Fans of this blog (or people capable of scrolling down a bit) may already know that at the end of National Novel Writing Month last year I was leaning toward not trying it again this year. Though I had a number of concerns, the biggest issue was that I didn’t have another novel-length idea in mind.
To be honest, that still concerns me. In 2014 I met the quota at least in part because I had firm ideas about the wrap-around and the first part, and the second part was actually an expansion of a long-lost screenplay I wrote for a class way back when I was an undergrad. One might even say that what I’d really accomplished was two novellas grafted together (and a critical critic might even justifiably observe that the graft was awkward at best).
My next victory came last year, and it too had a lot of the legwork done ahead of time. The first act was almost completely done considerably before November 1, 2017, so it couldn’t be included in the Novel Month word count total. I didn’t have a firm plot in mind for acts two and three until I wrote an outline in the days leading up to the start of the race. So at least the writing for those acts was original rather than something I dredged up from my past.
Still, overall it could still be argued that it was three separate stories tied together by common characters and locations. I think of it as a novel and defend its honor by pointing out that Stephen King has done more awkward melds in the past and sold millions of copies to people who never questioned their statuses as full-fledged novels.
But that still wasn’t a single story arc from beginning to end, and it still wasn’t something that wasn’t at least partially pre-written, even if long ago in another form.
Knowing that the next novel would have to start from an unformed idea and make it all the way to a novel-length word count in 30 days seemed daunting.
It still does.
However, over the summer I got the chance to spend some time organizing my story ideas. Like many writers, I tended to have things jotted down in several different notebooks, Google docs, Apple notes and the like. Getting them all typed into a single location gave me a much better view of what was unlikely to actually work, what would make a short story at best, and what precious few could maybe expand into a novel.
One particular piece seemed naturally to sprout elaborations on the basic concept. Like “Grandma Gillman,” my first self-published novella, this one took a small piece from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” But this one centered around a small collection of paragraphs early in the tale. The Newburyport Historical Society museum had acquired a ceremonial tiara from the Innsmouth folk via questionable means. Lovecraft describes the object to introduce the particular peculiarities of the people whose town he was about to visit.
Somehow my brain managed to mash that tiara up with the federal law designed to help Native Americans retrieve the stolen artifacts and ancestral remains held in museum collections. Which led easily enough to the notion that a story might be made from the only thing in the world worse than Lovecraftian monsters: lawyers.
About all of that much more could be said, but for now all I need to note is that the idea from my files struck me as sufficient to supply the skeleton for a novel-length work. And thus was born my determination to give Novel Month another go.
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