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Saturday, March 17, 2007

Novelists need large stoves

I was struck by this post by Alex Chee listing his various projects and ideas for novels. In passing he remarks that one of his ideas "has been on a slow simmer for 17 years." As someone with many possible projects for novels in various stages of cooking, I know just what he's talking about. While the project I'm working on now, a novel about an American office girl who gets sent to Bangalore to open up a customer call center, was started on the spur of the moment (and was intended to be finished within a year, though I've been working for almost two and a half years on it now), I have many other ideas and intentions for projects which are also "on a slow simmer."

Some of them I fully intend to do, like a novel about working in the software industry called Knock Yourself Out. Others are ideas which seem really attractive but which I doubt I have the means to do well, like a psychological mystery set in Japan or a series of novellas about a baseball pitcher (I have all the titles for the novellas, and even an epigram, but that's all).

Sometimes I think about all the projects I have in queue and the number of years I have left to live. I'm almost 51 years old, so if I manage to write a novel every four years or so that means I only have time to do four or five more in my life. Therefore I ought to choose my projects wisely, because I can't get time back.

technorati: Alex Chee, writing novels, novelists

Labels: fiction writing, novel writing, novelists

Comments:

I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.
But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film "The Hours". This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf's line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines. Rad more How to write a Novel

# posted by Poons : 1:27 PM