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hello novel
i figure that the novel writing venture that i will embark on will not be the pursuit of the Great American Novel ™; rather, it will be the “Hello World” of novel writing for me: i will learn the technical details of novel writing, including such details as setting up dialogue, character biographies, maintaining consistency of location and position of the characters in a scene, and other such mundane details.
framing it in such terms allows me the freedom to learn these basic things and write for volume without worrying (too much) about the quality of my prose and plot. “Hello World” is not about producing shockingly insightful ways to say “Hello World”. it’s about taking a basic, mundane, uninteresting functionality and implementing it. as such, i have decided to implement a very well known, basic, formulaic plot, which would go a long way to guaranteeing that i will see this task through, as i would not have to worry about what needs to happen next in any given scene. given my reading habits, it is clear that this plot will have to be the very typical historical romance, with no frills.
last month, when i cheated and wrote a few pages for this project, i started writing about me and seppo. the story was fictionalized and the characters had different names, but i figured it would be easiest not to have to come up with characters and their voices by going with knowns. in the first scene, i accidentally injure and hospitalize seppo. heh. i think i might take that somewhere in the future, but for now, i will be working on a very cookie-cutter story which will purposely be built to lack in originality. 😀 way to set the low bar. i’m pretty excited about it though.
but i regress
i am listening to Chicago’s “I Don’t Want To Live Without Your Love”. shortly before that, i listened to New Kids On The Block’s “I’ll Be Loving You”, and Skid Row’s “18 and Life”. i could still pick out Donnie Wahlberg’s lines. bwahahah. needless to say, i just threw some bucks down for a trip down memory lane.
yeah, i know the songs are not good and have no real lasting quality. but listening to them still makes me as giddy as a twelve year old, which is when i first heard all these songs. i don’t know why i enjoyed these songs. probably because they were popular and for no other reason, as my musical tastes had not yet been developed. yet, i still enjoy them, and there is no other music (or anything else, for that matter) that can evoke such a sense of how i was at that age. when i play this music, i can remember when i couldn’t see beyond high school, when i believed in the innate goodness of people, when i drew little hearts all over my notebooks, when little curlicues were a must in my writing, when friends made each other mix tapes, when it was important to get my jeans cuffed just right, when the best thing in the world was seeing that guy at his locker between classes and when the worst thing in the world was not being allowed to stay 5 minutes longer on the phone.
heh, i have a selective memory. that certainly was not the worst thing in the world at the time.