Writing, My Journey

I Started writing many years ago, but the story's more complicated than that.

In high school in the 1980s, I was a straight maths-science nerd. In year 12, I remember thinking, 'I wont ever need English Skills. I'll be working in a scientific lab with mass spectrometers and scanning electron microscopes. Why are they making me do English?'

For a long time I did work in scientific labs. Then my career changed and I worked with computers and data. During this time I would imagine science fiction and fantasy stories. Sometimes I would write an exciting scene or two. Slowly I began to realise that my poor spelling, grammar and writing skills in general, were holding me back from being able to share the exciting movies playing out in my mind.

I now realise that communication skills are essential, no matter what your chosen career. I wish that I had made more of an effort back in school to acquire these skills. I have made the effort since then.

About a year ago I started writing snippets of a tale that I thought would make a good story. I wrote the scenes that I felt had the most impact and importance. I was doing this writing after work, and on weekends, whenever I could find the time. In October 2014, I came to the realisation that I was able write a book. I felt for the first time in my life that I would be able to complete something of that length and achieve a minimum level of readability. Six weeks ago I finished up at work and started writing full time.

Starting with the bits and pieces I already had written, I set out to complete a first draft. The objective of my writing was volume. I'd never written anything as large as a complete novel before and I was unsure if I could. A little Google research found that the average size for a novel is about 74,000 words. Some simple word counts on Kindle novels I already owned and liked gave an average of about 85,000 words. I wrote in the way that was easiest for me with the objective of reaching about 120,000 words

By the time I had the story to a point where I felt I could end the book, I had reached 140,000 words. It only took five weeks. So now I know I can reach the volume easily, the focus is on editing and assembling the writing into a book.

I initially wrote each of the major character's stories separately.  Now during the editing process I am interweaving the different characters stories. This, and the fact I had written some scenes early then had to write the 'connective tissue' that would join them up, has made the editing more challenging. There are timeline issues and I have had to move some parts of the timeline around to make the pace of the book work better. This has led to context issues, where a sentence or a paragraph has been moved and it now implies a context that does not match the surrounding text.

Writing this way, was a direct result of tackling my largest concern at the time. Could I write a complete novel! Now that I know that I can, and how difficult the editing can be, I plan on writing my next book differently. More on that some other time.

A.I.Marin