The Tumultuous Travels of Thomas Drabble: The Novel

This is a sample of my less rushed, more focused writing. It’s certainly not any more polished — it’s still a first draft — by I think it’s better. It’s the very beginning of the first chapter of The Tumultuous Travels of Thomas Drabble. You’re welcome to compare it to the mini-story I posted a week ago. It’s fairly similar.

“Rachel King sat at her desk, the hollow tinktinktinktink of rain falling on the aluminum awning outside of her study was the only sound in an otherwise silent room. The flickering lantern on the back corner of the desk created long, wavering shadows on the cream colored walls. Every now and then, Rachel thought she saw those shadows take the shape of her characters past and she would shudder.

Aside from the lantern, the only things on the desk were an empty notebook, a full inkwell, and a very old pen. Rachel bit the nail on her left pinky — one of her many habits, along with one flaw, that she unwittingly passed on to all of her characters. Rachel picked up the pen and began to doodle in the margins. This wasn’t a habit. It was ritual.

The desk itself was typical enough, but Rachel thought it possessed a sort of deep, powerful magic. She could hardly imagine how many adventures had begun on that oak surface — how many great heroes had been born in this exact location on nights just like this one. The desk had belonged to her grandfather — a brilliant, unpublished author whose stories had dazzled Rachel since she was a child.

A flash of lightning momentarily erased the shadows from the walls. The tinktinktinktink was drowned out by the crack of thunder that followed. At the top of the first blank page, Rachel wrote “The Dangerous Journey of Justin Worthy”. She leaned back, causing the office chair to creak under the little weight it was supporting. She nibbled on the end of the pen. Frowning at the words she had just written, she scribbled working title in parentheses underneath them.”

This obviously doesn’t offer much. The story hasn’t even begun in these first four paragraphs, but I think it gives you a little insight to my writing style when I focus on doing it correctly. It’s not perfect. It’s not supposed to be. I’m just working on taking advice from the people who have been kind enough to offer it. Hopefully this sample gives you a much better pictures of the world that I’m trying to create than those rushed mini-stories did.