Hello everyone,
I wrote something about this yesterday on the Facebook page I maintain for my writing, and I suppose I should say something here too. For a while there I was much better about giving writing updates on Facebook than I have on this blog, but it’s been just shy of a year since my last post to that page, which should probably tell you how much work I have done on my sixth novel.
I don’t expect many of you to remember, but the premise was a murder mystery set in a medieval English village the year the Black Death broke out. By the end of the book —after half the characters have already died of the plague— what does justice look like when the murderer is revealed in a world gone mad? It was a fun idea, and one I hoped might have more universal appeal than my first five novels. I even had plans of reaching out to my old agent and perhaps trying to traditionally publish this one.
The idea became less fun to write during our own global pandemic, and I have been grappling for some time now with two unhappy thoughts: First, is anyone going to want to read my book after a year and a half of living through our own historic brush with pestilence? Second, how many other writers with better access to traditional publishing have also spent the last fifteen months writing their own ‘global disease’ tales? I wager two or three years from now bookstore shelves will be full of stories with similar tones and themes to mine. Even if I get the thing done, I expect it will not find a readership.
All of this has been powerfully unmotivating, and my New Year’s Resolution to finish the novel this year only really gave me a kick in the pants for a couple of months.
In happier news, I have also spent the last year and more in love. I proposed in March, and we are now two weeks into living in a new and wonderful apartment together as we begin to plan our wedding. I write this note from a cozy home office that I hope will see me write many new stories in the months and years to come.
As you can imagine from all that I have just said, I have not done much writing recently, and now that things are calming down I look at my sixth novel —still probably needing at least nine or ten months of steady work to finish a first draft— and the thought of trying to pick it up again leaves me cold.
I often think of fiction writing like a muscle. It requires exercise. Since the beginning of COVID-19 I have gotten out of the habit of writing. My skills and work ethic have atrophied. My work comes out flabby and unsatisfying. I need to create a new regimen of regular writing to get back into shape, and if my sixth novel were going to inspire that kind of sustained effort, it would have done so by now.
All this is to say, I have decided to shelve my sixth novel. I am not saying forever —five or ten years from now I might dust it off and begin it again, because I did and do like the idea and the characters— but for now I need to do something else, something that will keep me writing as often as I can manage.
I also do not think that is another novel. Not yet.
Diving into another project of that size without a plan and without the exhaustive research that goes into any work of historical fiction is just asking for frustration, when what I need is to build that fiction writing muscle up to a place where I can set it any task, and it will produce regular and dependable results thereafter.
No, I believe my path forward is going to be short stories and scenes that I can write in one or two sittings, and one-off sample chapters of ideas I have had for future books but where my research is still little more than a casual understanding. I believe if I do this sort of writing for a few months, I will both gain confidence and good work habits for my next novel, and I may also very well find the subject I next want to spend a year or two of my life working on as I noodle around in things that already hold a passing interest for me.
If you have read this far, you probably wonder if you will get to read any of these short pieces. I have decided the answer to that should be yes. Having self-published five novels, I am not prepared to go back to writing just for my own pleasure while hiding my work away in a desk drawer for fear that someone might see it. I write with a reader in mind, and when I am done writing, I hope a reader will find and enjoy my work. I will be publishing the pieces —when I am satisfied with them— on this blog, and I will also share links to them on my Facebook Page and through my Twitter account.
Who knows? Maybe people who enjoy the short pieces they see will even decide to take the plunge and read one of my other books that they haven’t tried yet? A writer can dream.
You will hear more from me again soon. In the meantime, all my very best!
–Geoff
The Writings of Geoff Micks 