EEK! Today I reached an exciting and a frightening stage in working on my novel: it’s coming together into a story.
Ideas have been forming in my mind like bubbles in champagne, but now they’re bumping into each other, joining, forming something larger — which is the story. This afternoon I used my writing session to commit to mapping out these half-ideas and asking myself just what sort of story this is. I haven’t got the plot yet, but I’m getting a real sense of the arc of it, who’s in it, and the overall tone.
Stephen King said that “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.” This feels true: you find the story inside yourself (or out in the world). But there’s another component to it, which is commitment: there’s a point in the process where you have to commit to what’s emerging, make choices about it. ‘This’ not ‘that’. What’s uncomfortable is that, in committing, the story goes from being all possible books to being one book.
