I started a new novel yesterday. I have a vague idea of who and what the novel will be about, so I started it with something I knew and some research. The town of Mildred was something I knew from my childhood. It had ceased to exist sometime in the 1970s. What finished it was a widening of the highway through it. The last buildings were simply bulldozed. Something else I knew which will be important to the novel is that the Mildred town cemetery still exists. Today it is beside a small church. I didn’t want the actual town to be included, so I renamed it. Mildred is obviously the name of a woman. I followed that idea by naming the town Alma – at least temporarily. I find things change as I write a novel. It might prove that the name of the town that no longer exists plays some role that is important in the novel.
When I start a story, I have a basic idea about it. When I am actually writing a story by filling in the details and bringing the action to life, I have to be careful. For example, if a diary is going to be important to the story, it must be introduced in an inconspicuous way earlier in the story. It’s called foreshadowing and can be a very simple sentence. “Lydia put her diary away before going to bed.” You may not remember this simple line, but when the diary becomes important, you will remember that something was said about the diary earlier. It didn’t just come out of the blue. Some readers will actually go back and try to find any comments about the diary. I once got an email calling me “sneaky.” It happened because she had dismissed a quick reference to an object as an unimportant detail. When it proved to have importance to the plot, she went back and looked for anything about the object. It was after she found it that she accused me of being “sneaky.” This blog is getting long, so I will end this for the day. I’m sure I will have more to say about the new novel in the future. It has no title as of yet, but I’ll continue to call it the new novel until it acquires a title.
