This post will be kind of a test for me. Instead of working it up on the word processor or collecting notes throughout the day to give me some starting ideas, I'm just diving right in. That's the test, though. I really want to see how this turns out with just a purely spontaneous attempt.
I have seven days left in the school year, which is to say I actually have nine days I'll be required to show up at my school and work, but I count myself in the group of teachers that only keeps track of instructional days. Once the teaching part of the year is done, we start shedding stress minutes after that final bell that sends the kids home for the summer. I don't mind coming in to work another two days after I'm done teaching. In fact, a part of me is kind of looking forward to it. (It's worth clarifying that I have one less instructional day and one more non-instructional day because distance learning staff is on a slightly different schedule.
The reason I'm bringing this up is because as soon as my summer break is officially underway, I plan on starting to write my next manuscript for real. I've played at it a little during the past several months, and I've collected a great number of invaluable notes, but I knew I wasn't going to be at my best while trying to wander through Pandemic Fog, so I pushed the start date back to the beginning of summer. Now that this date is so very close, I feel much more ready to begin than I did six or three or even two months ago. Because of that, I think it's time to write out my credo.
I got this idea from one of my writing professors. I was declared as an English major with a creative writing minor once upon a time, before I switched over to elementary education. I already had enough English credits to just reconfigure them into a minor, and that included two of the three creative writing classes I was slated to take. One was playwriting, which I only took because fiction was full that quarter. Ironically, a play is the only thing I've actually been paid to write...so far. If you were a fan of Elk River Community Theater productions back in 1995, hey, thanks for coming!
Surprise! I digress. I told you this wasn't prewritten -- now you see the rambling evidence. Anyway. The idea of composing a credo as you are about to begin a big writing project is supposed to put you in a mindset of what it is you want the new project to be. It gives you a document you can refer to later that will let you reflect on what you wanted to story to be like in the beginning, what it's becoming, and how much of the original idea do you still want to preserve. With that in mind, here are ten big things I've learned during these past months about what I want out of the manuscript I'm about to write:
1. It's horror. When I started getting serious about writing back in college, I wrote horror almost exclusively, probably because most of my fiction of choice was Stephen King. This one is a ghost story. I don't want readers to react to it with jump scares from shocking moments or stomach turns from scenes of attention-grabbing gross-outs, but I want them to get chills. I want goosebumps rippling through their skin. I want them turning more lights on if they dare to read it at night. During those last intangible moments before falling asleep, I want them speculating about what in the supernatural realm could possibly be real, and hoping it isn't.
2. I want my cast of characters to be so thoroughly and intricately developed that they could be taken out of the ghost story and dropped into nearly any other story and remain intact.
3. I want the story I tell around the scary parts to be compelling enough on its own that it could stand as a novel without having to rely on the haunty parts.
4. At least once, I want the readers to hurt. The kind of hurt where they have to put the book down and walk away from it for a time, if not holler and curse me out for what I've made happen.
5. I want readers to have characters they either love or pity or fear, or maybe all of those things at once.
6. I want to establish a sense of place so tangible that someone reading the book and getting really into it would feel surprised to find themselves at home when they look up from the pages.
7. I want moments, either of the story or the characterization, to border on literary. It's hard to explain precisely what I mean by that. I tend to think of literary fiction as the kind of book where the structure and style of the pure writing is just as important, if not more important, than the story itself. (It's possible and super likely there are hundreds of people in publishing who would say my description of literary is completely wrong, by the way, but I'm kind of in the "who cares" camp on this. It's my credo after all, not theirs.) I'm not looking to write literary fiction; this is legitimately the first full manuscript I'll be attempting with an adult audience in mind, and I honestly don't know if I even have "literary" in my skill set. But moments of it? I can accidentally back into writing the occasional good line, so I think I can pull it off.
8. I want things to happen that people will not predict. I don't want to color so far outside the ghost story lines that I'll find myself working in a completely different coloring book, but I do want to steer around the more obvious tropes of the genre.
9. In my mind, I'm aiming for somewhere around 400 pages. Of course, there would be at least nine different hoops to jump through before attaining that number, even if it turns out to be reasonable for the story. But I like the idea of writing something with just a little bit of heft to it.
10. I want to write something that will make readers remember my name. Not because remembering my name is all that important to me (other than hopefully getting them interested in a follow-up someday), but because I want it to be that level of good. A story strong enough to make people pause and look at the cover and think, "Damn. Who is this guy?"
And there we have it! Credo established, notes taken, mind organized. The real work begins in just over two weeks. It'll probably be ready for my usual circle of aggressively-recruited volunteers to read in...well, let's be honest: God alone knows how long. But someday.
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