Learning to write

Writing to learn

A month in I am at chapter thirty-five. It is the first time I have a plot structure in place before I started writing. I know where I am going, I know where I am. I have just written the midpoint. Act two is on its way to the dark night of the soul. The all is lost moment. I hope the real world doesn't have a plot.

By now I have lost count of my novels. Fourteen? I hardly ever write short stories. I am a world builder. I have a universe in me that wants out. I get lost in my own creations. The biggest project was a nine book epic. It stranded at book seven. I was a writer without readers.

Five years ago, I published my first book on facebook. A chapter a day. Senseless. Which is the title, not the conclusion. I had gathered a small group of readers. Twenty-six, to be precise. Including my parents. But no further family, or friends, or neighbours among them.

A writer needs readers. Readers are not their friends. A writer mustn't think he will find friends through writing. They mustn't expect to be found by their friends through writing. Finding non-friends that trust you enough to let you in, is not easy. You have to write in such a way they cannot escape once the first sentence has been felled. You have to make them forget about the real world without mercy. You dictate their thoughts. A skill I was largely unaware of. Mostly because I had rarely seen it mastered. I didn't grow up with good examples. I started writing from within, long before I found the first examples of words in an order I found equally captivating. By then it was too late. I ran behind half a life. I would never catch up. I couldn't read the ocean of literature first and then continue writing.

Some people say, eighty percent of writing is editing. Which seems a physical impossibility. I don't have enough hours. On average, I spent more than two hours writing each day. On average, I write five essays for each one I publish. I get dragged along by my own words. With difficulty, I stop writing to edit. I have forced myself to go back and retrace my steps, when all I longed for was to keep going.

Substack made me do it. A year on the platform has ignited a new way. A new love. A new longing. I knew I could write. Now I desire to also capture you, to spoil you, to hook you. I want to leave you breathless on the last page because I took out your heart, altered it and placed it back into your chest bleeding. Because my words caused you pain and made you lose everything. I aged you. I made you witness crimes. I impregnated you. I killed you and I brought you back to life. To a life changed. I have a story to tell, and I want you to read it as if it were written just for you. Because it is being written just for you. I want it to live on that special shelf. The one you return to again and again. I want you to share this story with friends, to give it as a gift over and over. I want my book to connect each of you to the eternal. I want you unable to shut up about it.

I am learning. Be patient with me.

Foreshadowing is not a technique. A novel is foreshadowing. Storytelling helps you see and hear, smell and feel what is to come. Gives a taste of what has happened elsewhere. It connects to what might happen. A book helps choose, cope, and deal with what will happen before it has happened to you, to anyone. It gives you experiences not yet experienced. A book is a companion, a travel guide. A book holds the songs you could sing but haven't learned yet.

After forty years of messing about, I feel as if I have just started writing. I know nothing and I will tell you how that came to be. I am getting out of the way to make room for the story that wants to be told. I won't be long. Be patient with me.

Not a happy book about a happy world, but I think it is about joy and how to get there.

It is the year 2072.

Eldon Mercer, who lives in a walled garden, doesn't know why he's been locked away there since his wife died thirty years ago. One day, attempting to repair his water supply, her old mobile phone starts to ring.

The title is:

Outcome, a three hero plot

Bringing together water and seeds in a speculative story about a dam.