Maybe you tried to dash off a volume this past November. Maybe you've been futzing around with your Great American Novel since you were forced to read Gatsby in high school. Maybe you once had the knack for turning words into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages, and pages into manuscripts. Maybe you even wrote, oh, let's say thirty three books before bad habits and plain old sloth slowed you down.
We're going to get past that.
In the next six months, I'm writing a new novel. I've got my idea, my characters, and most of my plot in mind. Now comes the hard part—the day in, day out work at the keyboard. In the last three years, I've managed to write half a book... three times. Not this time. This time I'm going to follow the same advice that I've given in a hundred creative writing classes; I'm going to sit there, keep writing, and see the words THE END appear on the page.
I'm inviting you to come with me. Get your notes together. Open up that trunk and blow the dust off the old pages, or search your defunct PC for files in AmiPro or WordPerfect. Find your character sketches, outlines, and random notes.
I'm giving you a month to get it all together. Come the first of January, the starting gun sounds.
Personally, I'm not going to wait. I'm going to start piling up the pages today, in fact, I'm planning to park myself... right where I am at the moment, and keep typing after this diary goes up. I'm going to try and get ahead of you. I'm not doing that because I want to gloat. I'm doing that because, if you'll agree to sit down and write, I'll agree to sit down with you and help you with it. I'll read some pages now and then. I'll pass along what I know about plotting, about dialog, about setting a scene and creating pacing that keeps a reader in front of the page.
I'm not promising to read every page, but I'll try to answer every question, and if there's a passage that's really putting a twist in your tutu, I'll take a look. If enough people pile in, maybe we can arrange some reading groups. I've been blessed with a terrific writers group for more than twenty years now, one that's been willing to read the flurry of pages in years when I've written ten novels, and also willing to commiserate in years when I haven't written ten pages. Maybe we'll be lucky enough to seed a few more groups like that.
Maybe no one is interested. Maybe I'll be making this trip alone. That's okay, too.
Because hammering out those letters T-H-E E-N-D is one of the most satisfying things I've ever felt. I need to feel it again. I'm happy to share.
Now I'm going to write.