Reading Bryson and Inspiration
Aug 18th, 2008 by Nut
Right now I’m reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while now but only started after buying it for 50 cents at a sidewalk sale a month or so ago. If you’ve never read it, it’s about how the author decides to hike the Appalachia trail even though he really doesn’t have the experience to do it. The book is funny, and that’s the main selling point, but it got me thinking about embarking on a project like that. Something big, unwieldy, and gutsy.
I thought about a lot of stuff: driving cross country, quitting TV taking guitar lessons, etc. What do all of these ideas have in common? They give me something to write about. That may sound lame (I’m sure Bryson didn’t hike the AT just for the literary value of it—although you never know), but that’s the way a writer’s mind works. We are constantly on the lookout for our next fix. So I asked myself, where might I find some fresh material? After giving it a lot of thought, there’s only one project that fits the bill and doesn’t require me to quit my job or strain my marriage.
Writing a novel I’ve already written. Huh? A couple of years ago, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, and I came away with 40,000 or so words of something that I didn’t think was too bad (at the time). That was a while ago and I haven’t revisited what I wrote since then. I’ve been eager to go back and see what I wrote (and if it was any good), but since I write by hand I haven’t been wanting to sit and type it all out. It would take weeks. It’s one of the main reasons I bought voice-recognition software recently. The idea being that I would narrate the novel and the computer would type it up for me. That was the theory, anyway. I have used the program to type up some recent stuff I’ve written, but the novel is still sitting there, ignored. Steven King would be proud — he usually sits on his rough drafts for “only” six months before revisiting them.
So here is the idea: take out the novel, type it up, and shape it into something worthwhile. Maybe it will turn into a novel, maybe it’ll turn into a short story but I think the experience would be a valuable one either way. Even if what I already have on paper isn’t any good, it’ll be a good exercise in editing and it’ll give me some practice working on something longer. It’ll be a challenge to take whatever I wrote back then and make it good.
That and it’ll give me something to write about.
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I’ve hiked parts of the AT as a kid, and have always wanted to read this book. I think when my kids are grown I’m going to try to hike the whole thing. You’ll have to let me know your full impression when you are finished.