Hi Everyone,
Despite the delay, I have been working on this. Based on your feedback and my own revision efforts, I fiddled around with Chapter 1 for quite some time. In the end, I just had a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that more than tinkering at the edges was necessary. As a result, I’ve made some big structural changes in the overall story arc I have in mind, yes, but even more importantly, I’ve switched from the third person to a first person point of view (which took more time than you might think to revise).
I hesitated to do this, as I’m fearful people will think I’m talking about my own life, something that’s common with novelists. I once read an interview with John Green, the famous young adult novelist, who said people ask him all the time if his novels are things that happened to him when he was younger. The short answer is no, that’s not how it works.
For example, as you will see in my rewrite of Chapter 1, I have a new character who asks to interview Jeremy when he is an older man about his first love (another change I made). I got that idea watching TikTok videos where I saw a guy doing something very similar. My experience with writing a dozen short stories and one full length novel is that the creative process is more ambiguous. Eventually, the characters become real people to you and, most of the time, I don’t know where their words and actions come from. Some are inspired by real life events, but most are not. Characters are often amalgamations of real people I know with a good dose of imagination thrown in to fill them out completely.
Even the idea for the story itself can be inspired by something I’ve seen or been experiencing, but are not recreations of them. For example, the first novel I wrote was inspired by stories in the news about sentencing young black males to long jail sentences, but the story itself is not about that. For this novel (more likely novella), challenging relationships have obviously been on my mind, being recently divorced and staggering through the world of online dating since ;-) But I think that’s also an issue that is universal ...who amongst us has not struggled with love, or the idea that love might not be enough?
Anyway, I’m sending you this update as a separate email; my rewrite of Chapter 1 should hit your inbox immediately after that. I’ve already been writing Chapter 2, so that should come your way sooner than my rewrite of Chapter 1 - I finally feel like I’m headed in the right direction, though I’m sure more bouts with plot, character development, and so forth will reappear. For anyone who has ever written a book, a thesis, a dissertation, etc., you know this feeling ...it’s part of the deal.
One last thing now. I have been looking at all your feedback. With some, I decided to use that feedback and make changes - some small, some large. One person, for example, pointed out that my description of Nica kissing Jeremy didn’t make sense given the difference in their height. Good catch there. And I began to think about changing the point of view because of a comment someone sent to me privately, actually. Other suggestions I considered but declined to follow, not because they were bad suggestions, but for various reasons. Mostly, I’m trying to share the process of writing a novel with you, in real time. As I have already, I’ll consider your input, but the main reason is to share the experience with those who might be interested in the process of writing a longer piece like this, of how that happens, of what it looks like. Thank you again for taking this journey with me.