Have you ever tried write a fiction text that goes beyond twenty pages? It’s a real mess. As a person who has published a couple of novels, putting one of them together and making it make a minimum of sense is a task capable of driving the most talented person crazy: each new paragraph, each sentence is a fountain of new doubts that branch into new and new unknowns. The essential problem, from which all the others spring, is the blank page.
That is to say, the fact that a novel author, even the least imaginative, has all the possibilities in the world before him. Unlike the director of a film or the author of a song, the writer has only one limit: his vocabulary. And for this reason, his work knows no potential barriers: he has been granted an absolutely overwhelming freedom of action. Luckily, books like ‘This year you write your novel‘, by Walter Moslkey, edited by EsPop Ediciones, briefly outlines the enormous work that every novelist has ahead of him.
Mosley has written a delightful essay of just under 150 pages where has brought together a few tips that come from his own experience: His most famous character is the African-American detective Easy Rawlins, who debuted in 1990 in ‘The Devil Wears Blue’ (adapted into a film of the same name starring Denzel Washington), and who has since appeared in sixteen novels. Mosley has written everything from science fiction to superhero comics, although his prestige comes mainly from crime fiction.
Let’s fly, young man
And what magic tips does Mosley have up his sleeve that in just 150 pages can create a novel from your pen? Few, in fact, and if we value them at the but, but surprisingly valuable, and which can be summarized in a couple of basics. The first of them is that you develop confidence in yourself and in your work. The second is perseverance, a lot of perseverance. If you are going to take anything away from ‘This year you write your novel’ it is that you have to dedicate some time each day to the most complicated task: sitting down for a while to write (and if you want the opinion of a much less successful and prolific novelist than Mosley, that is, mine, I think it is excellent advice). There is an explanation for this: according to the author, the novel is also written unconsciously. If you sit down every day to write, you will continue writing even if you don’t have the paper in front of you.
Since I started writing more methodically, and not as a simple entertainment to fill dead time, I try not to skip a single day of my writing time. Mosley advises finding your corner of the day where you are isolated and quiet, and where you will not be interrupted. In my case it is at six in the morning, when no one around me has woken up yet (neither at home nor on the street, since at that time the sidewalks have not yet been put in place). You have to pay certain tolls (I can’t go to bed too late, and hey: no one likes to get up early!), but the hour of absolute silence is priceless. Mosley agrees, and says so in his book.
But above all, there is an invisible teaching that flies over the book from beginning to end. It has to do with that first piece of advice that I told you above, that of trusting yourself, and it is implicit in the title, ‘This year you write your novel’. Mosley’s moral is very simple, but it must be internalized: anyone can write a novel. The sooner you assume that writing a novel is not a magical act, it does not require a talent for which only the privileged few are touched, it does not turn those who do it into special beings (and in fact, distrust writers who convey the opposite). , the sooner you will be ready to write yours.
There is something of a self-help book in Mosley’s proposal, certainly more than a typical technical or creative manual. But don’t be scared: it’s not ordinary self-help, because Mosley seems to suggest that you can, yes, but that if in the end it doesn’t work out for you or it’s not your thing, that’s okay. Lightness permeates Mosley’s simple lessons to make us understand that yes, anyone (including you) can write a novel, but that there is no need to get overwhelmed if you don’t have the day. After all, it’s just a novel. And maybe it’s not ‘War and Peace’ either.
“I’m not promising a masterpiece, just a proper first novel of a certain length,” says Mosley, and to do so he strings together a few ideas on how to prepare a draft, some elementary notions (first or third person, omniscient narrator or not?) and nails light ideas about, well, what a minimally readable novel has to have. In short: the stakes are low, the advice is easy, anyone can write a novel. This book is the only push you need.
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