On Writing A Novel (Thus Far) in 25 Steps
Or, How to Stop Worrying (fleetingly) and (sort of/almost) Love the Mess
Come up with an idea. Play with it in a notebook. Draw a map. Like this one (Link to it). Then revise it. You can’t really draw, but it doesn’t matter. Make up names. Some of the names suck. Change them. Mean to change others and forget.
Start writing it. This will go terribly. Get embarrassed and stop. Start again. Show it to your writer friends. Ask them to critique it rather harshly. Realize later that this was a bad idea. Let the project languish as you struggle with insecurity.
Get a short little residency where you stay in like a chicken coop but for people in Tennessee. It’s winter when you go, 30 degrees at night and you can’t keep a fire going for more than a few hours, so you sleep in your clothes, your hat, and under about five blankets. Find a walnut shell that reminds you of a different, important walnut shell. Eventually get this new shell tattooed on your forearm. This has nothing to do with the novel, which you try to revise bits of during the residency.
Go to graduate school. Ignore the novel idea in favor of shorter, safer options. Know that you will start it again in novel workshop your second year.
One week before novel workshop starts, have a panic attack. Rewrite the 40 pages you planned to start with. Like, completely. Change the tenor of the story entirely. Cut the original opening. It’s gone. You don’t even remember it now. In fact, the only thing you remember is that that original main character is now dead when the story starts.
Begin to share your work. Nobody gets it. You’re writing fantasy, but very deliberately trying to avoid certain tropes, like a chosen one or dark lord/villain. Everyone keeps talking about Harry Potter. Explain to them, often, that your book is not Harry fucking Potter. Remind everyone that Ursula Le Guin wrote about a school for wizards in the goddamn 60s, and did it goddamn better than Rowling ever could, and managed to do it without being a goddamn TERF.
Keep working. Revise the opening because everyone found it really confusing, and that criticism was valid and helpful. Suddenly, people are starting to get it. Be gratified. Then insecure. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat so many times.
Finish the two-semester novel workshop with about 150 pages of something. Have no idea what to do next, but sit down and keep going anyway. Stop and print and do a work through, usually in the backyard Tiki bar where you live.
At some point, be intimidated by the progress of a peer. Decide to set a weekly word count goal, which will change every week, depending on the ever-shifting landscape of your other responsibilities: drafting a whole separate thesis, running a debut novel contest, applying for post-MFA jobs, being a person, falling head-over-heels. Still, you hit your goals, come hell or high water. Mistakes count. Use strike-through instead of deleting. Write notes to yourself within the manuscript. Every word counts. Most of them are the wrong words. Don’t care. Keep going.
Realize that the ending you ultimately intend is actually like 400 pages away, and you’ve written over 400 pages already. But a potential first-book ending is coming right up. Aim for that. Duology, baby.
Finish a draft. Celebrate. Realize immediately the insane volume of work that revision will entail. Panic and despair, even as you celebrate.
Discover that the ending isn’t quite working. Reframe a few things. Move about 80 pages of book 1 into book 2. Move another 50 into a whole separate thing. Hope somebody actually likes the first book so you can eventually do all that other shit.
Make an outline, since lord only knows if the first draft actually makes any temporal sense. Delete the fifth point of view character. Rewrite every scene he’s in via the other POV characters he interacts with.
Go through bursts of inspiring work and bursts of frustration bordering on insanity. Think about making lifestyle changes. Don’t do it.
Work all the way through the book, ruthlessly cutting the exposition and backstory that you stuck in every single character beat in draft 1. Realize that the reader needs to know basically none of it. Watch that beautiful word count shrink.
Begin sharing with others. Get a bunch of feedback that at first feels overwhelming. Lose interest. Wallow in frustration. Get drunk, maybe. Feel like a fuck up for turning your life upside down to pursue writing. Tell yourself that you are 40, divorced, underemployed, still in debt, living in someone else’s house, and have little savings, that you are irresponsible and lazy and dumb. Other people don’t seem bothered by it, but you question your choices almost every day, even though you know you’re doing what you can do.
P.S. Yes, you’ve been in therapy for a while.
Begin round three of revision. This is where things start to actually kinda get good. It’s so much work. So many rewrites. So many scenes with new blocking, new vectors of tension and conflict between and within characters. Meet with yet another agent, yet another well-established author. Come away both encouraged and daunted. Keep going.
Hit the fucking wall at a full head of steam. The finish line feels in sight, but your emotional exhaustion overtakes you. Remind yourself that this is not forever. You will feel reconnected. Make some progress, sometimes, even so.
Hate yourself. Forgive yourself. Hate yourself. Forgive yourself.
Write, sometimes. Don’t write, other times. Try to write without checking your phone. Succeed sometimes, fail most of the time.
Those sections that are getting good remain good. Other sections get good, but more slowly, more agonizingly.
Start a Substack that both helps focus you and provides another thing to work on that isn’t the novel. Wonder if this is smart. Do it anyway.
Write a novel-writing process piece for the above and, right at this sentence, watch as the whole concept crawls all the way up its own ass. Realize you should probably stop it and just go back to work on the book.
Go back to work. Thanks for reading.