I keep telling myself I’m going to start writing again. It’s something I did as a kid and into my college years, but I haven’t written anything for well over twenty years. “What will you do with all that time in retirement?” people ask. Amongst other things, I tell them I’m going to write.
I have a novel in my head. Well, maybe not a full novel, but at least the beginnings of one. And every time I’ve thought I’d start writing it, I found myself sketching out a few more ideas instead of actually building prose. It was a stalling tactic, and I knew it. But Pepper had a good idea the other day: she suggested that instead of writing the whole novel, I start out with smaller goals. “Write a snippet”, she said. “Just a piece of the story.”
Well, today I actually did it. I sat down this morning and hammered out a snippet. It’s one scene from the novel that seems clear in my mind. By the time I finished, I had almost 5,000 words on the page. Not too bad for a first effort.
Over the next weeks and months, I hope to put together some more snippets. And who knows, at some point they might come together into a coherent story…