erik smetana: writer (or something like that)

The Novel started out as some sort of epic genre bending tome in the early conceptional stages, then as it bled into becoming my thesis, it toyed with morphing into something best categorized as YA fiction. Which was fine by me, some of my favorite books in the last few years have been YA, so that was pleasing in a way. But then the overwhelming urge to turn the book into something more literary took hold, it was after all my MFA thesis. And with that the novel was abandoned for a bit.

I realized I wouldn't be able to finish in short order, at least not soon enough to graduate in the spring, so I set it aside and put together a collection. Made up of stories written during my time in the program. It passed muster, even if it wasn't necessarily my best work or the work I had wanted to present.

This isn't something I've discussed with many other MFA grads, to see if they've had similar experiences, but that summer after completion I felt drained. I just couldn't wrap my ahead around writing, I'd been so focused on it for two years that now when I wasn't responsible for workshop stories (writing and reading them), putting words on paper seemed daunting. The summer of 2010 was one massive dry spell, followed by the fall and my first semester of teaching, another energy sapping monster. Grading, lecturing, talking about writing (and not always the kind I was most interested in reading) took a toll. Little more than a handful of revision sessions took place between September and December.

So when the semester break hit (for both my teaching position and my university related day job), I swore I was going to write. And I did, only it was on short stories. Some items that I'm fairly proud of (though they require several rounds of revision) came out of two weeks of me holed up in my office, the dog at my feet. But the novel was collecting dust on my jumpdrive and that was unacceptable.

So as I noted a few posts back, I'm ignoring all writing (with the exception of the occasional blog post) that isn't the novel. I started over with it, trying to get my barings, I revised (i.e. redid from scratch) my outline and started typing. I'm sitting somewhere around 10k at the moment after a very good writing session this past Saturday and hope to hit 15k by the end of the week (with an eye on my self-imposed first draft deadline of 3/9/10). But, the question lingers (or better yet, re-emerged from its hole), what kind of story am I writing?

Literary fiction? There are elements of it there. Genre fiction? It does involve some sf (science fiction) elements. YA? My primary characters are teenagers. Does it matter? Probably not, and that's what I'm going to keep telling myself, and hope that if I'm fortunate enough to place a revised draft with an agent, they'll steer me in the right direction and let an editor make that call.

My job is to write a book, not worry about which section it'd end up in at a bookstore.