What Not To Do

The summer is almost halfway over (oh my god where did the time go?!?!), which means the school year is about to start. And it's not just any school year; it's my senior year of college.  That means GREs, grad school applications, and graduation, but most importantly, it means writing my senior thesis.

Some of you may know that I'm writing a science fiction novel based on my research for my thesis.  Well, I'm quickly getting more and more worried about the fact that I've decided to undertake this giant project without ever having written any long creative pieces.

 

But, lucky for me, I happen to be surrounded by so many talented and generous people -- talented in that they know about writing and generous in that they're willing to lead my novice butt to something that might actually be good.  

One such person is Dr. (!) Sarah Rugheimer, who just got her Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard.  She sat down with me for over an hour last week and talked to me about my ideas.  It was amazing.  I went into that meeting with this vague, amorphous, kind-of-sort-of plan for a novel and walked out of it with a much clearer idea of what to write and how to go about writing it. 

I won't tell you the what now. You'll have to actually read my thesis to get that (see what I did there? that pre-publication advertising?).  But the how is something that everyone who wants to should learn, if they haven't already.  Here it is, in a few simple points:

1.  Read (That's pretty obvious.  You can't be a good writer without being a good reader first.)
2. Identify stories that are similar to yours and study them
3. Plan out plot points. 
• Use note cards or something else you can move around so you can play with the order of things. 
4. Write without interruptions for short periods of time (\(\approx 25\) mins) with regular breaks at the end of each session

I spent tonight working on the first two. Dr. Rugheimer recommended a few books, one of which is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.  I'm not too far along, so I can't really summarize it, but I can already tell it's really good.  If you're interested in science fiction and space and ethical quandaries, this is the book for you.

She also recommended the movie The Host, based off of the book of the same name by Stephenie Meyer (yes, the same woman who wrote Twilight).  The movie wasn't meant to be an example of great writing or plot development*.  The idea that I have for my novel was similar to the movie's plot, and now that I've watched it, I know they won't be identical.  I now even have ideas on how I can make my book better.  Maybe not in the eyes of preteen girls, because she'll probably always have me beat there, but that's not really my target audience anyway.  In other words, because of this movie, I have the beginning of a list of things I'm not going to do when I write my thesis, and that's as good a place as any to start.



*Disclaimer: The movie (and, I'm assuming, the book) is a lot better than Twilight!  The emotional climax of the movie actually made me cry, but that doesn't mean much because I cry at pretty much any movie.