Guest Blog Written by: Morgan Balog
I have been in the throes of writing my first novel for almost three years now. Six hundred-plus pages later and on the cusp of completing my first draft, I am still pre-writing.
I remember sitting in high school English classes the day before we were supposed to write our midterm essays. The days before those essays were usually allotted to be days of prewriting, to teach us young and immature students how to plan before diving into the breach of writing an essay on the honor of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mocking Bird or about the significance of certain ridiculous pickle dishes in Ethan Frome. You get the picture. At the time, these essays and topics were of no concern to me, and I was usually pretty good at bullshitting my way through these essays, that I would often waste the period of pre-writing the day before on drawing obscene and vulgar doodles – I was a real winner in high school.
But when I started attempting to take my strengths into the creative realm in college, I was given a nice gentle kick to the nuts. Many of the short stories I would start writing would collapse upon themselves if they weren’t given the proper planning. This, my friends, is learning the hard way. Frustration would infect me in the disguise of laziness, and I wouldn’t write.
This is not a good thing to fall into.
But it was after taking a class on Joyce and seeing someone do with the written word what that Irish lunatic did in Ulysses, that I began to comprehend the amount of planning that was needed for good writing. This was when I decided that I wanted to start working on my own novel and testing my own limits. I quickly began realize here that the amount of planning and pre-writing (and suffering) that I was going to need to do was going to be nothing short of immense.
When I started my novel, I spent several weeks sketching out the setting, the characters, their families, their backgrounds, everything and anything etc. I was not going to let myself be overtaken by the familiar collapse of being unprepared. This task, while grand, was going to be my greatest accomplishment, and there was no way that it would work if I didn’t completely plan for everything and anything.
I wrote on legal sheets, mapping out the characters and their motives. I would dedicate entire collections of chicken-scratched writing to their pasts and presents and eye colors and scars and fears and dreams and bowel movement cycles –everything. To make characters that were believable, I knew that I had to make them real to myself, as well as have an inventory of collected data on all of my characters and their physical details.
This process made the challenge of writing complex chapters even easier. I would know the opinions of the characters and what they wanted or didn’t want, making the dialogue easier to write.
I once had my father take me around our house’s front and back yards, giving me the name of every plant, shrub, tree, and flower. Everything in the setting of your book/story/screenplay/play/etc. needs to be believable – and I know that stuff like flower names and woods that make up certain pieces of furniture are not very interesting to most people, but these are the tiny details that will make your stories pop.
But I also knew that I needed to do this with the themes present in the novel. My novel is a collection of characters all experiencing the same themes and slowly converging within the same setting. I knew that these themes would be the major motivators for the people within the story. So I would spend days and days researching them [these themes], looking for scientific data and statistics and backgrounds to fully understand them, but to also build upon them and better implement them within the writing. Do not think that the research you hated to do back in high school will not be needed to write a good story. Half of my writing process was research. Whether it was looking up complex physics theories or reading up Kierkegaard’s concepts of existentialism or anything in between, I needed the knowledge to make people believe it.
To actually feel good writing, the reader needs to think that the writer is an expert on everything within their pages. You are the deity of whatever you’re writing, and like the universe, if one thing within your content seems unlikely or not entirely three-dimensional, your story will collapse and your writing will fail and your reign as god will come to a tragic end. That doesn’t sound like much fun at all, does it?
And now, almost three years later and on the verge of finishing my first draft, I know whole-heartedly that I would not have gotten past the first 20 pages without extensive pre-writing. This was not the type of content that I could bullshit an overworked and underpaid English teacher to believe, this was content that I wanted people to read into and interpret, and if your dream is anything close to that, you won’t be able to even come close to achieving it without sketching it out for yourself before sitting down to type out the very first sentence.
My name is Morgan Balog and I am an aspiring novelist. I graduated from Ramapo College of New Jersey with a BA in communications with a concentration in writing. I currently work as a content writer for a marketing company and like to spend my nights smacking my head against my keyboard and calling it a “good night’s work.”
