So I seem to have managed to get the novel into first gear
anyway. I took all the bits of false ‘starts’ , stuck them into one folder on the
computer, labelled the chapters and read through the whole thing. I realised
that I had given the main character three separate names and none of them was
right. So she’s now called Clare, which was the name of a minor character but
in a scene of dialogue between the two, I had accidentally called the main
character ‘Clare’ and it stuck.
After my main character became Clare, the story started to
come together a little more. So maybe the naming of characters is more
important than I thought it was.
A writing colleague also mentioned something else. I always
had a ‘fear of influence’, you know, that whatever I was reading would somehow
seep into the first draft of my novel and get mixed up with my own voice. Well,
my colleague suggested that because I was dipping in and out of all sorts of
projects (short stories for magazines, trying to market and edit a previous
novel, teaching) that I was possibly being influenced by other characters from
my own writing J.
So maybe there’s something to be said for just focusing on one thing at a time…
