For those curious about the writing process, here’s an example of a section I wrote for the novel I’m finishing up on. I wrote this back in August of last year when I was merely thinking about the story. I was trying to get into this character’s head, so I wrote this as almost a type of journaling.
This probably won’t go into the novel but it’s an example of how I was trying to get his voice in my head. This character knows he’s going to die and is thinking of a song that would sum up his life. I wrote this late one night and emailed it to myself.
Unused section for current novel-in-progress:
I see my life in segments, like carefully constructed record collections. There are patterns, of course, but they are random and raw just like life can be. I can take a chunk and remember. I can be there again, taste all the tastes and feel all I felt when I was eight or eighteen or twenty-eight. Life to me are those sections, those genres, those sounds, those memories. It’s not a big ball and never will be. Music is all that’s mattered because it has played while life has come and gone. Life has moved on, and the soundtrack has played all throughout it.
What would I choose to define me? What song would I choose to embody me? I couldn’t begin to choose. But rather I choose those chunks and I see fate and failure and folly tied into a big fat ball of grace. Are those really my stories, my tunes, my times? Are those really what played in the background? Would those songs be sung at my funeral?
Sometimes I wonder what matters.
Sometimes I don’t know what matters because all that’s mattered has been myself.
It’s by God’s grace that somehow, someway, I’m loved and I have hope.