The Challenge...

Write five novels on line in one year. Five, count’ em, five full length novels in 365 days, or one book every two months. I will be writing all of them simultaneously. Crazy? It’s insane! A lot of folks don’t read five books in a year. The first part of each story will be posted on Saturday September 12, 2009 and run until September 12, 2010. Three hundred and sixty-five all too short days for a guy with a full time job. So why take on such a daunting, and risky challenge? Three reasons.

I’ve published two books, Broken: One Soldier’s Unexpected Journey Home, a novel of PTSD and the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald set among Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula, and Everything for Love: A Memoir of Love and War set amid the brutal siege of Sarajevo. Both have sold to international audiences, and I love every soul who bought and read those books. But the recession has challenged a good many hardworking people. Weighted under more pertinent burdens discretionary items like books are quite naturally pushed aside. My goal is to offer five good books to help those folks escape from their troubles for a time, or find community with characters in the stories who are struggling to overcome their own hardships.

Two. The process of publishing makes marketers and salespeople of authors. We’ve gotten away from the art of storytelling. That ancient craft has been forsaken to committees, endless focus groups, and homogenization. Lost is edginess, point of view, individuality and, yes, offensiveness. During the Living Fiction Project I won’t be writing to niche markets. I will be writing to the stories and the characters. Informed often by the news of the day, the characters may go off on diatribes. They may be affected by the news, respond to media, cultural quotes and events as a means to render their world and motivations better for the reader.

This was the way stories were once told. I will have one chance to tell the story and to tell it right the first time. There will be no rewrites, no drafts. The characters and stories will unfold simultaneously for the writer and reader alike.

The truth is, my writing has always been rather organic and natural. That is, I have a vision for a story. I have a beginning and a destination, but the characters are very much alive within that story. They possess their own intention and will. In the story I may wish them, indeed attempt to force them in one direction, only to have them tell me that they intend on an entirely different direction. Their thoughts and words will emerge without being reworked or annotated. No doubt they will reveal themselves in unforeseen ways as each of the stories unfolds. As my wife has observed on more than one occasion, “Bill is never alone. He has all his characters to keep him company!”

Finally, this is the perfect project for a writer with a sort of creative A.D.D. Rather than fending off or setting aside ideas and inspirations that come on something with the force of a sudden summer storm, I will indulge each of those stories. At the very least it will keep things interesting, and keep me guessing as much as you, the reader.

As for the stories, I won’t go into detail here. I have tried to pick stories that are very different from one another. They are stories that will challenge both writer and reader. Some will be quiet and introspective, following lives engaged in the quiet calamities we all struggle to survive and overcome. There is a futuristic piece. There is also a historical novel, telling a fictionalized version of a real event never before written about, but one so profound that it nearly changed the course of history.

I won’t attempt to predict where this road will lead. The first post of each of the five stories will start this Saturday, September 12. My only concern, aside from hoping that my marriage won’t suffer from the intense and awesome commitment and challenge presented in this project, is to tell heartfelt, thoughtful engaging and entertaining stories. The rest, my dear friends, I shall leave to you…

W.C. Turck