A Spork in the Road

I’m working on a novel.

It is a literary novel, and it came to me in a flash: I worked out the initial outline in a day (two weeks ago) and wrote the first chapter last week. After slogging word by agonizing word through my previous novel effort, which is still untitled and lacks an outline, for half a dozen years, I’m now looking at a novel that could conceivably take me 15 weeks (one per chapter) to have an initial draft in hand.

Synopsis (One Sentence)
Forty-seven hours before their youngest brother’s wedding, Tasha Cooper’s sister Annie fails to get off her plane, so Tasha jumps a flight with her uptight sister Jill in a race against time, a hurricane, and their own family demons as they track down Annie and try to get back in time for the ceremony.

The synopsis itself is getting tweaked as I go along, but here’s the thing: I have a synopsis. This fills me with authorial hope that I’ve finally caught a novel by the tail, and may be able to wrestle it into manuscript form.

The Faery Court was a popular summer pastime because it had the full support of two out of three players. Tasha claimed the role of Faery Engineer, a privilege which went undisputed because of its incomprehensibility to the other two. This left the role of Faery Queen open to Jill, who was usually demoted to secondary roles and relished a game in which she could so easily assume the highest royal ranking. Annie, when she was not staging unsuccessful coups, assigned herself a rotating set of positions ranging from Faery Cook to Faery Princess to Faery Fashion Designer.

I have discovered, in various stints writing for the game industry, that careful planning is not inimical to creativity, but rather the reverse; that it’s much easier to write well when you know roughly what you are writing about; and something new for me, which is that words are disposable. They’re just words. You can write a beautifully moving scene filled with evocative imagery and deep insights, and if it doesn’t serve the purpose of the larger work, you just tear it out and start afresh.

I’ve already ripped a couple scenes out of the first chapter and rebuilt them. I didn’t even do version control — that careful preservation of previously written words that is crucial to technical writing but that becomes a kind of safety net, for me at least, in creative writing. And I’m trying to write without a net. If I fall, no lasting harm is done, but if I play it safe, I may as well shove the manuscript in a drawer right now and stop wasting everyone’s time.