Choosing First Novel Topic

I thought I would post today about how I went about choosing the topic for my first novel. I have dozens of ideas for novels, as I am sure any aspiring writer would have, and this was actually quite a difficult task.

The first thing that I think that you need to do for your first novel is really make a strong, what I would call “normal” book. I have ideas for sci-fi and fantasy books but overall I think these genres might be rather difficult to get into as I think people are more weary of new writers, since there are a lot of them in this field. If you are targeting an existing world such as Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance than this is nulified quite a bit as those particular series get sells just on the name brand alone. However,  I have little interest in these series (not that I don’t like them, I just want my own series), so this is out. Plus I have also noticed that people who write sci-fi or fantasy tend to only write in those genres, and while I have ideas for those genres I don’t want to be in one specific genre like that. One way that I think you can get out of this is by writing a more traditional work.

Next, I fully believe in the “write what you know” saying. This is going to be my first book so I think being fully aware of the subject is very very important. I don’t want to have to worry as much about the research side the writing since I am largely using this book to get my sea legs. As I progress in writing I can advance my topics into ones that I’m less familiar with and thus would need to research more. Researching is something I’m not quite prepared to get into full blown, especially since I am currently a student and research enough as it is.

With these two things in mind I originally decided to write an autobiography. On top of the two above reasons, I also feel like the autobiography is a genre that seems to be really blossoming in mainstream America currently, thus I have a good chance of selling because of it. Also, while I may not be famous or powerful in any paritcular way, my disease does provide me with the ability of showcasing something not many people really know that much about and going through how exactly that affects my life.

After writing a couple short chapters on the subject though, I decided that this wasn’t exactly what I was looking to write either so I morphed the original idea somewhat. Instead of a straight autobiography, I am planning on doing a fictional autobiography. What this essentially means is that I will take some of the larger moments of my life and sort of mash them together into one story and try to explain how it affects my life in a more indirect fashion that way. This also allows me to make more subtle commentaries on the medical society as well as society on a whole. I think it is a great idea, I have a lot of stuff I can put into, and putting it into a real story can make it more interesting to read. We’ll see how this works!