The month of June, what time I could spend on writing, was mostly on miscellaneous tasks that had fallen by the wayside for a while, and on pulling together the proposal for Screwtape’s Good Advice. With that in the mail last Wednesday, I turned my attention to the proposal for In Front of Fifty-Thousand Screaming People, my baseball thriller. I first started on the proposal, and tidied up the synopsis and wrote the sell sheet. Actually, I did some of this overlapping the SGA proposal, while waiting on my beta readers to respond. I did some market research, and figured out what books out now would be reasonably like mine.
Then I turned to, or rather returned to, writing the book. I began FTSP in June 2004, after pitching the idea to an editor at a conference. At that time all I had was a concept with some plot outline. He liked the idea, and said to send him a few chapters. So I quickly pounded out a prologue an two chapters and sent them. He still liked the concept, but wasn’t as thrilled with the writing as I would have liked. I set the book aside, partly not knowing what to do, and partly from the busyness of life.
Over the next three years I pulled it out and worked on it from time to time. I ditched the prologue, as the editor suggested, and polished the writing of the first two chapters. I added a third and polished it. I began a fourth. An idea came to me for a scene well into the book, which I thought would be about 2/3 the way through, and I wrote that. I worked on a plot outline and character development, writing page-long essays in the words of the four main characters, stating in their own words what their motivations were for the events in the book. But I did not do any serious writing, continuous writing for days in a row, as I had done with Doctor Luke’s Assistant.
Friday night I decided I’d better get back to this. The agent wants the first thirty pages with the proposal, and when I merged chapters 1, 2, 3, and the partial 4 I had only twenty pages. I figured out what to do with Chapter 4, and finished it as a short chapter. The plot analysis I had done as part of writing the synopsis told me I had to move the scene I thought would be 2/3 the way through to become the first plot point, meaning it needs to be 1/4 to 1/3 the way through. I did that, and made a couple of related changes. Then I sat down on Friday, Independence Day, to write the fifth chapter, intending to do serious writing.
Lo and behold, I couldn’t write it! I wrote “Chapter 5” at the top of a re-use page, then sat there, not sure what to do. My plotting did not get down to the level where I had to plan what the next chapter would be about. Yesterday (Saturday), I went back to it and managed to write about half a page. That was a start, but not the type of progress I needed to make. Was this a case of writer’s block, my first? I have had times when I was not motivated to write for various reasons, usually the whirlwind of life causing my brain to shut down for a while, but never have the words not come to me when I wanted them to.
After a while the reason for this inability to add this chapter became clear. For the last seven months I have been concentrating on non-fiction as a probable easier way to break into publishing, and purposely laid fiction aside. I brainstormed the SGA book and began it. I turned my Elijah and Elisha study into a potential book and brainstormed it. I thought about ten other Bible/small group studies I could write as follow-ups. A fruitful career as a writer of Bible and small group studies danced before my eyes in waking moments, and through the subconscious in sleeping moments. I had done no fiction writing at all, until after the Blue Ridge conference, with the interest of an agent staring me in the face, I at least read my manuscript and made some edits. I shared chapters 1 and 2 with my new critique group, and received feedback. Now that I’m ready to return to fiction, I can’t get my mind around it.
It’s hard to change gears between fiction and non-fiction–at least it is for me, this first time to do so. What will the future hold? If my career goes the way I want it to (at this stage of my “career”), I will be switching regularly between fiction and non-fiction. I’d better learn to shift those gears effortlessly, on a day to day basis if necessary. This will be especially true if I follow-through with plans to market and publish the Documenting America newspaper column.
Help! I’m a prisoner of a career that hasn’t even started yet.
The good news is that, as I fell asleep Saturday night, a scene late in the book came to me. I wrote it mentally lying in bed, then wrote it on paper Saturday morning. Today, while eating lunch, the way to write chapter 5 came to me, and I’ll be hitting the keys for that after I finish this post. So maybe the gears shifted over the last couple of days. May it be so.
