My novel will finally get finished…

At the risk of sounding corny, I was inspired today after watching City of Ember (which was better than I expected — I’m going to read the book next). A handful of plot ideas wove themselves about my head and finally scattered onto paper, where they will direct the path of the story I’ve been patching up for the past couple of months.

“The story” is the 50,000-word novel that I birthed as the result of NaNoWriMo ’06, when I decided I wanted to get serious about my writing. Ah, what a month that was. I worked and went to school in addition to churning out 1,667 words a day, and because I didn’t plot ahead of time the story veered and jumped and stopped and started and basically didn’t make any sense. After November was over, I breathed a sigh of relief and stored the file in the swamps of my hard drive, convinced I would never look at it again because it was so terrible.

Then this past January, I opened the document — in a hands-over-my-eyes, make-sure-no-one-else-is-around kind of way — and to my surprise it was a lot better than I remembered; the voice, at least, and even some of the plot itself (it was so intriguing, even I didn’t know where it was going…).

It was then that I decided this poor abandoned story actually had some potential and was worthy of saving, polishing, and possibly publishing. The next step was to add to it — hence my newish daily writing routine — but the glitch was that I still didn’t know where things were going, so I wrote scenes that ultimately added very little to the plot and frustrated me to no end. And then today came along. (Today, oh glorious day!)

I guess you could skip all of what I just wrote and read this: the story has a new life and a new direction, and even though I don’t necessarily look forward to rewriting most of the 50,000 words I already put down, I’m excited about how it will turn out.

This quote, which I found on the web site of the author of City of Ember, seems like an appropriate way to wrap things up:

A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.
—Thomas Mann