My boyfriend is a musician but he is still trying to find his niches in life. He paints cool abstract paintings and he writes lyrics but now he is trying to write a novel. He said it’s harder than it sounds because he’s been having trouble fleshing out believable characters.
He experimented with trying to make an outline first where he mapped out the entire story but he said that didn’t work that well because when he tried to work from the outline he ended up taking creativity as it came along and taking the story in different directions from the outline.
I tried to write a novel once myself because I am a huge reader of novels and I write poetry and lyrics. As I went on though I thought that perhaps it’s just not my natural writing style to write a novel, and I should stick to shorter pieces.
There are some writers I like a lot such as Richard Brautigan who wrote some weird novels that I think are great. He is really unusual in the way he uses language. I read a review on the back of one of his books once where the reviewer said reading his novels was like reading the novels of Mark Twain if Mark Twain had been wandering around a marijuana field before he started writing.
The writing is hilarious whether or not Brautigan is writing books of short true stories or in his works of fiction. When I first encountered him I had never seen anything like it.
Lucky for me my college library had a full collection of his poetry as well, because it’s almost impossible to find these days even online. So at least I got to read it even if I can’t own it myself, and reading it got me to decide to seek out everything he’d written such as his funny novel ‘The Hawkline Monster’.
My boyfriend is a really funny person too so when he lets me read the snippets of ideas that he’s turning into his novel, I always end up amused and wanting to read more on the same line.
I guess this is what any potential novelist is looking for, that people will start reading the writing tips and want to just keep on going because the writing is compelling. Novels are long by nature so if the writing isn’t compelling to me in the first chapter or so I probably will set the book down and not pick it up again. As for my boyfriend, I have great faith in him and I am excited to see what he ends up with when he finishes his first novel.
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