About a week ago, I quit
By: Charmain Brackett
I threw in the towel and
gave up on the dream. I announced to the Facebook world that I was done with
novel writing – kaput, finis, over. It was back to the reality of the newspaper
grind and time to forget all of this science fiction and fantasy. I’d played on
the other side. It was fun, but now, it was over. I was tired of tweeting,
Facebooking, blogging and announcing to the world about my efforts.
And it felt so good. The
pressure of trying to create a fourth novel in my Key Guardian Journals’ series
and one-up myself was over. My brain was free. I could breathe.
However, in that brief span
of 12 hours or less when I tossed the idea of writing another book, a new idea
came into my head. My characters appeared and almost begged me to tell their
story. I saw it from start to finish all at once. I’ve never had that happen.
My three novels, The Key of Elyon, Elyon’s Cipher and Elyon’s Light, are all
young adult with science fiction and fantasy themes but without sparkly
vampires or dragons. I don’t plan out my novels from beginning to end. I hated
writing outlines in school. If I had to turn an outline in with a paper, I wrote
the outline after the fact. It was hard
to predict what I’d write because research often played a key role in
developing a paper. It’s the same with newspaper features I’ve written over the
past 25 years. An idea forms, but other factors influence the end product. I
often finish with something totally different than what I envisioned at the
beginning. Why would writing a book be any different?
I didn’t know where I was headed with the
trilogy, and along the way, plot twists developed that even I didn’t see
coming. I disciplined myself to write every day until I finished it. “Words on the page every day” has been my
Facebook status so much in the past 18 months that other writers I’m friends
with quote and tag me in their statuses.
Now I have a complete work
stuck in my head, and I’m trying to get the words on the page as fast as they
come.
And it’s different from the
rest. This book seems to be tailored for a different segment of my readers. My
target audience is young adult for the Key Guardian Journals, but I’ve
discovered I have many fans who are middle-aged women. They’ve usually read the
books before giving them to their children or grandchildren who also seem to
like them. What did they like? Many of them liked the themes of second chances
and a renewed hope.
My work in progress deals
with those themes as well. I’m crossing to a different genre for this one, but
I’ve never been able to stick with one story type. In a typical newspaper week,
I could be writing a story about an event at a local school, focusing on the
latest fashion trends or interviewing the Grammy-award winner coming in to
perform at the local arena. Variety is important for my creative brain. So
maybe I’ll find a pen name. I’ve actually used one of those before. I may have
to resurrect her.
Where this leads I can’t
tell. I do know that I’ve put more words on the page in the first week with
this one than I did with my three previous. They flow, and I’m going with it. People
always tell you not to quit, but maybe letting go of something for a short
period of time isn’t such a bad idea after all.
Charmain's facebook author page is facebook.com/thekeyofelyon and her website/blog is www.charmainzbrackett.com. She can be found on Twitter
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