Found: First Novel Notes, part one

Recently, I was cleaning out a small room in the house so I might better utilize it for something other than storage of random art things and wine.

In doing so, I came across a box containing notes and magazine clippings and books and memorabilia I had collected. The theme of the items in the box was a novel, my first attempt at one at least.

Please note at this time: The novel was not also in the box.

But in a flash I was rewriting it. I could quite literally smell the room where it all begins, the confusion of characters as they wake.

I found myself waxing.

That might be what this is ... a waxing. A rebuffing of the terms of the novel, as I once understood them. To sit down with it again. To rework it, publish it.

The question is how . How do you return to a project ten years in the making and two fifths finished?

The box is a good place to start.

In this particular instance, I set myself up fairly well. When originally I was doing research for the novel, I collected enough fodder to get me started and keep me writing indefinitely.

There are character sketches and deep rooted paradigms that branch out as to be the sky's competition of breadth. I attempted to know my characters better than they knew themselves. I needed to know them in order to bring them to the scenes they were in.

Even now, the steps are evident. From obstacles to character goals and scenes. I lay the notes from the box in columns on the floor. I draw a line of tape down the back of a complex of scenes and hold it up. That scene literally gets taped to another, and another.

Soon there's a family tree of the story.

I could sit down right now and begin where I was. In theory.

It wouldn't be hard. But I decide the better route is to see if there's a manuscript laying around somewhere.

And I go back to cleaning the storage room.

- Benjamin Spencer
Executive Editor