As I said before, The Marinara Murders is simmering in a drawer, waiting for me to pull it out and edit it. If all goes as planned, that will be next Saturday, where I try to read the book all in one sitting. I'm very excited to re-read it and see how I did, but in order to know that, I need some distance from it (which is why I've waiting more than 7 weeks since I finished it.
But I've also decided that the best way to get a little distance from the book is to start the next one. And I'm happy to say that I'm more than a chapter into the next Beautyman mystery novel, currently titled Salted Earth.
Starting a new novel is weird. I vaguely knew what the plot of this would be and had a couple things I knew I wanted to include. After that, I feel like I'm a vacuum for details, lines of dialogue, situations, places, stories. I read a ton during these times, usually non-fiction. I just collect all that I can and it all goes through a filter where the only question is "does this fit?" I couldn't get too specific on why one detail fits and another not. In all honestly, I try not to question that. I usually just know.
Even if later it turns out it doesn't fit, there's a weight, or a theme, or some other way that it informs me. Often, it's helpful for me to know secrets about my characters that will never show up on the page, so some important details end up being known only to me.
Stephen King talks about writing a novel being like sculpting a block of marble. First you hammer away and then chisel out the details. But the statue is in there, he just has to find it. I understand where he's coming from, but it's not exactly how I think of it.
Writing a novel feels a lot more like furnishing a house. You are on the look out constantly for furniture and colors and textures, thinking about what all of it might look like inside the house you're building. Sometimes you go searching rows at antique stores looking, and other times you just stumble on what you're looking for when you least expect it.
When you find what you like, you put a chair in a room, or you paint the wall, and you stand back and say, "Does this work?" Not just with what's there now, but with what you think will be there later. So the chair might be great, but it will be too big for the sofa you really want to bring in later and the patterns clashes with the throw rug. And the yellow wall puts the wrong light on everything. Etc.
While I often feel like I'm discovering the story, as Stephen King suggests, furnishing a home feels truer to me. You know what it should generally feel like to stand in it, or cook dinner in it. You just need to arrange all the disparate elements in the right way to make it happen.