My First Novel – Done?

Well I just finished it. My very first novel. It’s called 4 Wheels and a Piece of Maple. It is about an Aboriginal boy from a small and isolated First Nations Reserve who gets exposed to skateboarding culture and it not only changes his life, but the lives of many other people in his community.

It feels weird to be finished because the story could go on. It feels like it should go on. The characters seem real to me and deserve to have a future. I don’t know if I can just stop the story although I told the story I wanted to and I think it turned out great.

I know that I am not done with the novel completely. But now that I am done with the first draft of this project, I can go back and edit and revise some older ones. My verse novel and my screenplay have been waiting for me to do just that.

I’m going to have to think of what my next project will be. As of right now I have no ideas, which is also a strange feeling because I knew what my screenplay would be about. I had planned that one in my head for years before starting. And near the end of that first draft, I knew what my verse novel was going to be about. Now, I have no idea what I am going to write next, which I guess is a good thing since I need to do a rewrite and revision of those two older projects.

I think it is important to distance yourself from a project before doing the rewrite and revision. I should be able to read those two projects with a fresh eye now. After I write a new project I will go back to this novel. And who knows, since it seems like the story could continue, maybe a sequel is in the realm of possibilities.


4 responses to “My First Novel – Done?”

  1. I felt the same way about an older story that I wrote – one that was unfortunately deleted in a computer crash. I was only eleven when I was writing it, though, so I didn’t really have the idea of completing it in mind, I just wanted to write. But now I’m really upset that it’s gone, because it possibly had more potential than anything I’ve written up until now. Anyway, congrats on finishing your novel!

  2. Thanks. Sorry to hear that you lost your work. I am always paranoid of losing my work too. I make sure to save it in two places every time I sign off. I save it on my hard drive and on a disk (now I use a flash drive.) I also make sure to print off a copy when I am done. There is one other way to save it too. If you set up an email account that you don’t use for anything else, you can email attachments to that account and you can access them whenever you want, even from different computers.

  3. Congratulations!

    And I too share the writer’s horror of a great work lost forever, Alexis.

    I breathed a lot easier once I acquired a fire-proof steel cabinet in which to store my scribbled treasures.

    As for computers, they can be a writer’s best friend and her worst enemy, too.