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Fulcrum Shift
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What caused Will to finally write his first
novel?
I have been an avid fan and reader of Science Fiction
and Fantasy for a long time and I
always wanted to write my own novel but never got around to doing it.
One day I just got fed up and started writing.
This is how it happened:
I live in a mid-sized New England city that had its heyday
a hundred years ago during the
textile revolution. The city is populated by a multitude of three family
houses. This packed the mill workers into close quarters so they could
easy be within walking distance of the cotton and fabric mills. Anyway,
I live on the first floor of one of these three family homes and my
sister lives on the third floor. A while back she bought a brand new
gas cooking stove for three hundred bucks and right from the get-go
the pilot light on it would occasionally go out. Well she would call
me to come up and relight it. This is where my novel was born- right
inside the broiler section of her gas stove. One of the times I went
up there to light it I had my head deep inside the
broiler holding a lit match, trying to get it going when the thought
occured to me:
"This stove is a piece of junk. It's brand new, it cost three hundred
bucks, and it's a piece of junk!" This train of thought continued.
"What do you have to do to get anything of decent quality in this
world." My life until this point had been an endless string of
broken toasters, remote controls, throwaway VCR's and whatnot. It seemed
to me that if you wanted something to last you had to pay good money
for it and to pay good money for something you have to earn the money
first. Now
I am just a working class dog and I am scraping by just like most everybody
else. So what could I do? I could see myself thirty years later, still
scraping, hoarding pennies in my 401K, and still tinkering with all
the shoddy, mediocre quality gas stoves in my life.
Well my novel was born right there. With
my head deep inside the stove and the smell of
natural gas strong in my lungs I decided to write the novel I had always
been thinking about. After lighting the stove I drove directly to the
local drug store and bought a spiral bound notebook and a pen. I took
these directly to my desk at home, sat down and wrote this line:
"The figure walked quietly
down the cobblestone alley with purpose."
That was all I needed. From that point on the novel wrote
itself. It just flowed out of me. I came home from work and sat down
at my desk to write almost every evening. It took me about a year but
I did it! Maybe it was the gas fumes!
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Heres a selection of resources
to help the aspiring writer in you.
How
to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy -- by Orson Scott Card, Orson Scott
Card; Paperback
Writing
Science Fiction and Fantasy -- by Crawford Kilian; Paperback
Complete
Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction by Cory Doctorow, Karl
Schroeder (Paperback)
Writing
Fantasy and Science Fiction (Writing Handbooks) by Lisa Tuttle (Paperback
- March 2002)
World-Building
(Science Fiction Writing Series) by Stephen L. Gillett, Ben Bova (Hardcover
- January 1996)
Zen
in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury (Paperback)
The
Writers Complete Fantasy Reference by Writer's Digest Books (Editor),
Terry Brooks (Introduction) (Paperback - November 2000)
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