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.