I’ve been thinking long and hard about my book for a while now because I don’t want to end up writing fifty pages and then deleting it all again. The genre and tone of the book has been shifting back and forth repeatedly and I’ve found that it mainly depends on my mood. If I’m in a bad mood I want to write about despair and blood and writing a detailed essay about how much force it would take for the protagonist to snap someone’s fingers into three pieces. If I’m in an empty mood then I want to write about apathy, boredom, and make the book primarily focus on inner conflict and how the protagonist quietly goes insane. If I’m in a good mood then I’ll want to write wholesome scenes where things are all happy and fine. And since my mood changes so quickly and so often if I try to write something over the span of a few months the differences in tone will stand out glaringly. If I try to write something neutral when I’m in a bad mood then subconsciously I’ll end up using bitter and hateful language and each bitter word might not affect much. But each word adds up and the tone changes from the protagonist lazily explaining his daily routine with little care to the protagonist complaining about the repetitive nature of his life and despising everyone around him. And so when I read over the chapter I notice the way the protagonist talks isn’t how I intended him to say it so I’ll have to write everything all over again and that just a burns me out so I delete everything and quit because my heart isn’t really into writing anything anymore. Then one day, as I go about my life ideas just click together and I think that I must write it down before I forget, and the cycle continues. Genre is another issue. At first I wanted to make a psychological horror novel about depression but I decided that it wasn’t very scary and I couldn’t really think of a good premise, just interesting scenarios that would happen in the book. After that failed I thought about writing a mystery book but gave up straight away because crafting a mystery is harder than you think. First, (let’s just assume the mystery is a murder case because that’s what they all are) you have to create a victim, a murderer, and their motive. Second, you create how the killer got away with it. Third you have to sprinkle around clues for the brilliant detective to piece together. But that’s hard because you have to explain why the clues exist (as in how those clues came to be) and then you have to make them cryptic enough so that the reader doesn’t figure out the mystery near the beginning, because you want them to figure things out as the detective does. There’s more things like the progression of the investigation and things like that which I won’t get into. Then I wanted to write a fantasy novel but the thing is you have to create and entire fictional world for that to happen. And so I spent a while envisioning a world that felt alive and lived in. Sort of. I completed a little bit of my world and then gave up because I’m not very creative. It was going to take place in an underground tower with twelve stories. At the very bottom the protagonist wakes up underneath a tree in an endless field of grass. Except the grass is glowing white like a light bulb and so are the leaves of the the tree. The base of the tree is pitch black, and so is the sky. The only light comes from the plants, and the stars in the sky. My idea for the setting was that it was going to resemble a beautiful ethereal black and white painting. At “night” the plants would sleep and dim, so the cavern would go completely black like it was nighttime. The “stars” are actually holes shining down light from the story above the one the protagonist wakes up in. Anyway, I’ve dedicated too much space to talking about this. After I abandoned my fantasy novel I decided to innovate and make my own genre. The nothing genre, which is when the story has no plot. Then I quickly realized it is difficult to write an intriguing story with no plot. Next, I decided to try my hand at writing a romance novel. Unlike to previous few genres, it seemed like even a novice such as myself could write one. At first I wasn’t very into this idea for a few reasons.
1. Romance novels are boring.
2. Nobody likes romance novels other than lonely people.
3. My first book should represent the things I’ll be writing, and in the future I’d like to write more thought provoking stories that are about inner turmoil, depression, sociopaths, and murder. I don’t think a romance novel would fit right with the other things I’m going to write.
