'Nuff said.

So how does a writer who has been raised in a box of 500 words pen a 60,000 word novel?
I actually read, in a writer's online group, a writer who said she had the main points of her novel written, and then she was going to go back and fill in the rest with fluff.
No. No. No. Words are not packing material. Every chapter has to go somewhere, has to mean something. If you are reading this and thinking, why, yes, I'll just put some verbal peanuts around my main points and voila - put down the pen, step away from the Word document, and take up some other hobby.
The smarty pants answer is that I wrote 500 words 120 times. Seriously, for my first novel, I had some scenes in my head, and I wrote aimless words to get me from one vignette to the next. It's not a technique that I'd recommend. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of the Beatles' movie, Magical Mystery Tour. They thought they'd put a bunch of odd characters on a bus and film it - naturally, hilarity would ensue.
Hilarity did not ensue. It may have threatened to sue, I don't know.
For my next novel, I put an outline together. I've read interviews with lots of famous authors who scoff at outlining and still produce works of art. Good for them. I was writing my very first murder mystery and I wanted to make sure I had all of my clues in a row. My outline was not particularly detailed, but I described each chapter and what I wanted to happen.
This doesn't mean that I followed each chapter to the letter. I do have a few "Soupy Sales" moments in my book. For those of you who weren't raised in the Jurassic Era, Soupy Sales was a guy with a kid's show. Every show, there'd be a knock on Soupy's door and you never knew who was on the other side. Sometimes it was a famous person, sometimes it was a film clip of an old cowboy and indian movie, once it was a naked lady (we didn't see her, but you shoulda seen the look on Soupy's face).
So I never planned for Peri to meet the apish man who works for the collection agency, or the mother of the number one suspect in Marnie's murder. But I had started the chapter with Peri in her office, and there's a knock at the door... who's there?
They actually worked in the book, but I would never rely on Soupy moments.
Mostly, I was able to stretch my writing to novel length because I was able to linger on descriptions more than I am able to do in my columns. I could fill the readers' senses with the sights and smells and noises. I could add dialogue and observances that, while not absolutely necessary, fleshed the scene out. Peri and her cohorts could, hopefully, become real people to my readers.
And no, I didn't write it in 500-word chunks.

Greetings!

It's possible that I'm a blog-aholic. I have a blog on my website (www.gaylecarline.com/geeblog.html) to discuss my very first book deal and how it came about. I have a blog on MySpace (www.myspace.com/gaylesoo) to discuss random events in my personal and professional life. So why do I need yet a third?

To discuss the process of writing. My blog title comes from James Thurber's Preface to a Life (My Life and Hard Times), where he talks about how everyone thinks of writers, particularly humor writers, as being light-hearted souls with nary a worry. According to him, they "sit on the edge of the chair of Literature."

That description suits me to a T. I have read many of the great literary works and admire them. In my heart of hearts, I would love to write one of those tomes, and be remembered for all eternity as the author of the "21st century War and Peace" or some such title.

But fear holds me back. What if my efforts to be inspiring are seen as insipid? What if I attempt deep symbolism and I'm accused of presumption? Worse yet, what if I do write this mighty work of art and I start taking myself too seriously?

Which is probably why I started my delayed writing career as a columnist. It's hard to be precious at 1,000 words. My first gig was to report on horse shows, and interview horse people, which left no room for fiction, and no way to get too big for my britches. When I started writing for the Placentia News-Times, I was writing humor essays about my daily life, a la Erma Bombeck and James Thurber. Although I wouldn't call my tales fiction (they do contain moments of exaggeration), the essays had to be light and short (500 words), so I could not go Tolstoy on anyone.

But I always wanted to write a novel. In 2006, I started writing one. It was a literary masterpiece that took me over a year to write, about a young girl's struggle to define herself. Well, that's what I intended it to be. What I ended up with was a well-written piece of crap. Part of it was because I broke many of the rules that make a novel readable. The thing about successful authors who break the rules is, they know the rules well, so they know how to break them. I didn't. The other part of the problem was that I was in a writing group of two: me and my friend, Pam. I adore her, we make each other laugh, but a writing group of two is a mistake. Pam loves romances. I don't. And yet, by the time we had finished critiquing my work, I found I had written a romance.

Enter the Southern California Writer's Conferences. I had been attending these since 2006 and had been dutifully listening to all of the experts, without doing a thing they said. After my literary-romance-fiasco, I finally started paying attention. In 2007, I was able to start my second book, a murder mystery, with all of the tools I needed to make a good, light-hearted novel. Which I did. And that was the book I sold.

So I still sit at the edge of that chair, wanting to rest my back against it and write Literature with a capital "L", but I have made piece with the fact that I'd rather write light and lively works than not write at all.