Author Jeff Whelan [3] : Process

"I'm also quite intrigued by your manner regarding your book, how it came about and who you are as a writer.  Any thoughts?"

          Space Orville was born on March 29, 1982.  It was a cold, damp evening and I was struggling to come up with something for my high school creative writing class.  I had hammered out a few rather smarmy, deliberately oblique poems that were going nowhere and sat staring at the page waiting for something to jump out of it.  For no reason that I can recall, I typed the words "Space Orville" under what I had written.  Half an hour later, I had close to three pages of this bizarre, rambling space adventure that actually showed promise.  My classmates found it thoroughly amusing in a twisted, "Dr. Caligari meets Flash Gordon" kind of way.  My instructor was perplexed but expressed support for the ideas nonetheless.

          Throughout the next year, I added to the story periodically, sharing the chapters for laughs as they came about, but never worked on it with any degree of seriousness.  I kept all of my original work but, not long after high school, it found its way into a file folder and there it stayed for the next 18 years.  The concept, though, stayed alive somewhere in the back of my head the entire time.

          Then came an adult creative writing course I took through The Institute for Children's Literature.  As a final project, I dug out my old manuscript, dusted it off and decided there might be enough to work with.  And so began the long, slow process of building something that was actually coherent and readable out of the rambling train wreck that was the original story.  With three chapters completed and reviewed by my instructor, I graduated the writing course with the promise to finish the manuscript and get the darn thing published.

          That instructor has, sadly, passed away, but I think she would be pleased with the results. Completing the manuscript fulfilled a promise not only to her, but to myself.  I discovered that I actually had not only a writing style, but a method as well.  I like to write longhand on the first pass.  I sometimes start from an outline but find, more frequently, that a series of randomly generated ideas on a page will often take shape on their own as long as my pen keeps moving across the paper.  My first edit comes when I type the thing out.  Next edit comes when I read over what I typed, realize it was all tripe and have to go back and start over. None of this should come as news to any author, though.  Seems we never quite finish editing our work, even after it's been available to the reading public for nearly a year.  Comes a time, however, when you've finally got to just leave it alone and let folks read it.  Most of them will tell you honestly whether or not it's any good.

          I find I write to entertain not only others, but myself as well.  I like refreshing ideas, optimism and happy endings. I like wordplay, quirky humor and weird characters.  I've read and enjoyed plenty of dark, dystopian speculative fiction, hard-edged supernatural nail-biters and deep, psychological thrillers and there are many very talented authors out there, indies especially, who can write this stuff very effectively. When I sit down to write, this different brand of crazy jumps out of my head that I have embraced as my own style.  Does any of that come close to saying who I am as a writer?

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