But then I thought, why couldn’t I do both? A romantic story about a sociopath. I’m sure it’s been done a dozen times before but maybe I can add a few things to make it unique. And that’s when I thought of the absolute perfect genre. Psychological romance. Half the chapters are psychological dedicated to the protagonist’s indifferent outlook on the world. Neutral chapters. The other half is dedicated to romance and exploration of emotions. Happy chapters. And maybe I could even through an extremely morbid chapter I there somewhere, though it’ll be a little tricky to weave it in while still seeming natural and maintains a cohesive tone. Anyway, a romance story needs two protagonists. Three if you want a love triangle. That seems pretty cliched, so I’m not doing that. Also, I don’t want to go through the effort of writing that many people. I decided to first create the protagonist and then create the other one after based on how the protagonist turned out. Motives, goals, personality, aspirations. The protagonist ended up being pretty easy to make. Motive: none, goals: none, personality: nonexistent, aspirations: none. Of course, that’s not all there was to it. There was the matte of how the MC would narrate the story in a way that made sense with who they were. Word choice, tone, and sentence structure all created the narrator’s voice, which was very important because a bad narrator makes things boring to read.I wanted the protagonist to be a person that was uninterested with life in a way that could be relatable. I toyed with the idea of the protagonist killing stray cats in an effort to ward off the boredom but that disconnected the audience and the protagonist. You don’t have to relate to the characters in a romance novel and it would be pretty interesting to see someone who kills cats in their free time to fall in love. But I wanted the readers to still understand the character. Not too much, just enough to empathize and to root for them. And if the protagonist murdered a cat the audience would probably dislike them and if the characters in your romance novel aren’t likable then you’ve failed. Next I began crafting the other character. They had to flow well with the protagonist and their interactions together have to have the audience rooting for them to be together, which will inevitably tear their hearts apart when I make them both die. Just kidding, probably. I’m not sure about the ending yet. Lastly, I started thinking about the audience. Who would read this book? The answer is nobody. Without extensive marketing and advertisement this book will probably never be popular. If I was writing some Shakespeare level stuff then maybe, but I’m not. The genre isn’t very mainstream either. And it’ll probably drown in an endless sea of other books being published. What I’m hoping for is that it’ll gain a cult following with a small group of people. Start with maybe twenty people really liking it. And then they discuss it to know if anyone else has read it because they like the book enough to want to talk about it, and the book spreads slowly to more and more like minded people, eventually reaching cult classic status. Even something as small as that would be unlikely because I’ll probably have a lot of grammar errors and I don’t know how to properly format a book, and the book would have to be really good for people to overlook that. Probably the only people who are going to read it are my family members. Or maybe not even they will read it. Because all of my cousins combined have the reading ability of a rock with a broken pair of eyeglasses. Something is very wrong if you are 10 or 9 (I forgot how old you are again) and the longest book you’ve ever read is Flat Stanley. Or Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I don’t know what kind of books you guys read. Do you guys even read? I don’t think so. (Reading manga isn’t equivalent to reading a book. Not that I don’t like manga, it’s just not the same.) As for the adults the only books they seem to own are things like math textbooks and political books maybe? Or I at least I think they do. Actually I don’t think they own any books. It’s difficult to imagine them reading a literature book and impossible to imagine them enjoying it. I think my book would connect more with teenagers to young adults anyway. So not even my own family would read and enjoy my book. But I still want to write it. It’s more of a project for myself. I want to write it and revise my book until I can say that I’m satisfied with my work. If it turns out really bad then that’s okay because I still like it and I’m definitely not stopping at just one book. I haven’t yet reached the point where I can say that I like my work so until then I’ll have to keep grinding away hours tapping away on a keyboard, using ancient software to write everything.
Side note: writing is really time consuming because I spend more time at the table thinking than writing. Usually I write about two to three full pages and when I look at the clock forty minutes have passed. I don’t have any time to relax and play on my switch which is an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice. Once school starts I’ll probably feel burnt out once I get home and all I’ll want to do is look at my phone and sleep and I’ll also have homework to do. I probably just won’t write on weekdays which want be good for production. And then there’s band practice on the weekends. I’ve decided that even if I have to throw a temper tantrum like a baby and jump off a cliff and hold a gun to my head I’m not going to band because I despise it so much and I’m willing to fail the class and just so I can spend my free time writing. Last thing, there are probably a lot of errors in this blog, more than usual, because I’m writing on a phone with a tiny keyboard and it’s late and I’m tired. As you can probably tell I don’t proof check my blogs because they’re very long and I’ve spent all my energy writing it. And it’s not like any of you are reading this keenly anyway and I’m guess everybody just quickly speed reads my blogs so I don’t know why I go through the trouble of writing so much. Again, writing is to give me enjoyment, not to give others enjoyment by reading it, though if they do then that’s just an added bonus.
it took me two whole hours to write this. Writing is a long and tedious process.