Reaching Ourselves in the Past

April 21, 2020

I may have sounded a little critical yesterday of Writers & Lovers, so I’m writing this post to clarify that I loved it. Although we disagreed on the matter of page vs. word count, the novel gets all the other parts of the writing process right.

Writers & Lovers is the story of a woman in her thirties who is writing a novel and grieving for her mother and barely scraping by. No spoilers, but it is ultimately a feel-good story with a satisfying ending. It gets a little sad, a little deep, but the touch is light and not sentimental.

A big reason why I love novels about writers is that there are always excellent passages about the writing process. Our narrator Casey thinks as often about writing as she does about her lovers and friends and debts and losses. This bit in particular rang very true to me:

“The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane. The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable.”

This passage was definitely in the back of my mind when I wrote yesterday about only surfacing from writing long enough to check my word count.

I find this idea of a first draft as the first layer of a painting very comforting:

“I’d had a few bad days of writing, and I was tempted to go back a chapter to fix it, but I could not. I just needed to move forward, get to the end. Painters, I told myself, though I know nothing about painting, don’t start at one side of the canvas and work meticulously across to the other side. They create an underpainting, a base of shape, of light and dark. They find the composition slowly, layer after layer. This was only my first layer, I told myself. … It’s not supposed to be good or complete. It’s okay that it feels like a liquid not a solid, a vast and spreading goo I can’t manage, I told myself. It’s okay that I’m not sure what’s next, that it might be something unexpected.”

At one point, Casey is interviewed for a position as an English teacher. The interviewer asks if she was always such an enthusiastic reader. Her answer:

“Not really. I liked reading, but I was picky about books. I think the enthusiasm came when I started writing. Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That’s what I love about Bernhard in the book [Woodcutters]. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it’s contagious because while you’re reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school.”

The reference to consciousness reminded me of something Emily Gould wrote in a recent Lit Hub Craft of Writing newsletter:

“Novels pile up; they can seem like a nuisance, frivolous at best and at worst a self-indulgent way of avoiding a reality we’d rather not countenance. But it’s worth remembering that they are also the best technology we have for transmitting one person’s consciousness directly into another’s.”

Which in turn reminded me that Lily King also wrote a Craft of Writing newsletter. In it, she describes the novel as the story she needed to read at the narrator’s age. As Toni Morrison said, “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”

I like how Saeed Jones puts the same idea another way: “I don’t think it’s enough to save our lives in the present; I think we need to reach ourselves in the past, even if it’s only to make amends or pass on an idea we’ve come to understand years later. Who would we be now if we could connect with ourselves back then, just in the nick of time?”

I’m definitely writing a novel I wish already existed, but at this point it’s in no shape to save anyone. In a convoluted way, insofar as my novel reflects anything about my own life, the story is about what could happen in the future. Maybe I should look more to the past instead.

April 21, 2020

Am I There Yet?

April 20, 2020

In the novel Writers & Lovers by Lily King, when a character talks about how their writing is going, they speak in terms of how many pages they’ve written. In one scene, a novelist describes her ex-boyfriend, also a writer, begging for a second chance. The ex hasn’t even started writing his book, but the dumped novelist has written two hundred and sixty pages since he left. Their respective page count is how we know she will never take him back.

In another scene, our main character, Casey, asks another writer, George, about the story he’s working on.

“’How long have you been working on it?’

‘Three years.’

‘Three years?’ I don’t mean for it to come out like that. ‘It must be more of a novella by now.’

‘It’s eleven and a half pages.’”

When George tries to ask her out, she thinks: “I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and a half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.”

Pages are one thing, though, and words are another. I prefer word count. A page could be sloppily handwritten in a pocket notebook or in a 10 pt font single-spaced with the tiniest possible margins. A page could mean anything! Word count is the only measure by which I can meaningfully chart my progress.

At the beginning of the month, I joined a group of writers led by Nina Semczuk for an April NaNoWriMo in order to get back to work on the fourth or fifth draft of the novel I’ve been working on. I did NaNoWriMo back in November but hadn’t worked much on the novel since. As I found then, the external accountability of sharing my word count is obviously the special sauce I need. This latest draft is going much better than I expected.

I usually track my word count in my own spreadsheet, but for this round I’m only using the spreadsheet shared with the group. I keep a sticky note on my desktop with the total word count I have to reach and how much I’ve done so far today. Whenever I feel the urge to quit a writing session early, I update the day’s count. Seeing the number helps me push onward. I’m like one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at every word count update, hungry for that feeling of accomplishment in reaching that daily goal.

