Okay, so I’ve been working on a novel with a friend for a good eight years and although we do have a completed book it is quite frankly rubbish.  We both believe that we have a very good story and a few good characters with plenty of scope for growth.  I know that we need to do a lot more of location scouting but the only thing holding us back on that is ourselves but that is not essential at the moment because we’re at the brainstorming stage.  At times it does feel like we will never  be able to rewrite it how we see it.  We have an amazing blockbuster ending but we need to get to that point.  We need to build this universe up and create character growth and diversity within the characters.

I believe that the reason we are not happy with what we have is because it is not well written at all. I think that is because we didn’t know what we were, or are doing.  We dived straight into a hundred thousand word novel with no idea of how to structure a story of any length let alone one of so many words.   We could not build characters over such a length.  We didn’t understand that the reader needs to be able to understand and either hate or love the characters that they were reading about.  Neither did we have the research skills to find out what we needed to know to make the technical sides believable. 

There was no skill of the art form either.  We did not understand the skill of the written word, we probably still don’t but I do a little bit more now.  I’ve started knocking out a few short stories and that has been a huge learning experience for me.  I’ve gone from putting a two thousand word story together to having one that has just topped the eight thousand word mark.  If it wasnt for discovering Escape Pod and then StarShipSofa and the many amazing writers (plus countless other skilled people) then I would never have really started writing short stories which would have meant that I would not have gotten any better at writing.  I know there are writers out there that have never written a short story but for me it has been a vital part of learning my trade and I find that I really enjoy knocking a short story out.  In fact it’s mainly what I have been working on for the last year and I feel like I’m actually growing as a writer and hopefully soon I will have something published by the end of the year.