Random Thoughts on Writing

I have struggled for a long time (literally years) to write fiction that I like. It is not the actual writing that's hard, it's liking what I write. I have won NaNoWriMo twice now, but I have never been happy with what I've written.

Today, as I sat down to try to plan out a new novel, I am deciding to take a new approach. In the past, I have always tried to write the type of book I like to read (scifi, dystoian, fantasy, general teen fiction) and it hasn't worked out too well. I'm realizing that maybe I need to take a note from John Steinbeck, who is one of my favorite authors of all time.

A long time ago, I remember reading that his first novels (which I have not yet read), were fantasy, King Arthur type stuff, because he had been told that was what was popular. Those books did terribly, and he realized he had to take a new approach. He decided to scrap everything he had been told and he wrote what he knew. He wrote about the people and places he loved the most, and his readers loved. Books like The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men made him famous.

I'm thinking that maybe I need to try the same thing. I've spent two, almost three, years trying to write about things I know very little about. When I think about it, the pieces of my own writing I feel the bast about are my opinion essays and articles about things that matter to me. My two best pieces of writing (in my opinion), are an essay about Great Expectations I wrote last year, and a responsive essay I wrote on Ben Johnson's "On Education and Style." Maybe, someday, I'll share those here.

Both of those are essays on things that I care about and believe in. Maybe I need to take the same approach with my fiction. With all this in mind, I have a new plan, which I am sharing here for accountability.

I am going to try to have a finished novel by the end of 2013 with it's basis in my own experiences. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do yet, but I am going to try to "write what I know." That doesn't mean that it'll be a memoir (I only have 15 years to write about, and it wouldn't be that interesting), but there are many themes in my life that I can pull from. I'm sure homeschooling, which is hugely important in my life, will be one of them. My family has gone through a very tumultuous last few years, and I am sure those experiences, and their effect on me, will be prominent in my story as well.

I am a planner at heart, and I hope to spend the next few months brainstorming for, and eventually outlining, my novel. Maybe it won't go anywhere, or maybe it'll be the best thing I've done so far. We'll have to wait and see. Whatever happens, I'll try to post here about it regularly. At least once a month, I will try to post about how this new project is going, even if it's going nowhere.