Breaking Ground

I don’t remember what got me started on my last novel. It just poured out of me, the idea of three kids brought together under mysterious circumstances and discovering they had superpowers.

This one, the one I started today, is more complicated. I’ve had a vague outline of this novel since at least 2006, maybe 2005. The idea has been percolating for all that time, but when it came time to write it, I wrote “Civic Powers” instead, all 160,000 words of it.

Now I’ve broken ground on “Seedling,” and it feels a bit weird to be actually hoeing this dirt that’s been laying fallow for all these years. (Enough metaphor for you?)

Getting started is tricky. You have to commit, at least until you change your mind. In the shower this morning I settled on writing in first-person, and telling the story with a single narrator, rather than the multiple-narrator approach I had considered. Too hard, too confusing, and not necessary. My character has a lot of spare time on his hands — he can tell my whole story, tell it about himself and about all the other characters in the book. So we’ll see how that goes.

My original outline starts with a few time-jumps, but I’ve decided not to write it that way. If I want to pull out a prologue that’s set toward the end of the story, I can do that in rewrite. For now I’m going to try to be more linear, following the idea that my character is writing this book while killing time locked inside a — well, that would be telling.

Also, thanks to my friend Marck for giving me more to read this month. Even if it’s not his novel.