This year, I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to write a 175 page novel (50,000 words) during the month of November. Nano starts on November 1st at 12:01 AM and ends November 30th at midnight. The rules state that I have to write a novel completely from scratch, no rewrites or finishing drafts that have already been started. On November 1st, I will sit down with a blank Word document. Hopefully, by November 30th, I will have written an entire novel of at least 50,000 words.
It's fun! I've participated twice before. The first time I attempted this feat, my story petered out and I wasn't able to finish. The second time I tried, my novel was complete, over 50,000 words, but was terrible. I couldn't even bear to read it. It might be saved on my hard drive somewhere, but I don't even really remember what the story was about.
This year, I'm preparing myself ahead of time. I'm going to write a "Biblical narrative," a novel that tells a Bible story but is written from the perspective of fictional characters. I've always wondered what it would have been like to live as a slave in Egypt, experience the plagues, and see firsthand the awesome power of God delivering His people.
The novel will be written from the perspective of an Egyptian male who is involved with the Hebrews but I'm not sure exactly how. He will be either a scribe in Pharaoh's court and will thus witness Moses' demands regarding the Hebrews or he'll be a tax collector who deals with the Hebrew farmers who grow part of their crops for Egypt.
The second character is a Hebrew slave, a young girl who lost both of her parents early in life and is no stranger to hardship and grief. I want to explore what it may have been like for both the Egyptians and Hebrews as the plagues progressed and the Hebrews were finally allowed to leave Egypt.
That's what all my research has been about lately. I've been reading books on Egypt, the plagues, and Mt. Sinai. There are some very interesting theories about the 10 plagues, whether they were supernatural occurrences or natural events controlled by God. I'm not sure anyone really knows.
2 comments:
Now that will be interesting!
That sounds like a great story! I cannot wait to hear more about it.
I have always found ancient Egypt fascinating. When I was in middle school, I wanted to be an Egyptology. For many years I toyed with the idea of writing a fiction story about the plagues and the exodus, but I never got around to it. I felt my writing style was not suited to a historical fiction.
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