Hailey's Novel Diary – 3/26/17

More than a few people have asked me, “How do you write a book?” My standard reply is, “With a computer.”

I'm starting a new book. It's a novel, pure fiction, and I'm trying something new. Since I'm writing this book in a different way, I thought I would jot down a few notes about what I'm doing while I write it. That might sound highly egotistical, as if I think anyone cares about my writing process, but what about blogs, Facebook and Twitter is not egotistical? The whole point of this blog is for me to look back in the future on what I was thinking about in the past. There might come a day when I look back on this book and wonder what I was thinking.

I'm not doing it for posterity. I'm not expecting historians to pour over these words in two hundred years while analyzing one of the great works of world literature. I fully expect to be completely forgotten by then. Books can easily last a few centuries, but most are only remembered for a few years, if that. And no matter what happens with this book, I have no doubt that no one will have the faintest idea what a blog was 200 years from now.

I suppose a few caveats are in order. Since we are talking about a novel that has not yet been written, there is the very real possibility that it will never be completed. I try to finish what I start. That's one of those remnants of my upbringing. But sometimes you do something that maybe you should not have done. Some things were never meant to be finished.

Equally possible is that I will finish it, but it will never be published. There are a few people who can write absolutely anything and it is guaranteed to be published by someone somewhere. Those people have names you recognize. Even if you have never read any of their books, you have probably seen a movie based on one. I'm not one of those people. I'm not contractually guaranteed anything.

I could write a big chunk of the book and then change it. Maybe drastically. When you read the finished product, you never know what happened in between drafts. By documenting this book as it happens, I'm opening myself to a world of embarrassment. Fortunately, most of the world will never know that this blog exists. Anyone who reads both this blog and the novel, should it ever exist, might know how it all started out versus how it ended up. I don't have a problem with that.

The point of this little experiment is not to serialize the novel. I will probably not even talk much about the story. This is supposed to be a diary of sorts about the writing process. I can't say how successful it will be. I might be too busy to update it often enough, or I might just give up entirely. This is an experiment. It might be interesting, mildly amusing or completely pointless.

Let's see what happens.