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My First Novel is Just a Story that I Want to Tell
My years-long journey to tell it 500 words at a time
I started writing a novel about ten years ago. It was based on a poem my father showed to me. I became enamored with how crazy the poem was, not understanding its meaning. Eventually, it gripped me so tightly that I had to define it in my way, and The Tree of Children, the name of my unborn novel, was conceived.
The poem is The Reason for Skylarks by Kenneth Patchen. It’s taken me quite some time, but I finally picked things up again almost two years ago and have been writing 2,000 words a week, off and on. I am at 63,000 words now, this October 2019.
I did not produce an outline ahead of time, or devise a set of characters, or motivations for them, or create any details at all. I knew there were the giant and the tree. I asked myself what that meant to me, what it could be, why the giant was at the tree, and the story became apparent.
As I’ve been writing, I leave lots of notes that have to be filled in later. What does a giant eat? How tall, exactly, is this giant? Are we talking titan? Or just your run of the mill Goliath? Goliath, for the record, was three meters tall (about nine feet!).
My goal for 2019 is not to answer all the many questions I have, or fill in the…
