Can I Really Pen the Next Great American Novel?

August 27, 2012

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So, for those of you who know me, you know I have always been a writer.  I may not have ever been a very good one, but I was always found with pen in hand at any given time, always carried a notebook around, and if I was not writing, my nose was in someone else’s book.  It is just such a huge part of who I am that it never seemed strange or unusual.  People would often ask me what was wrong if I didn’t have some form of the written word in my hand.

With the rise of technology, I tried my hand at doing so electronically.  I tried typing it out in Word.  I tried using several different writing software platforms.  You know what?  None of that works for me.  The realization hit me yesterday that technology is precisely my problem.  I have to go back to my roots.  

Thanks to this year’s generous school supply sales at the beginning of the school year, I have a stack of composition notebooks in the corner of the living room.  I went and grabbed one out last night as I was struck with yet another brilliant character idea.  All I really know about her so far is that she is 17 years old, lives in an area that was hit with major devastation in 2005, and that she has always felt like she was on the outside looking in on her own life.  Pretty basic and generic stuff right?  Somehow, I know this is going to turn into a fantasy novel, which is odd to me because I have never really written fantasy.  Most of my story ideas up until this point have been coming of age, overcoming obstacles and surviving adversity, real sob story meant to be a lifetime movie kind of stuff.  

And most of my story ideas fall apart and go into a junk drawer after about 7 or 8 pages.

But it would seem that none of the above apply this time.  I grabbed out my trusty college-ruled marble composition notebook.  I sat down to write, and the words flowed from my pen.  I cannot guarantee that any of it will make a danged bit of sense, or that it will even ever get published, and chances are it will be rewritten at least a half a dozen times before any of the rest of the world will ever see it but we shall see where it will end up and I will keep going with it.  Who knows, maybe one day, we will see my name on the New York Times Best Seller List and I will have finally arrived.

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