As the light was dimming and returning during the sun’s eclipse, I began to write my fifth novel. What a gift!
This is my favorite part of being an author. I have no idea where the book is going, I don’t even know who’s narrating the story, although so far it’s Mrs Hudson. Everything is open, my characters are leading, and my imagination and intuition are communicating with my singular muse.
What is the process, how does one start to write a novel?
There are many, many ways to plan a novel in the writing world. They can be helpful and I have read some of them. I am lucky to be blessed with my writers cabin and the time to write. We are each unique. I am obviously far on the right-brain side of things. I’ve been an artist all my life. Yet, for me, language is as much a part of my creative side as sculpting or photography. Left-brain activities like timing, planning, or charts dull my imagination. I find some of it is useful during my final rearrangement of the novel. But not at the beginning. The beginning is joy.
“You are joy, looking for a way to express.
It’s not just that your purpose is joy, it is that you are joy. You are love and joy and freedom and clarity expressing. Energy-frolicking and eager.
That’s who you are.”
The words of a medium channeling the spirit, Abraham Hicks. I don’t really care which of them said this, and I don’t know if I believe in spirit mediums like Arthur Conan Doyle did. Yet, we find our teachers when we need them and I have been encouraged by these words for many years.
To me the start of a novel is something that grows out of my writing. I am always writing, whether on paper or in my mind. So when I sit down at my computer, the ongoing conversation translates onto my screen. Picasso said, “Inspiration has to find us working.”
Sometimes it takes a solar eclipse, an earthquake, or the burning up of all one was before! Sometimes just a step in the right direction.
So write! Don’t worry what it’s going to be or where it’s going, that’s for your characters to decide. Develop a willingness to study the craft even as one adds to it. At sometime during your writing, the book will shake your hand and introduce itself to you. Learn characterisation, how to build depth. If there’s a villain, he must be as real to the reader as the hero. Read other authors and fall in love with language. Learn how to tell a spendid story. What Hollywood has never learned: The background is as important as the foreground.
For me there is also the joy of joining an audience that is as venerable as Sherlock Holmes himself. Arthur Conan Doyle began it in 1886 with A Study In Scarlet. And the lovely worldwide Sherlockian, Holmesian, and Doylean Community has been enthusiastically applauding ever since.
As my community of friends, you know that I have recently released, FIVE MILES OF COUNTRY. And it is doing very well, thank you. I will continue to inform you of book reviews and the progress of this wonderful Sherlock Holmes book as I write the next one.
Award-Winning author, Gretchen Altabef, publishes with MX Sherlock Holmes Books. These Scattered Houses, in Sherlock Holmes’s voice, chronicles a unique conclusion to his ‘Great Hiatus’. In Remarkable Power of Stimulus, Holmes finds London awash in murders, anarchists threatening Paris, and the return of Irene Adler. Under surveillance by Moriarty’s henchmen, Holmes steps into Baker Street knowing he will find Watson’s friendship and unerring aim are as dependable as the British Rail. FIVE MILES OF COUNTRY is Altabef’s third novel in the Rachel Holmes series. Holmes and Watson are called to Thomas Edison’s ‘Imagination Factory’ to solve the murder of a Vaudeville danseuse in the world’s first motion picture studio. THE KEYS OF DEATH is a genesis story of No. 221B Baker Street and the solving of Mr Hudson’s murder.
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