Anderson, Faulkner, and Me!

I was shopping in a local bookstore the other day and found a book by Faulkner I had not know existed. It is called New Orleans Sketches, and it is amazing, One of my favorite books is Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. I have always considered working on a similiar work of inter-connecterd short stories. New Orleans Sketches is Faulkner's verions of Winesburg.

I think I am going to adapt this style for my crime novel. I worked a lot on plot stuff yesterday, and it went very well. I think I have an outline of some of the "sketches" I am going to do. I am going to spend the first half of the novel just doing character sketches on each of the main characters, and some of the locations totally described.

I am going to set the whole novel in a small town called "Fair Hill". It is a small mountain town in the Ozarks. So with it being a small town there will only be probably 8-10 characters total, so I am think probably 20 or so chapters/sketches. I am going to try and write one sketch a week and I am also going to start submitting them to short fiction magazines. I want each of the stories to be tight stories that can stand alone and also that will form the chapters of some connected novel.

I am planning on going down to the office twice a week and writing a rough draft of story by hand, then spend a day typing it and doing first revision, then step back for a day and not think about it (start working on new story idea), then I will comeback and spend 2-3 days revising the story and then the 7th day or so I will submit that story to magazine. Then after all that my plan is just to rinse and repeat.

Okay I am going to go make some coffee now and work on some more plot stuff I will keep everyone up to date on the novel progress as it happens.

Read these amazing books now!