Jessica Ralston's Blog

Like a lot of writers, I can’t really stand my own writing, in the same way that I don’t really like my own cooking. And, just as when I go out to eat, I tend not to order my signature dish–an overcooked and overspiced meat-stewy thing containing something inappropriate, like tinned peaches, and a side order of undercooked and flavorless vegetable–I really don’t want to read anything that I could have come up with on my own computer. What I produce on my computer invariably turns out to be an equivalent of the undercooked overcooked stewy thing, no matter how hard I try to follow the recipe, and you really don’t want to eat too much of that.

The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby

“There were about seventy-five squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.”

About A Boy, Nick Hornby

“…it’s the writing that’s hard, not the invention.”

I’ve been trying to read a lot more lately. My thinking on this is that a good reader a good writer makes. Totally logical.

It also gives me incentive to buy new books. One or two a month, that is it! I have a limit.

I will probably want to talk about the books, so I’ll use this space to do that.

In my reading last night, I came across a nice paragraph in “The Polysyllabic Spree,” which is a compilation of Believer columns written by Nick Hornby. The paragraph is about how Hornby dislikes his writing. He says that anything he comes up with on his computer is like an overcooked undercooked stew-y thing, and it’s really not very good. I don’t think I can tell anyone how happy I was to hear this. Really. It made me realize that I can hate my own writing and still plod on regardless, because someone will like it and want to read it, right? Right.

In writing news, I cleared off my kitchen table yesterday and sat down with my unfinished novel and my characters, a notebook, and a black Sharpie marker and listed characters, did some character studies, and listed some of the subplots and issues that need to be resolved. Throughout the story, there are eight small subplots, four or five different personal issues dealing with relationships between a few of the characters (nothing romantic, just, two people can’t stand each other and the other is a mother-son relationship), and just basically I just wrote a lot of big letters in the notebook.

I felt better after doing it. The sheets are white with big black letters and the pages are all over my table. You tell me you wouldn’t feel better about things if you hadn’t just done that.

I was doing a character study of my MC, and the first words that came to my mind were “not a risk taker.” I texted my friend Bee to tell her this revelation, along with my worries that my MC is not a risk taker and she said that I could liken it to Luke Skywalker. He wasn’t a risk taker. “It’s about a scenario that happens regardless of personal risk or having a secondary character who’s a risk taker sometimes.” That made me feel better, too.

I also realized all those books that I like to look at at Barnes and Noble (and sometimes buy), the ones with titles like “From First Draft to Finished Novel,” are absolute crap. If J.K. Rowling and Nick Hornby and JANE AUSTEN wrote their books, which are frankly much better than I could ever do, without those books, then dammit, I can too.

I tallied a bunch of word counts of novels on my bookshelf. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” has 107,000, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” has 60,000, “To Kill A Mockingbird” has more words than “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.” “The Picture of Dorian Gray” has just over 100,000. I don’t have the numbers handy right here, but I can update with them later.

In conclusion, I think that anything over 120,000 won’t do well because it won’t hold anyone’s attention to actually buy and READ the damn thing.

Ugh.