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.