Writing a Novel

[Lexington]

I've done plenty of writing. I started with fanfiction, just because it was an easy way to get started. You already had the characters, and the basic scenario, so you just needed to come up with new and different scenarios for them. I actually really enjoyed that - taking established characters and gently nudging them in slightly different directions, to see what happened. Soon after that, I wrote some pure fiction with characters I invented from whole cloth. I didn't "publish" any of these works, but I posted them online for anybody to read if they so desired.

The response? Surprisingly positive. Any negative reaction I got was mainly warranted. I had three people take me to task for having somebody add onions to a spaghetti sauce just before serving it. (I don't know why I did that - it was more to have the characters actually DOING something rather than just sitting there talking. ) A few people were confused (if not bewildered) by one of my endings, but I think that just means I wrote it correctly. I was trying to get a sort of twilight, between-awake-and-asleep, between-living-and-the-void feeling with the closing. A couple people found a plot step that I took to be somewhat hackneyed. (This was because it was.) I didn't edit a couple of them quite as well as I could've, leaving misspellings and minor mistakes in afterwards. And one person went apeshit when she saw I wrote one character as gay. I felt it was at least possible given the canon of the story, but she obviously had eyes on this guy...

Even the positive response was sometimes not what I expected. I have two favorite stories I've written. One involved trying to tie up all the loose ends of a TV show that got cancelled before it got a "final episode". (I've actually done this twice, but one of them I like far more than the other.) And one was written entirely from the vantage point of a minor character - one of those "dumb strong henchmen" that you see in cartoons. I loved getting into his skin and looking at everything through his eyes. But those two remain my least-reviewed stories. Most people loved two other stories I wrote, which I also quite like but don't have the soft spot for.

But here's the thing. I wrote these things for one person - me. By posting them online, I'm basically saying "here's something I've done that you might like, too." And some people do. Probably most people don't. And that's OK. Even if only one person read them and enjoyed them, that doubles the number who did.

If your purpose in writing your life story is to inspire or help other people, do it. Post it online. And if one person was helped or inspired by it, it served its purpose.

Lex