Well, maybe the word 'novelist' is a bit grandiose, but I've long held an ambition to be a 'proper' writer. By this I mean someone who writes fiction.
This doesn't mean I'm not happy with what I'm doing at the moment. I have been amazingly fortunate over the last couple of years - I've managed to 'escape' from teaching, using the knowledge I've gained over my teaching career (LOL) to become an eduational writer. It certainly knocks the socks off doing battle with thirty pre-pubescent eleven year olds every day! But when I was day-dreaming as a kid I didn't fantasise about writing school textbooks and interactive whiteboard CD Roms. I wanted to write story books.
Like most writers I've got several ideas for novels lurking in the cobwebbed corners of my hard drive, but I've never got around to actually starting work on any of them. I've always felt too intimidated to be honest. However, I've recently been thinking more and more seriously of giving the whole fiction-writing thing a spin. Inspired by my friends on The Write Idea writers' forum, in particular my 'real-life' friend Carol, I've started work on a project which I hope will eventually be published.
I won't bore you with the details, because they would...well...bore you, but the book I'm working on is the first in a series of eleven (yes, eleven!) * gulp* fiction books for children based around the scheme of work for history at Key Stage 2. The plan is to write the first one, write a sales pitch for the whole series of books, and then try to find either an agent or a publisher who's interested. The whole thing might take some time...
I have a word count target of 250 words a day. This sounds pathetic, and believe me, it is, but I write extremely slowly. One of the reasons for this is that I rewrite every sentence about six times before I feel happy about moving onto the next one. Then when I've finished a paragraph I have to rewrite the whole thing again.
Another reason why it takes me so long to get the words out is my excessive pruning rate. I can sit down at the computer and write five hundred words, but at the end of the session I often end up with fewer words than I started with. So if I aim to spend two hours a day on the fiction-writing mularkey, an average of 250 words is a fairly realistic target. It might seem like peanuts, but that's 45,000 words over the next six months, which is more than enough to rewrite the whole book several times!
My reason behind telling you this is that the more people I tell about my plans, the more likely I'll be to stick with them. The threat of public humiliation is a wonderful aid to the creative process!
Catch you later,
Helen
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