Through a combination of not knowing what I was doing, I wrote my first novel, historical Civil War fiction, Grant Me Timely Grace, with five point-of-view characters. A glaring rookie mistake. After seven years, I finally figured that out. And, to my own amazement, finished it. After seven years.
Two years later, I was ready to write my second novel, Beth’s Book. This book was going to be different in many ways.
First, it would have one protagonist, Beth Shepherd, be set in contemporary times, the early 2000s and not require me stumbling through the intricacies of upper-class Victorian women’s fashions. GMTG has two major young women characters.
Beth’s Book is a psychological mystery for which my career as a long- time psychotherapist would be a rich resource. Dissociation figures prominently in Beth’s Book. And I greatly enjoyed my spin on the mystery novel of a protagonist, Beth, a fiction writer, being taken on as a case by her fictional detective, Katie Shields.
Fictional Katie forces her author Beth to face up to her own crimes that underlie all the dysfunction and chaos Beth is experiencing. This novel only took me two years to write. I suspect if you’re embarking on writing your second novel, you have some modicum of confidence (You did, after all, finally write your book to completion). Take a bow. Give yourself a pat on the back for facing the terrors of the blank page and the endless re-writing a novel requires
The interminable bouts of Who am I to think I can write a novel? The all-too-often symphony of self-recriminations that stem from yet another survivor of a dysfunctional family. You did it.
You can do it again.
It won’t be easy. It never is. Unless you do what I did for my third novel.
More about that next time.
