Early in my professional life, I experienced emotional trauma at the hands of my employer. Many years later the pain is still so vivid that I have tried to deal with like any writer would: by penning a novel about it. The first attempt, while still not abandoned completely, ended up sounding too self-pitying. A friend of mine with an MFA told me that many students elect to use biographical novels as their thesis. I want the story to be profound, and funny, and not so dreadful. I began revising it recently, but put it back down. The second attempt was to make it all a metaphor. This led to 75,000 words that didn’t have a strong center. These words lack the cohesion of painful narrative, but they do contain some very nice writing. I revisited that novel recently. There may be hope for it. Novel writing draws on personal experience. These two novels are not among the six I’ve completed. Both are sufficient, length-wis...
Blog of a struggling writer.