The Fog of a New Novel

boat house fog

Originally uploaded by 416style

Obscuring fog drifts in for me. I really like this Creative Commons-Attribution photo of a Canadian foggy day, and it reflects some of my current feelings. A new novel like my Eulalie project, requires a huge amount of creation. World creation, character creation.

My last book, Heart of the Hunter, was easier in many ways in that I was already familiar with the characters from a previous novel attempt (a NaNoWriMo novel that got to about 40,000 words and then collapsed) and I was certainly well versed already in Cora-Ni, the fantasy world I've been creating and discovering since I was 8 years old.

Eulalie means that I have to get to know these people, these characters who have started to speak to me. It also means that I have the real world to draw from. Now, you may think that makes it easier for me, but it doesn't. I frequently have a hard time thinking of the real world as being full of the narrative juice that makes writing fun for me.

So I can linger in text over the complex machinations of a sorcerer preparing a spell, but the day-to-day life of a social worker trying to make ends meet leaves me with a certain kind of ennui. If I am not intrigued and interested, my readers surely won't be.

My own advice to someone in my situation is "write what you love." And the thing of it is, I love Eulalie House and all who live in her. I'm just trying to pick up on the literary grammar and syntax of how one creates a story in this toolset.

I think that's what I should stick to: why do I love these people? Why do I care about them? What happens to them and how can I explain it in a way that will get the reader to care about them? Good questions to keep coming back to.