I haven't blogged in a long while. It wasn't because I didn't have anything to say, it has been because I am working on "the craft" No, not witchcraft. The finer craft or writing. As I'm sure anyone can plainly see with any post with my actual work on it, it is very rough. Like it in that form or not, I'm learning how to turn it into something much better. One of these days I'm going to polish up Spark of the Dead as practice with my new skills.
The biggest problem I am having right now is fragmented focus. Rather than sitting down and working on Spark: Corruption I have been getting a random assortment of different book ideas. Most fit more in a short story setting vs an actual novel. This time I'm typing up each of my ideas and adding any extra thoughts to them I can at the time.
So with this frustration of trying to hone skills and scattered interest has come also means for excitement. I have been taking a hard look at Spark: Evolution and I found some areas needing improvement. Most of these realizations came with finishing the book Writing The Breakout Novel by Donald Maass. During the whole course of the book nothing is forced on you. There wasn't a time I felt ideas or concepts pushed on me. Instead it showed me how Donald Maass perceives the breakout novel piece by piece from his many years of success.
So, after reading this book and getting a lot of great help from the wonderful peeps at Writer's Digest forums I have been refining myself as a writer. I've been struggling with things, but am very happy with my progress at the same time. I was a fool to think I could naturally have the ability to write a novel and have all the technical aspects down right away. Though, from reading the book stated above, it did make me smile a lot because a very large if not all the things that breakout novels have... I'm proud to say I have already incorporated into my novel. Plot is great; normal character growth is great; pushing them to the limit and taking everything away from them in order to build them and conflict is great; theme may need to be expressed louder; emotions in place to really feel and care for my characters will be under a microscope.
To the last part above, I know I fall in love with my characters each time I read my story as if I don't know what is going on, but I'm sure being the creator has a good amount to do with that. Anyone who has read this so far has been in love with the characters in the ways I hoped they would. What I do need to do is make sure that those tension filled moments and emotion filled moments are indeed just that, tension filled and emotion filled.
Well enough from me for now, wish me luck on my very large task set before me. With my last words of the day, I say that writing a novel was easy, going after agents has been difficult (on hold for now), but nothing could prepare me for the magnitude of difficulty that making my novel technically sound has been with my limited education.
