Eleven Pages: Introduction
The short version?
I’m Zan and I’m writing a serialized novel. Get started with Chapter 1…
Three years ago, I was working on yet another comic book script. I was collaborating with two new artists, and wanted to create something original with them that we could all own. I worked up an outline and first issue treatment and presented it to them, but they backed out.
I’d been developing comics scripts for as long as I could remember. My main problem (I thought) was that working in that medium made it impossible for me to do projects all by myself, and I ended up with lots of single issues, short stories that wouldn’t fit anywhere, and false starts like the one I’d just experienced.
This time, rather than find new artists, I decided to ditch the “graphic” part of “graphic novel” and write it as prose.
After lots of extensive outlining and goal setting, I’d come up with a plan to write thirty small chapters of about ten pages each. With only me to answer to, I started to write. I found I could finish a draft of a chapter in the span of three or four hours, and return to polish and re-write later. I kept at it, and kept my momentum.
But eventually I discovered that my main problem was not my only problem. Turns out that one of the reasons that I’ve always gravitated toward collaborations is that I work better when I have others invested in the project, making deadlines, expecting me to hold up my end of the deal. For better or worse, other peoples’ deadlines have a way of seeming more important than my own.
Recently, I made a new online friend, a writer himself, and told him that I had started a novel, but that it was languishing. He asked what it was about and I told him, and he immediately asked me to share the first chapter with him… and then the second, and the third… When he’d read all there was to read, he demanded a new chapter. I sat down, re-read and polished what I’d already done, and wrote a new eleven-page chapter so that he could find out what happened next.
This got me thinking.
How could I build a structure around this project that would continually encourage me to write in this way? My original outline focused on completing thirty short chapters, and since I knew the story was engaging and could find an audience as a serial, I thought I would try putting (some) pressure on myself and start to serialize the novel online.
If one writer friend was encouraging, then how about an online army of them?So please register, and please come back and enjoy the chapters as they’re posted. Get started with Chapter 1…
Enjoy!
Charles “Zan” Christensen,
Seattle, WA
2007