my own. Because I’m smart that way.)

I got my BA in spring of 2011. The previous year, I had heard about this NaNoWriMo thing—National Novel Writing Month: crazy people who sign up to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I already knew that I wasn’t a novelist, but I had some time on my hands, and once again I thought, Why not? All you have to do to win the challenge is write 50,000 words in 30 days. Nobody said anything about it being good words, let alone quality writing anyone would want to read. Maybe I could do that. It might be fun.
So I signed up. “Write 50,000 words, and have fun”—that’s all I aimed for, that first NaNo I participated in. I started with only a vague idea where I was going. “It was the blue bowl that started it all…,” I typed on November 1st.

And I kept typing, and typing. Telling myself a story I enjoyed, about a young woman who gets sucked off into another world and how she copes. Typing and typing. There’s a cute baby in it, and descriptions of cooking in an open fireplace, and a potter who makes pots on a kickwheel, and a bit of gentle magic. Typing and typing.

By November 30th, I had 50,000 words. I’d had fun. And, to my surprise, I had a novel. I went back and read it from the beginning, and, what do you know? I enjoyed it. As a novel. And then, wonder of wonders, I handed it to a couple of other people (notably among them Lee Strauss, who had just published her own first novel), and they enjoyed it too!

I had written a novel. A real, honest-to-goodness novel.

But this story isn’t quite done yet. That particular year, Createspace, which was Amazon’s print-on-demand arm, offered NaNoWriMo winners a coupon for five free print copies of their novel, which you had to redeem by the end of June. So I got my rear in gear, proofread this unexpected novel manuscript (then proofread it again), got help with making a cover from one of the Offspring who knows their way around Photoshop and has a knack for graphic design, and less than a year from that November 1st, I had in my hands five printed copies of a book that I had had no idea I’d be able to write.

I had written a book.

It didn’t stop there. The next November, I went back and wrote the sequel to Seventh Son. It was much harder that time, because not only was I in grad school by then, but I was invested: I had this novel planned and plotted out; it had to be a novel, and it had to be good—as good as the first one. I couldn’t just waffle on as I had the first time, this time it mattered. But I struggled on, and again I finished; that novel was Cat and Mouse.

The year after that, I’d learned my lesson (namely that trying to do grad school and writing “a real novel” is a little bit insane, or rather more so than NaNoWriMo is already), so when November rolled around I decided to write something simple that didn’t matter so much—I grabbed one of my favourite Grimm’s fairy tales, “Puss in Boots”, and retold it to the tune of 50,000 words. And again, I got a novel. That one became Martin Millerson, or: Something With Cats (because it has a whole bunch of extra cats in it, not just the booted one).

I kept doing NaNoWriMo, and wrote Checkmate, and Star Bright, and then a number of other novels that will see the light of publication eventually (I hope). Yes, novels. I’ve written novels, plural. I didn’t always “win” NaNoWriMo, and didn’t even do it every year since, but I call myself a novelist now.

Why am I telling you all this?

It’s because of my friend’s question: “Where do you start?”

This is the story of how I started. I didn’t even set out to “write a book”, because I didn’t know I could. But I could sit down and start typing, and tell myself a story I liked. And after a certain number of days of doing it, and then doing it again, and again, and again, I had a book.

That’s one way of writing a book: sit down and start writing.

However, that’s not the only way. I would say that’s not even the best way. There are other options…

…TO BE CONTINUED…

PS: NaNoWriMo 2023 starts this week – you still have time to sign up!