Day 35 - My First Novel

My First Novel

When I was a kid, I loved Greek mythology.  When a new school year would begin, I would open my literature book to find out if there was a section on it and had it read within a day or two.  I read every mythology book in all my school libraries and the Duncanville Public Library too.  And then I would read them again.  One of my high school teachers convinced me to participate in a state academic competition in the mythology division.  I was sure that I’d do average, but I won!  All that reading paid off.

Years passed and I was a new teacher at Nash Elementary (now Intermediate), in Kaufman, Texas.  One rainy, boring Saturday I was watching an old movie based on the Greek tragedy The Trojan Women.  It is about the women captured after the fall of Troy.  As I watched, I realized I knew every character and her importance to the story.

For fun, because I was bored, I started writing down everything I remembered about the Trojan War.  After a day of writing I had more than a dozen pages.  I looked at it and realized I had the makings of a novel.  I started that day writing feverishly.  If I wasn’t at work or church, I wrote.  When there was something I forgot or couldn’t see the connection to the story, I’d buy a book to help me figure it out and read all week to know every detail.  It was a long time before I told anyone about my novel, more than a year.

A few things bothered me about the Greek stories.  The characters did not seem well developed.  Helen was no more than a pretty mannequin.  Why did she do what she did?  Some characters were super heroes one minute and a crying baby the next.  That didn’t feel right.  Not everything about the war is in the Iliad or the Odyssey, some are in the Greek tragedies, like The Trojan Women or Ajax, and a dozen others.  I didn’t want my characters boring and I wanted them to have reasons for doing what they did.

One of my decisions that came late in my writing was to eliminate the Greek gods altogether.  With them my novel would just be a fantasy and my characters ceased to have any meaning.  Without them I could explore things like why Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon when he returns from war or why Achilles gets so angry at Agamemnon.

The story of the Trojan War has a hundred characters.  Eventually I cut the novel down to four main characters: Agamemnon, Helen, Clytemnestra, and Achilles.  I never could get rid of Odysseus, so he is still a major character.  The other guys could stay in the novel, but they became secondary to the others. There are a lot of secondary characters!  My main characters needed a backstory for their lives to make sense and that is what I tried to do.  The secondary characters make the backstories more believable. 

This spring, as I was preparing to come to Bolivia, and I was saving all my novels on flash drives, I came to my final decision.  I need to tell it in first person.  These guys needed to tell their own story so I could say what they think.  That changed a lot of scenes.  A lot needed to be eliminated and some things needed to be added.

And then one night, at the end of July.  I was finished.  Yes, I am finished.  Soon, I will be publishing my novel on Amazon, as a Kindle book.  There will be more about Amazon later (and there are also Amazons in my book) and formatting my book for Kindle.

There are a few details I am working on, but I am publishing soon.  I might only ever sell 50 copies, but my twenty year-long odyssey is over.  My first novel is complete.

Spartan Sisters coming soon!