Evenson's Post #1

This is Brian Evenson: I’m a writer with a few past books out and with a novel, Last Days that’s just come back from the printers.   I’m hijacking Jeff’s blog for a post or two…***Probably because I have a novel just coming out, I’ve been thinking a lot about how you put a novel together.  When I wrote The Open Curtain I had a plan going in:  I would trick myself into writing a novel by writing three novellas and then putting them together.  That worked flawlessly for the first two novellas, but then I got to the third novella and realized it had to be not only a novella but had to complete everything.  So, I spent years writing and rewriting that third section and throwing it away until finally I got it right. Then, when I wrote Aliens: No Exit, I had to write a fifteen-page summary of the book so that I could get it approved by Dark Horse and by Fox.  Result:  everything came together pretty smoothly.In October I spent two weeks at an artist colony and thought:  “Doing an outline worked pretty well, maybe I should do that again.”  So I did. Only problem is that I ended up with a 95-page outline of the first third of a projected novel.  Maybe a case of too much time on my hands.  It’s pretty specific and filled out, but it’s still only a third of the book, and if the outline is 95 pages, how long is the book itself going to be?  And when do I find time to sit down to write the 95-page outlines of the other section.  Wouldn’t it be easier just to write the book without an outline?  But if I do that will I run into the same problem that I ran into with The Open Curtain?You’d think I’d have written enough by this point to have this figured out, but I think each book has asked for something a little different from me, which is part of what keeps it interesting.  There are certain things that get easier and certain things that I have to keep re-teaching myself every time.