Grimm End

My name is Steven and I am an incessant planner.

One of my biggest problems with writing is wanting to understand the story completely before putting words down on a page. This planning goes on endlessly and gives me the perfect excuse for not actually writing. I can’t start writing, I don’t know where the story is going yet.

And on it goes.

I wrote my first 50,000 words about Grimm End for the NaNoWriMo event in November, 2006. It was a useful and satisfying exercise because it taught me that I can turn off my internal editor who usually prevents me from writing at high speed.  It also was a setback because the direction that the story took was meandering and mostly boring.

Although I was able to lock out my internal editor, my internal planner became more powerful than I ever imagined.

I have been giving this problem some thought this week and I think that I have an idea that may work for me, at last. It borrows a little from software development, my day job. I’ll let the idea germinate a little more and, if it seems like it might work for me, I’ll post an outline of it in the near future.

Every year in November, National Novel Writing Month challenges participants to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I participated in 2006 when I wrote my first attempt at a Grimm End story. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to participate since.

I just missed it this year, but I can’t really be disappointed. My daughter brought our first grandchild, a beautiful little girl, into the world the day before Halloween and we’ve been celebrating every since.

Therefore, this year, I am attempting my own novel writing month in February. I’m running a little behind as yet, but I have every hope to end the month with 50,000 words of a new draft of Grimm End.

When I was a young lad, I would read about the adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy, the Hardy Boys. On some Saturdays or gloomy summer days, I would ready one of them from cover to cover.

Recently, my lovely wife, who herself enjoyed reading about Nancy Drew when she was a wee lass, asked me to read a Hardy Boys mystery to her. The teenagers in my Grimm End books reminded her of a more grown up version of those books and she wanted to hear one again to compare them.

Despite the abundant use of adverbs, the overly dramatic dialog and the resemblance between the police in the books with the keystone cops of the movies, the basic story is actually enjoyable.

There are worse things than being compared to the Hardy Boys, he said humorously.