Savannah Laura

In my ongoing process of writing Posies and Paper Trails, I've decided to make a third- to first-person transition. As I have mentioned in my previous post, I'd began to doubt my choice for the third-person narrative after taking a short break from writing. For some reason, it felt wrong to let a narrator, who wasn't a character of any kind within the story, tell the story of my main character, Teddy. The story belonged to her, so it seemed only right that she would be the one to convey it to the reader.

Though I've never written fiction in the first-person, it feels quite natural to me. The day I made the transition, I wrote about 1000 words, which is twice as much as I normally manage to put down.
Writing in the first-person is fun. It gives me the chance to be inside Teddy's head, and because of that, I'm finally getting a slightly better idea of who she is as a person. It might sound silly, but she seems more real to me already, than that she did when I wrote about her in the third-person.

Anyway, making that transition was possibly the best decision I've made thus far for my novel. Even though I have to admit that I'm worried that the first-person-narrative might lead to some problems in the future. But for now, I'm just going to listen to the story Teddy has to tell me, and continue writing the third chapter.

Fantasizing about a story is all fun and games, until the moment comes to put my ideas on paper. Once I open a Word document and face the blank page, I get scared. I feel a certain pressure to come up with the perfect first sentence, paragraph, scene, and chapter. It's almost like I'm afraid that once it's written, it's no longer subject to change. Of course, I know better. The art of writing a novel is in the rewriting. A first draft will never be perfect, so when I finally had a breakthrough halfway May, and knew the basic plot and outline for my story, I told myself to get over the fear of the blank page and just write.

The first chapter

Getting over that fear was easier said, than done. I had no idea where to start and felt like I was stumbling around in the dark. Writing down that first sentence was terrifying. I think I've rewritten it at least a dozen times before I forced myself to go on with the next.
All in all, it took me about four days to write the first chapter of Posies and Paper Trails, and as a slow writer, that's something I was (still am) really proud of. I told myself that I was perfectly able to keep up that writing pace, and so I moved on to the second chapter.

The second chapter

When I was drafting the second chapter, I came to realize that I'd began my story too early. Most of what I'd written in the first chapter wasn't doing anything for the plot. It was just me trying to figure out where to start writing my novel. The second chapter felt more like a first chapter to me. It established the everyday life of the Main Character and contained the inciting incident. I still wasn't wholly satisfied with it, but at least I had the feeling the story was going somewhere. Unfortunately, that feeling did not last very long.

The third chapter

I'm currently working on the third chapter of my first draft, and I'm slowly losing focus. I keep writing and writing and writing, but the story isn't going anywhere. It's frustrating. I already took some distance from Posies and Paper Trails to figure out how to move on from where I am now, but instead of making things better, it made things worse. Not only have I lost focus, I've also began to doubt my choice for third-person and to hate the fact that my story is not as dark as I wanted it to be when I plotted it. So, basically, I'm feeling a strong need to edit or start from scratch.

The rest of the novel

I'm not going to let myself give into that need. The art of writing is in the rewriting, and that will be done once the first draft is completed. I know writing the entire first draft without editing will be hard. It will demand a lot of willpower and self-control not to give up and start anew, but I can do it. I will do it. I've already started writing this novel, so I am going to finish it as well.

Coming up with an idea for a story has never been hard for me. It was growing that seed into a full novel that has been the problem. I've never completed a novel, and while I used to blame it on my perfectionist fear of failure, I now know the problem lies in not being able to transform an idea into a story worth telling.
For years, I wrote by the seat of my pants, but recently I discovered that that doesn't work for me anymore. I realized that if I ever wanted to finish a novel, I shouldn't sit down and start writing the moment an idea pops into my head. What I needed to do was brainstorm and work on a basic plot and outline before I started writing, and that is what I did with my current project.

Story idea

The initial idea for my story developed quite a while ago, but for a long time, I didn't know what to do with it. So, I shelved the idea, and put my energy in different projects until April. The 15th of April to be precise. I had been binge-watching Peaky Blinders and come across the Spotlight trailer on Youtube, and that sparked an idea. Not wanting to lose it, I immediately opened Notes on my laptop and wrote down everything I could think of. It wasn't much, but by the next day, I had the bare bones of the story on paper.

Brainstorming

While I was fleshing out the skeleton plot, it turned out that I wasn't fully satisfied with it. Something was missing and I couldn't put my finger on it. So again, I decided to set it aside, but this time I wasn't going to work on different projects. I would use my energy to brainstorm instead. For a month, I put all the ideas I could come up with down in an old, unused notebook that I had found in the back of a desk drawer, and halfway May I had a breakthrough. Suddenly, I knew what had been missing and the best part of it was that there weren't any drastic changes to be made to the basic plot I already had. I only had to add a few things, and then it would be a story worth telling.
Another good thing that came out of brainstorming: I was able to give my new project a decent title. Instead of calling my novel Untitled (like I usually do with new projects), I refer to it as Posies and Paper Trails.

As a lover of stories in all forms, I have created an account of imaginary people and events from an early age. I played pretend with friends and family, dreamed about scenarios that wouldn't happen in a million years, and wrote fanfiction that shouldn't have seen the light of day.

Though I'm too old to play pretend and no longer interested in writing fanfiction, I still love to daydream and write stories about characters whom I have created entirely on my own. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I've decided to try my hand at writing a full-length novel, and with this blog I want to document my writing journey from the blank page to a finished book.