Guest Post: Falling in Love with Your Novel - Maria Geraci (LRC)

Maria Geraci, author of Boyfriend of the Month Club, is here today so let's give her a warm welcome ^.^ She has a wonderful piece about falling in love (with your novel)!

Btw: You should read my review of Boyfriend of the Month Club.



Falling in love with your Novel
By Maria Geraci
Writing a novel is exhausting. Both emotionally and physically. The only thing I can compare it to is falling in love. As a matter of fact, it’s exactly like falling in love.

There’s the beginning stage which is always fresh and exciting. Two people see each other across a crowded room and there’s a spark. An instant attraction. Or maybe it starts out as friendship and then one day the friendship becomes something more. It’s the same way a writer begins a story. You imagine a character or a situation or a first line and you’re instantly intrigued. You want to know more so you sit down at your computer and start typing. The words flow like honey. You want to see each other every day. You can’t get enough of each other. You text till three in the morning. You get up and before you have your coffee you go to your computer and open up your word doc and write the one perfect line that you must have dreamed while you were sleeping because you woke up with it fresh in your mind. Ain’t love grand? If only things could stay this way.

Then you have your first fight. Maybe it’s just a spat or maybe it’s more serious, like a major blow out. This is the stage when you might just say the hell with it and walk away. Your friends tell you he’s a loser. You can do better than him. The story concept isn’t working. You send some pages to your critique group or to your agent or your editor and they don’t like. But… then he apologizes. And then you apologize. And then you kiss and make up. You take those pages you gave your critique partners/agent/editor and read them again. You can make this work. You know you can. So you rewrite. You’ve just gone through an important initiation rite and come out the other side with your relationship stronger

Next comes the most dangerous stage of a relationship. Boredom. You’ve hit a wall. The zing is gone. You ask yourself, is this really the person I want to end up with? The story becomes predictable. You have a hundred pages left to write and you don’t know which direction to take it. You edit. You rewrite again. You go away for the weekend and you rediscover why you fell in love in the first place.

You finally finish the story but you’re not sure if it’s really “done.” You love it one day. And hate it the next. You just know you can’t read it anymore. So you send it to your editor. She tells you that she loves it, but that you have to take out chapter 14 because she hates the character you’ve introduced there. But the character has to stay because without him the rest of the story won’t make sense! You go back to the computer (armed with lots of chocolate and coffee) and you take out chapter 14 and rewrite the ending completely differently. And it works! He tells you he hates your cat but you love your cat, so you compromise. You keep the cat but the cat doesn’t sleep on the bed anymore. Maybe things are going to work out after all.

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A Big Thank You to Maria for this insight into novel writing! You can visit her website http://www.mariageraci.com/ and her Facebook fan page http://www.facebook.com/MariaGeraciBooks

Remember: if you review one of her books, you get 2 extra entries per review ^.^