Introduction
This site is provided to offer novelists, and aspiring novelists, suggestions as to how they might develop their projects in manners that are efficient - you can make the most of your possibly limited writing time - and effective - you can design and develop for the impact you intend.
We break the novel down into its essential components, and we do the same with the development process.
The site is organized around an approach common to information architecture. Concepts are introduced with topics drilling down into how those concepts might be used in story telling. A Table of Contents is provided to help you navigate the site and perhaps visit those pages that spark your interests.
This site is really designed to be read front to back, but before committing to that - and this site will be growing, like a weed, perhaps to include the insights of people with actual knowledge on the novelist’s craft - a word about the level of madness required to walk (or crawl) your way down this writing path.
Do You Really Want to Do This?
I am a boxing fan and recently I heard a retired champion-turned-boxing-analyst say something I think also applies to writing long fiction.
“You don’t ‘play’ boxing. You play games, but you don’t play boxing.”
Boxing is dead serious - in fact, can be fatal to combatants.
Writing long fiction is that way, too. It is damaging to a person’s social life and to a person’s self-esteem, and that’s if you are living the writer’s life and doing it right.
You can’t really write long fiction without having the dedication of a professional boxer. In fact, you won’t write long fiction at all if you are not of that professional boxer ilk.
You’ll start a novel, but unless you are of a certain personality type, you won’t get far with it. You’ll despise yourself for your lack of discipline, certain that you have a great novel within you, but somehow just won’t be able to collect the words and commit them to whatever media you imagine writing for. There are always other distractions. Life, for instance.
Nothing makes me happier in life than sitting alone in my room, dreaming my “fictive dream”, and typing up the words. I love everything about the process, love living in that hypnogogic state, dreaming of worlds beyond those known and familiar, traveling to exotic locations in my mind, and finding the words to express all I see there.
That ain’t for everybody.
If for some reason you feel pressed to write your novel, but you find the doing of it to be a pain, and find the calling is not really for you, don’t beat yourself up about it.
There are no rewards at the end of the writer’s rainbow - certainly not rewards of the kind recognized in our material world. Novelists who make money are usually novelists who stopped dreaming the dreaming long ago, and set up a production house to turn out the fiction sold at airports and grocery stores.
As I write this, the Writer’s Guild of America is out on strike. There is a good chance that all writers are extinct already, easily replaced by artificial intelligence, which offers an excellent read of public tastes, attitude and opinion, and can spit out that novel you will never get written in a matter of minutes.
So why go on as a writer, especially now, at this inflection point in history, as we approach a technological singularity that will render all humans meaningless?
I don’t know.
It is entirely possible, to my way of thinking, that writing novels that no one will ever read is a form of mental illness.
On the other hand, I prefer to think of it as a contribution, an anonymous gift to the world, offered for its readers to do with it what they will.
To me, writing - and especially writing long fiction - is the air I breathe. This site shares some of what I have experienced and learned in this utterly Quixotic pursuit.