The Game Plan Means Less Hyperventilating

Well, this is the first blog on my adventures of writing my first novel.  Writing to me is always an adventure.  I love to get lost in the characters until they feel so real.  I also love to get lost in the words.  My family thinks with words I am a bit of a perfectionist.  I love words though and even in school could not get enough of literature or grammar classes.  I have written my whole life.  In fact, as a kid my mother used to get so upset because I would write on my clothes, my desk at school, the walls at home, just everywhere. 

The past few years have been a challenge and one day as I was talking to my mother she said to me that she had always hoped I would write a book.  This was not the first time she had said something similar but this was the first time I listened.  I guess we should always try to listen to our mothers, they really do know best.  Writing has always been my emotional outlet.  I am still that nerdy girl that writes in a journal everyday. Well, I guess just by writing this blog I am still that nerdy journal writing girl.

So I did it.  I decided to write my first novel.  Then, I was nervous.  I mean a whole novel is daunting and challenging.  It isn't like writing one of my poems or short stories.  This was a novel that in a perfect world I would want people to read.  Since my writing is so personal to me they would be reading and critiquing me.  After a moment of panic and hyperventilating over that fact I managed to finally find enough oxygen to breath again and I sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote.  I wrote so much I knocked out five chapters.  Yes I did!  Yeah for me.  Of course they were five awful chapters.

Unfortunately, or rather in this case fortunately, life does get in the way.  I have a job and a son to raise and a life to live.  Those five chapters sat until a few months later I pulled them back out and gasped at the mess they were in.  The characters were not defined and the story was too fast and all over the place.  I decided then and there that what I really needed to do was come up with a game plan.  That is exactly what I did.  I named the main characters and created an outline.  Boy my English teachers would be so proud right now that I am saying this.

It was amazing how much better I felt after doing that.  My thoughts were less frantic running around all over the place and settled into more of a pattern and it allowed me to begin to write with a bit more freedom and knowledge of the actual story.  And with that I end this first blog with the first lesson I learned for writing a first NOVEL.  Creating the game plan or outline of a book allows for the creativity to flow in an easier less erratic manner.