My goal for the month is 55,000 words. As of today I have 38,511 words. In Google Docs, using the font Spectral Normal at 12 pt with 1.5 line spacing, 6 pt before and after every paragraph, indenting the first line of each paragraph, without page breaks between chapters, with 1 inch margins, that’s 82 pages.

(I used to just type into Google Docs without changing a thing, but I recently decided to switch up the formatting from draft to draft as a visual reminder to create something new and better instead of just rehashing what came before. Each draft looks a little different from the last one, even aside from all the different words in it.)

I feel validated when I read about writers like Fran Lebowitz who also fixate on how much one writes in a day, not discriminating between page and word count:

“I’m not interested in the thoughts or ideas of these people, I only want to know how many pages a day they wrote. I don’t know many writers. … But as soon as I meet any, as soon as I can figure out that it’s not too intimate a question to ask them, which is about six seconds after I meet them, I say, How many words do you write a day?”

Even better is recognizing the importance of word count in someone else’s writing process, demonstrated in this story Lebowitz tells about a man at Sotheby’s showing her an original Mark Twain manuscript:

“He showed it to me. A short story. He was telling me about the manuscript and where they found it and everything.

He said, I’m pretty knowledgeable about Twain but there’s one thing we don’t understand. We’ve called in a Twain scholar.

I said, What is that?

He said, See these little numbers? There are these little numbers every so often. We just don’t know what those are.

I said, I do. I happen not to be a Twain scholar but I happen to be a scholar of little numbers written all over the place. He was counting the words.

The Sotheby’s man said, What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous!

I said, I bet you anything. Count. I don’t want to touch it, smudge up this manuscript. You know, like the sign says, you break it, it’s yours.

He counted the words and saw I was right. He said, Twain must’ve been paid by the word.

I said, It may have nothing to do with being paid by the word. Twain might have told himself he had to write this many words each day and he would wonder, Am I there yet? Like a little kid in the back of a car — are we there yet?”

Like a little kid in the back of a car, like one of Pavlov’s dogs — perhaps there is something instinctive and primitive about making word count the thing that gets you through the writing day. The work itself can be rewarding too, but only when you’re deep in it, not when you surface and wonder if it’s time for dinner, if it’s time to get up and pour yourself a drink. That’s the moment when you check your word count and figure out how much more you have to do. You catch that refreshing little breath, and then you dive back in.

April 20, 2020

Ten Recommendations from Lydia Davis

December 13, 2019

Adapted from “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” in Lydia Davis’ new collection Essays One, here’s a sample of ten recommendations. The one about taking notes is my favourite, but the whole thing is full of gems:

“Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting, or writing. Trust your own interest. I have a strong interest, at the moment, in Roman building techniques, thus my notation above, taken down in the Cluny Museum in Paris. My interest may pass. But for the moment I follow it and enjoy it, not knowing where it will go.

“Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people — either real other people or imagined other people.

“This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.”

The third recommendation in particular, to be mostly self-taught, validates my own approach (not that I couldn’t use a good writing workshop now and then):

“There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you. I have found that pursuing my own interests in various directions and to various sources of information can take me on fantastic adventures: I have stayed up till the early hours of the morning poring over old phone books; or following genealogical lines back hundreds of years; or reading a book about what lies under a certain French city; or comparing early maps of Manhattan as I search for a particular farmhouse. These adventures become as gripping as a good novel.”

December 13, 2019

Another Draft, Courtesy of National Novel Writing Month

December 3, 2019

At the end of October, inspired by some fellow writers, I decided to use NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month: a challenge wherein writers the world over attempt to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days — to rewrite the novel I’ve been working on for a while now. I’d made very little progress in months, so the idea was that NaNo would get me back into it and, just as importantly, get me back to writing every day.

And it worked, because now I have a new draft. I ended up writing an average of 1800 words a day, anywhere between 300 and 800 words in the morning and then another 1000 to 1400 words in the evening. On my best day, I wrote just under 2200 words.

A challenge like this is really useful to get quickly back into the habit of writing. The momentum of something new and yet familiar (since I already knew something about my story and characters) helped get me over that initial hump of getting started, and then the rest was simply stubbornness (and a constant awareness of my word count) to make sure I got my words in for the day.

