Milestone
I haven’t been here for awhile. Part of it is probably my lack of confidence. I realize I have a hard time believing anything I think about or write about is of any interest to anyone else.
But, in contradiction to that, I really haven’t been here because I’ve been finishing the first draft of my novel. I did so on December 30 after an unprecedented crunch. Last month, I wrote almost 54,000 words—more than twice what I did in any other month. Now I have a 240K word draft of a novel, with a beginning, middle and end, characters I really like, surprisingly robust thematic resonance and enough of a foundation for the further drafts that I really do feel good about it.
Fiction feels different from non-fiction in the sense that I don’t worry nearly as much about whether someone would want to read my fiction. I don’t know why that is. It could be that I am more comfortable and confident with fiction to the point that I’ve achieved a higher level of proficiency than with non-fiction. I say proficiency, but I mean something more like attitude. When it comes to my fiction, I find I like what I do well enough to not worry too much about whether others might like it or not. It’s oddly self-justifying in that way.
But with non-fiction, I often end up concluding it’s not worth the time to try to tease out what I think and make an argument about something. While I can see the possibility that there might be an audience for some of my stories, I feel like there’s not a lot of interest in seeing what a not-already-established middle-aged, cisgender, heterosexual, white man thinks about anything in real life. That’s not a complaint but it stops me from bothering with it, even though it shouldn’t.
I hope I can eventually overcome that and write non-fiction more easily and with less concern.
In any case, I’m gratified that I finished my draft, which was my goal for 2022. I’ve been relaxing and doing very little for a couple weeks to allow myself a little rest. Before I return to the book for another draft, I have a lot of other things I’d like to spend time on.