I, unfortunately, must make a small confession. That title’s not entirely true. I mean, I’ve been writing ever since I learned to write–I didn’t just pick up a computer yesterday and learn how to write. But, in the past, I never wrote unless I needed to write. That changed this last year.
I’m a rising college freshman, and in my senior year of high school, I had a terrific English teacher. And one day, while completing a short story assignment, I came up with an idea for a much longer story. So I wrote a few elements of it into that short story and then I kept doing that. Either for assignments, or through short stories I’d write on my own, I built a story arc, building to the final story (which is going to be a book). You can see those stories at ]HugoKessler.com/nethersphere (it’s a blog format, so the first story is at the bottom–if you do bother to read them all, you will see that I got way more comfortable with writing short stories as the year progressed). Anyway, I’ve been writing the final story now, and it has been an interesting challenge.
First of all, after spending a year writing short stories, it was very difficult for me to switch to writing a book. I didn’t know how to write a story that long, with breaks and pauses and words. After planning this story for months, I struggled with getting it off the ground. I wasn’t sure where I wanted it to be tonally, or how I was going to plot things out. Then I read Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, which really inspired me to just let myself go and write like how I like to write. I tend to enjoy writing with a very quirky sort of humor, which is similar in a way to Gaiman’s writing in Anansi Boys. I hadn’t really been sure if I could write something in that style, but now that I’ve started just doing it, writing has been far easier. I still haven’t decided what to do with all the short stories I wrote. I want to include them in the book as part 1, but those short stories are very different tonally than the rest of the book. With the exception of one story, most don’t include a lot of humor (or at least the style of humor I’m writing now), and so the stories might seem jarringly different. (Any ideas with how to handle this?)
Anyway, I’ve been using Scrivener and it has been great. I’ve been really enjoying the program and I’ve made great progress using it.