The daily word count goal was exactly the kind of motivation I needed. When I used to write every day in a single morning session, I could maybe write 1000 words, but usually less, so I didn’t think it was going to be easy. (Unlike lots of people, though, most of my non-working time is my own, so I have it much easier than most.) But I found that most days it didn’t take much to get there — mostly just sitting down with my laptop, opening the document, and continuing where I left off, no matter how unequal I felt to getting down what was supposed to happen next. Near the end of the month, there were a few days where I had the fleeting thought about not bothering to get to 1667 that day because I was tired and just wanted to go to bed (at, you know, 8pm) and was ahead of my overall goal anyway, but then I would look at the little graph of my daily progress on the NaNo Stats page and power through.

I wrote this entirely as a fresh draft and only went back to my old drafts and notes to remind myself of the names of minor characters. I kept a small list of scenes at the end of the document that outlined where I still had to go. It was helpful to see where I was heading next and steer myself in that direction. The story went to a few unexpected places, but I think what this draft did more than anything else was narrow the timeline (from a whole summer down to one week) as well as the setting and story enough to spend more time with the (many!) characters themselves and figure out what was going on with them.

One of the best things I did with this draft was not write about anything from the perspective of the character who appears at the centre of the story. Previously he’d gotten quite a bit of his own page time, but I could never settle on how to portray him. For this round, I decided I wasn’t going to get into his head at all. I like that it forced me to figure out how to show who he is from the perspective of other characters. I didn’t get it right, but I liked the path it started me down, narrowing my focus a bit and letting me spend more time with other characters.

The next stage is a bit of a black hole, of course, because I’m terrible at revising. So far I plan to write out the outline of what I have, compare it to the outlines from my last couple of drafts, and try to create a bit more structure on which to hang the material I have spread out over some 150,000 words. There are elements I can bring together, and there’s a lot to throw away. And then, maybe, in bits and pieces, I’ll get some other eyeballs on it? I’m thinking a lot about why I’m still reluctant to let other people read it and trying to put into words what I want (and don’t want) from early readers. It’s scary but it’s good.

Some additional reading about NaNoWriMo to get thinking about next year: 20 years of NaNoWriMo, two vital reminders for writing a novel, why word count matters, and the best writing advice for NaNoWriMo.

December 3, 2019

Another Thousand Words

July 1, 2019

The second year of #1000wordsofsummer ended this weekend. Although I got a lot of value out of it last year, I didn’t participate this year. Well, I sort of participated, for three days. But I’m not currently at the stage in my novel writing saga where churning out a thousand words a day is important. I have plenty of words already. It would be all too easy to strike down some new path and allow myself to get distracted from the revision process. At this stage I don’t need to be creating new content as much as I need to be figuring out what to do with what I already have.

At the beginning of May I started assembling the second draft. I say assembling because the second draft didn’t begin as a copy of the first draft. I started a new document entirely and wrote up a sort of dramatis personae and then started copying over chapters from the first draft. I moved pieces around, added new pieces, then divided the document into three main sections to organize the writing better, although all three sections will be interwoven later. I did a good chunk of new writing, then copied more over from the first draft, rearranging and rewriting a bit as I went, but not letting myself get too far into the weeds at this point. I wanted to assemble something that I could go over with more attention later, when I have more of a structure in place, more scaffolding which I can remove later, as Zadie Smith might say.

Over the first week I got together about 12,000 words, took a break for a work trip, then added 7,500 words. I skipped a few days, then added another 16,000 words. Then I didn’t touch it again for sixteen days (oof) between our 11-day vacation and the week of recovery afterward. I opened the document most mornings during that week, but didn’t have the time or energy to give it the attention it needed.

Finally last Tuesday I sat down with the seeds of a new scene in mind and plowed out a thousand words. It felt so good that I did it again for another two days. Now I’m back to assembling words from the first draft, reorganizing groups of paragraphs, making little edits as I read through the scenes. I’m okay with that.

Although I didn’t join #1000daysofsummer, I loved getting the daily emails. Here’s a great passage from the email on Day 10: “We create a space for one idea to live next to another, so that our ideas will have a big home together. But writing is also about reaching out beyond yourself and offering up your best thoughts and connecting them with the world. Everyone gathers together on the shelf in one way or another.”

And some words from Alexander Chee on Day 3: “The legal pad and pen is like a change in the wind in my heart, the new idea raising its hand. The notebook makes room for it and the pen is the door it opens to walk out. A tiny door the size of where the ink comes out. And it cost me less than ten bucks for the pens and the notebook.”

I wonder where I’ll be this time next year, if the challenge repeats in 2020. New novel? Still editing this one? Done forever with writing? Ha. We’ll see.

July 1, 2019