My brain has been kicking an idea around for a while now. It is not an idea I like one little bit, and I can’t let go of it, and I’m starting to get massively, massively fucked off with it. The idea is this: write a novel.
This is a shit idea. I don’t do long prose, because I’m shit at it. But I have reached the point, after some 18 months of kicking it, where I am forced to concede that if ever I am to do something with MARLOWE it won’t be a comic (or at least, not any kind of mini-series of the sort one could pitch as a previously unpublished writer). But I don’t want to sit on it. So I need to make it into something else. Something where I can place different demands on the thing, and make it another sort of beast, while still exploring the themes I want to. And the only form I can find that would make it something fit to see the light of day is to write it as a novel.
This doesn’t just suck because I don’t want to write a novel, by the way. This sucks because it means a totally different approach, a complete re-thinking, and, most crucially, it means doing a fucksight more research than I needed to for the comic. My head has Betrayed me. I must kill it. Or at least talk myself out of writing a novel.
Have you seen NaNoWriMo? It might be just the thing to get novel-writing out of your system.
Briefly, they encourage people to write a 50,000 world novel in 30 days. Sheer madness, I say.
Yeah, I’m aware of that. Frankly, if I’m going to write a novel, I want it to be *good*. 2000 words a day, and a few days for re-writes is not *good*. It’s an exercise in discipline.
Not only that, but it takes me most of an evening to bash out 1500 words of dubious op-ed writing. I don’t think I could even manage 2000 words a day without taking time off work.
All that said, I may take a run at it this year on a non-MARLOWE trip, just to see where I get to.
Perhaps MARLOWE could be a move/play/TV series script?
I have a feeling you’ve already considered this, though…
You’re right. Wouldn’t work for film. Visual media demand a level of visual excitment that I just can’t sustain through the second act, no matter what I do. Or rather, I can, but at the expense of the plot elements that interested me in the first place. It *might* work as a play or as a TV one-off, but that’s even more hassle than a novel, and I wouldn’t know how to sell it.
i’ve seen writers do that kind of two thousand word thing and have a novel done in a month. it’s a bad idea, and they’re bad writers, and if at the end they all put a bullet in their brains, i would be a happy fellow.
anyhow: novels are more research, yes, but short stories are not, and if you wanna start working out the kinks, that’s a good place to start. there’s also a large market for them.