Publication day!
Today sees the publication of my first novel, The Recluse Rules. It's a literary/psychological horror set in Wales, if that's your bag.
Having written 6 academic books previously I wondered what it would be like to write fiction. And the answer is very different, but also, quite similar. When I was a child I always wanted to write fiction and used to spend hours tucked away writing stories (hey, we didn't have the internet and only 4 channels on TV). This love of writing is probably why I started blogging and writing academic books in the first place. So the fiction writing desire fed those and now has come full circle.
I think when writing your first novel, like writing your first academic book, the main question is "can I?" Can you put together enough of those word things to constitute a book, and for it to be reasonably coherent. With academic books I found the content flowed pretty quickly from a good chapter outline. Once you have that cracked, it is, more or less, a matter of filling it up. That's less so with fiction. I have to switch between discovery and outlining modes more. I had a general idea for the book, a vague outline, but I needed to write my way into the characters to then get started, then switch back to outline to plot the direction, then back to discovery, etc.
And while I enjoyed writing my academic books, writing fiction is a LOT more fun. You don't have to be completely faithful to the truth. I did a lot of research for some aspects, but on others I needed it to be roughly okay (for example some of the local geography in the book isn't exact, but it doesn't really matter). In academic writing there's all that having to be correct - urgh, right? Obviously as well, there is greater freedom in the style of writing in fiction. I felt that my last two academic books got a bit closer to a personal stye, but they were still within the general frame of academic textbooks.
Another difference has been familiarity. I have gone from being knowledgeable in how the academic book writing world operates, with publishers, keynotes, etc to being a painful noob. I'll blog the different tools and platforms I used in writing the book in another post, but the whole world of fiction writing, particularly self-publishing independent authors, comes with its own set of communities, expected behaviours, unexpected tasks, and new skills to develop. That's exciting. But, also a bit daunting.
But the main thing is I have answered that first question: "Can I?" Yes. That is not to say it's a towering piece of fiction, but it is definitely a book. I'm already about a quarter of a way through writing my second novel and I already feel the benefit of having developed knowledge through the process of writing the first one.
