"Get excited by your fears. Make friends with them."

In the introduction to The 90-Day Novel, Alan Watt suggests several writing exercises to prepare for writing your novel.  The first (and most fun) is the "fear exercise."  It goes like this:

Write for five minutes, as fast as you can, beginning with the sentence: "I'm afraid to write this story because..."


I'm afraid to write this story because I don't think I can.  I'm afraid that my novel will suck.  Actually, I'm convinced my novel will suck.  My ideas aren't interesting enough.  No one will want to read what I've written because it will be boring.  I'm afraid it will be sentimental and over-written.  I'm afraid of the way people will judge me.  I'm afraid to spend hours and days and weeks on this novel and it turn out horribly.  I'm afraid I'm wasting my time.  I'm afraid I'll spend weeks on one idea and realize that I want to write about something else.  I'm afraid I'll enjoy writing this novel so much that I'll want to write another one.  I'm afraid that people will tell me my novel is good when it's really not good at all.  I'm afraid people will tell me it's not good when it really is good.  I'm afraid I'll never figure out what I'm supposed to be writing about.

The moral of the exercise:
(1) "by acknowledging our fears, we are no longer ruled by them" (13).  I'm not sure if I believe this.  Even after making a list of my fears about writing this story, I still feel trapped by them.  Maybe I have to give it some time.
(2) "the fears we experience are identical to the fears our protagonist experiences....if we inquire into the nature of our fears, we will begin to recognize all sorts of connections between ourselves and our protagonist. Our fears make us uniquely qualified to write our story" (13).  This is interesting to me.  I would have never thought to relate my fears about writing to my protagonist who is not a writer.  But now that I think about it, I can see some similarities.  Many of my fears had to do with the way my novel - and myself - would be received and judged.  I have always struggled with having confidence in myself.  I am my worst critic, and I assume that everyone else perceives me the way I perceive myself.  But this blog is not a therapist, so I'll move on.  Throughout my novel, my protagonist will struggle with being independent.  After her brother goes to prison, she will have trouble defining herself and knowing herself because she has spent her whole life defining herself through him.  She does the same thing with her father.  My protagonist will also spend a lot of time working on a boat with her father, and she might think she's wasting her time.   

You will have created something

My "favorite" novels

Novella workshop started this week.  I've got a long road ahead of me.  There are 96 days in the semester, including weekends and breaks.  If I write one good page a day, that means I will have a 96 page novella by the end of the semester!  I have my fingers crossed, but I'm not holding my breath.  For the class, we're reading The 90-Day Novel by Alan Watt.  I hope this book, along with the class, will keep me motivated, inspired, and writing.

On the first day of class, we talked about writing, writers, and books.   We went around the room and said what our favorite novel was and why.  I usually don't like questions like this.  If you know me, you'll know that I have a lot of favorites.  If I marginally like something, I bet there was a point in my life when I said it was my favorite.  But it was nice to hear what books other people enjoyed and would recommend to aspiring novelists.  Some of the novels included Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, Serena by Ron Rash, and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

My favorite novel is East of Eden by John Steinbeck.  At least this is what I told the class.  The truth is, I really really really really really love East of Eden.  I like it because it's long.  It's about family.  It's about place.  It's about America at the turn of the 20th century.  I like it because it's a good story -- it's a good story told by a good storyteller.  It's beautiful and oddly magical.

Here's a short list of some of my other "favorites":

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin