Building the novella

Last month, I said I'd give myself a month to explore writing a novella.

I'm happy to report that I've been writing, but it took some extra work before I even started.

Let me tell you about it.

One challenge I've always had writing on my own is finishing long fiction.

With Angie, I have no problem writing the novel. We've worked on five books together—she started them, and I followed behind and finished the back half. And I've written plenty of short fiction, too—including a month of writing a new story a day.

But longer work, alone? That's always been where I hit the wall. I can come up with plans, plots, and ideas, but when the writing needs to happen, it fails.

So before I got going this time, I decided to lift the hood and figure out how I actually write.

The fiction engine for me

To begin, I tore apart my own stories and the ones I wrote with Angie to see how they ran: action and strong images in the first scene, people moving toward something, wanting something.

I also looked at the stories and films that resonated with me—my favourites. The ones I keep circling back to. I dug into theory that resonated: movement and counter-movement, Greimas squares, John Gardner's profluence, Johnstone's free-association and reincorporation, Syd Field's story structure, and the craft of David Lynch, Shakespeare, and Kieslowski.

I built out a working model—a step-by-step process of how I can find and build a story that I hope won't only work for me for this novella, but future ones as well.

But the only thing that will matter is putting it to the test, chapter by chapter, until I have something complete and finished.

Relearning my own lessons

Strangely, as I've been working through the novella, practicing the model, I've recognized the engine underneath: want, obstacle, action, response, outcome. Jerry Cleaver, from Immediate Fiction. What I taught for years, but sometimes had never applied to myself.

It worked fine for murder mysteries — the mechanics were obvious. But when I tried writing stories about internal struggle, I couldn't find where the engine ran. Somewhere along the line I got disconnected from the basics.

Now I see it. I even see lessons I resisted from other teachers because I didn't yet have the perspective to understand them. They weren't wrong; I just wasn't ready.

My hope for my students was always that they'd keep learning after my class ended. Now I’m here, continuing to learn from it too.

Moving Forward

So now I have the steps, a road map, and a direction to go. I've started on the journey, but over the next month it will be about finding out if it works.

Of course, the story is about grief, about death, and about memory — because of course it is. I don't know if there's another version of me for now. Hopefully, there will be with time, but until then, I just hope to keep on writing.

All the best,
David