Writing

I started to write a book. It was going to be great. A variation of the "Millennium Bug" scare. I sat down and just started typing. I made it about two pages. Then it sucked.

Being an avid reader of many kinds of fiction and having (I hope) an active imagination, I thought "How hard could it be?" Yep, I’m a fool.

The beginning was easy. I occasionally play a role-playing game with several friends and I was thinking of creating a campaign to GM. This was in early 1999 and the "Millennium Bug" was really starting to gain momentum so I thought I would incorporate it into my campaign somehow. A lot of ideas rattled around in my head for a while and then the role-playing kind of petered out, the year 2000 came and went and the anti-climax of the "Millennium Bug" kind of took the wind out of my sails. But the seed was planted.

A few years later, after getting married and having a kid, I started to wonder about writing again. I would sit at the computer late at night surfing the internet or playing games and think I should be doing something more productive. Or at least cathartic. So I started writing rants. Just blowing off steam and exercising my creative muscle. Throwing most of it away because it was silly or not really for public consumption. But it made me feel like I could write.

So, one night I was merrily typing along and the "Millennium Bug" thing pops back into the forefront of my brain. Cool. We all know what really happened in 2000 so writing the story differently didn’t seem to make much sense so I thought "What if someone used the scare as a model for something else?" A new idea was born.

The hook was easy. I literally used it to cement my concept as I was formulating it. Kind of a stream of conscious process that made it about three paragraphs. Then I had to think. There is more to a book than three paragraphs. You have to have more than a hook.

Characters! All books have characters. I would create some. Hmm... I discovered that it is easy to create general "them’s" and "they’s". Individual characters were much harder. Sure, it’s easy to say "I will call him Bob, and he is a security guard", but then Bob has to say and do something. With someone or something else. And have a personality, and background while he is doing it. Ok, I’ll think about that for a while.

Which opens my eyes to the next hurdle. The "something else". I need to have a plot. There has to be a plan to tell the story. Do I want Bob to tell the story or just be a person in the story? Do I want it to be detailed and accurate in how the incident was achieved, or do I want to just tell of the outcome? Do I want a thriller or a drama? Or... ? Crap!

Once I pick a theme then I have to create history so I know what the facts are. An outline. Double crap! Do I start at the beginning or tell the end and work backwards? Write one side at a time or in parallel? How many steps do I take to tell the story? How detailed should each step be? Suddenly there were more questions than answers.

Suddenly in the course of a few minutes I had gone from enthusiastic to overwhelmed. Not fun. Not conducive to being the next best-selling author. Or even a not-so-well selling author. Books are hard. Maybe someday I will sit down and work on a time-line and history for my idea. Maybe after that I will decided how I want to write it. Maybe even later still I will work out characters with backgrounds and personalities. And eventually if all that happens and the planets align correctly, and... I will write my book.

Until then, I seem to be about a two page guy.