I’m Getting Ready to Write a New Novel But Not Actually Writing It Yet—Here’s Why

My writing’s been in this weird state of transition for a long time now.  That’s because, for the first time in nine years, I’m not actively working on some sort of novel.

Instead I worked on querying MFA Thesis Novel to publishers for ten months, and in between queries worked on some shorter pieces in various states of completion.  Having time to focus on these other projects has been great, but I’m realizing how badly I miss having a bigger, more involved project to work on, and how much I want to get back into the creative process of working on a novel.

But, as I wrote about in my post a few weeks back, I’m having trouble starting.

That’s partly because this novel idea is particularly ambitious—it’s like nothing I’ve ever written, and writing it the way I’m imagining it is going to take every bit of my writing skill, in addition to a lot of skills I’ve yet to get a handle on.

Another part of the problem is genre.  Not only is this novel different from what I usually write (fun literary novels with humor and sex jokes), it’s in a genre I don’t even usually read.  I can’t tell you what that genre is yet, but rest assured that my contribution will have plenty of humor and sex jokes.

So What Are You Doing?

For both of my previous two novels I started with a rough outline—a step-by-step list I scribbled in a notebook of what would happen when.  Those outlines guided me through writing rough drafts, and even though the rough drafts came out pretty different from the outlines, working from an outline was still an essential starting point for organizing my thoughts.

For this novel, though, I don’t even really feel comfortable making the outline yet, because even the order of events is dependent on some aspects of the genre I don’t feel entirely confident about.

This sounds more complicated than it really is—basically, I need to familiarize myself with a new kind of writing before starting the actual writing process, and that means I have to do something really, really important:

Research.

So What Does That Mean, Exactly?

That I have to read a LOT, and some of that reading involves some really specific material.

I started by making by rough list of some books I need to familiarize myself with the genre, and dove in with some I have available here in Japan.  I plan on using eBooks to pick up the rest, or maybe placing an international order with Powell’s Books or another indie bookstore since I’m trying to avoid using Amazon whenever possible.  Fortunately there’s very little I can’t access in Japan, so I’m not too worried about that aspect.

Then I have to read a lot—like, a LOT.  The reading will be ongoing, and I expect it to continue while I’m working on the draft.

There’s also some special research I want to do that goes beyond your basic Wikipedia fare.  I don’t want to half-ass this research, since it’s kind of the cornerstone that the book is based on, and I want to make sure I soak up as much as I can.  In recent years I’ve caught myself falling into the bad habit of rushing through research with quick Google searches I can use to grab a few links and pretend I’m an expert on something (e.g., anything I write for this blog *cough, cough*) and my big fear is that I’ll fall into a similar trap with this novel.

That’s why I want to make sure I devote as much time to research and prep work as I need to make the novel awesome.

This is a big step for me, since in the past I’ve always viewed research as a kind of afterthought, or a brief preparatory step I tried to breeze through in an afternoon or jumped to in the middle of the writing process to find the info I needed.

I suspect this is because of lazy habits I picked up during high school, but I also think it comes from the arrogance of being an adult and thinking you know more about something than you really do.  A lot of the things we feel confident knowing are actually things we have a lot to learn about, and there’s a danger that comes from thinking you know enough about a certain topic to teach other people about it.

I thought about this when I was writing my recent post on writers paying for submission fees.  I felt confident about my knowledge going in but soon realized I knew almost nothing about how submission fees worked on a larger scale.  The info I added into that post represents a few hours of Googling and reading (again, which I did while drafting the actual post), but were I writing an actual novel or an entire book about writers and submission fees, you can damn well bet I’d take a deeper dive.

That’s because this blog is just a blog and its posts are more are less disposable—stuff I fire off in haste and then give a quick polish to before posting every week (*hides look of shame*).  With my bigger projects, I want to make them the best they can possibly be—and that means going all the way.

Final Thoughts: A New Way of Working

The next few months are going to be challenging as I figure out a new workflow for assembling the background info I need for this novel—all while working a Day Job and doing all the other things that keep me busy.  I feel confident I can make it through, the only question is how long it’ll take and how I’ll organize my time and mental energy while I do.  Anytime I start a new workflow it always takes some time to figure out the best way of getting things done, but mastering those skills is an important part of learning and growing—especially for me as a writer.