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

First Drafts Forever

April 17, 2019

I’m beginning to think I might write first drafts for the rest of time. When I last checked in about my writing, I was just about ready to begin revising. That was last October. I spent November putting 25,000 words into a second draft, and then I read The Westing Game and My Sister, the Serial Killer and How Fiction Works and realized that I wanted to try something else.

So I started again. Another first draft. (Hm, does this sound familiar yet?) A fresh take on the central idea I’ve been working on for my last several first drafts. And I’ve been working on that for months now, since December. I’m nearly 80,000 words in and still going, not quite sure how to finish. One day I’ll call it done, and — then what’ll I do?

For a while it felt ridiculous that, after all the build-up to the second draft, I started something new. And I wondered if I’d ever get to the next stage. But then I read Joseph Scapellato wondering what a draft is anyway.

“Every writer is going to have their own approach (or set of approaches) to the question of what constitutes a draft. These approaches might change with every phase of every project; the way that you wander through your first draft could be quite different from the way that you wander through your final. The hope, of course, is that your conception of drafting, whatever it is, can serve as a perch — a perception-changing post, slightly above the page, from which you’re better able to see your work and your process in a useful way.”

I considered my progress over the last two years or so as work on several separate first drafts, new project after new project that never got done, but maybe I can think of them as several successive drafts of the same work. The stories all have a similar context, a few characters in common here and there. Each draft is a new experiment, a way of playing with different types and forms of relationships, different configurations and perspectives and voices. Perhaps they’ve each been a way of finding my way to whatever it is I’m trying to write about. So maybe I shouldn’t think of the latest draft as its own thing. Maybe it’s really the fifth or sixth iteration of what all along has been the same novel.

“A draft is a single step. Your steps — how they look, what they do, how you take them — don’t have to be like anybody else’s. They don’t have to be beautiful or memorable or brave. They can be awful or ridiculous. They can even be unsure. But they have to help you trick yourself into spending the time and doing the work. And you have to take them, all of them, one by one.”

I also like the idea of approaching each draft as if it’s the first, no matter how many have come before. The tiniest thing can result in the biggest changes. All the first drafts I’ve worked on have influenced this one. Not just the ones that have a little bit in common with what I’m working on now. Every draft is the first one, and the multiple novels I’ve been drafting are really just one novel. Can I have it both ways?

In the end it’s as Scapellato says — the important thing is the tenacity to keep working on it, keep putting in the time, keep putting down more words. “The secret ingredient,” he writes, “if there is one, is the willingness to spend what time you’ve got.”

April 17, 2019

You Go Toward That Tone: John Berger and Michael Ondaatje in Conversation

February 18, 2019

During a recent weekend trip to a small town on the north coast of Lake Erie, in a used bookstore that also sold antiques, I stumbled upon Writing Life, a collection of essays about writing by a variety of authors. One of my favourite kinds of books.

Writing Life, edited by Constance Rooke

I’ve been working through it slowly and this afternoon read the conversation between John Berger (of Ways of Seeing fame) and Michael Ondaatje, in which Berger tries to describe what his books are like before the writing begins:

“Well, I can only describe what happens, which doesn’t make much sense, but before I really start writing a story, like you there is something there. There is Venice or a date or a character, but that’s only a starting point. The story in my mind is absolutely not verbal. There are no words for it at all. Nor is it visual, it’s not a series of shots or a painting. It has something in common with music in the sense that it is complex and can be held in the head like a whole musical composition, although it can never all be there at any one given moment. I haven’t any words for it. It is perhaps in a way geometric, but it’s not, because I think that implies an incredible precision. Perhaps it is algebraic in a way, but it’s much more chaotic than that; and the strange thing is that, for a long, long time when writing, I check it against the inarticulate, totally amorphous thing, and it can say with certainty, ‘no, what you’ve just written is false” or, occasionally, occasionally, ‘yes, perhaps that’s not too far away.’”

Ondaatje replies by describing it as an “an unfinished ideal … not at all verbal, it’s sort of like a tone of music. … You go toward that tone.”

There’s also a great exchange about characters unexpectedly breaking into a story. And I loved Ondaatje’s description of how in the process of writing a scene you’re kind of waiting for things to happen:

“When I’m writing a scene, I will not know the eventual arc of that scene at all. I am waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, change his or her mind, do something odd, pour some milk over somebody’s hand. Odd things like that are outside the normal behaviour of a scene.”

I’m getting close to the end of my latest first draft (yes, still on a first draft, again), but it still feels like every scene I write has this possibility inherent in it. Possibilities both in the scene itself and in each character. I’m close to the end but I still don’t know what’s going to happen. Enough of the time, something halfway good has emerged when I stay open to whatever might happen next, whether it seems to fit or not. So all I can do is keep trying for that, again and again.

You can watch or listen to this conversation between John Berger and Michael Ondaatje in its entirety on Vimeo.

February 18, 2019

Changing the Whole Nature of The Thing: Zadie Smith on Some Aspects of Craft

August 16, 2018

I’m nearly finished the first draft of the novel I started in June, and I keep thinking about Zadie Smith. Specifically about her lecture, “That Crafty Feeling” (2008), where she describes two breeds of novelists: Macro Planners and Micro Managers. These are ugly words, as she says herself, but they usefully describe two methods of approaching the ordeal of writing a book:

“A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot, and creates a structure — all before he writes the title page. Because of this structural security, he has a great deal of freedom of movement. It’s not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle. As they progress, forward or backward, their difficulties multiply with their choices.”

Zadie Smith herself is a Micro Manager:

“I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose between three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea what the ending is until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels.
…
“Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line. When I begin a novel there is nothing of that novel outside of the sentences I am setting down. I feel I have to be very careful: I can change the whole nature of the thing by changing a few words.”

For the Micro Manager, the first twenty pages of the book are “a kind of existential drama, a long answer to the short question: What kind of a novel am I writing?” The risk of this approach is that the first twenty pages can become “a pile-up of too careful, obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only loosens and relaxes after the twenty-page mark is passed.”

How about a house building metaphor to make the difference between these two types especially clear:

“Macro Planners have their houses basically built from day one and so their obsession is internal — they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers like me build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.”

Not my type

I keep thinking about this because I’m not sure which type I am. I plan in only the most basic sense, with only the roughest of ideas about the kind of novel I want to write and about the protagonist and their journey. Start at the beginning, continue to the middle, and finish at the end. The house of my novel is in no way built when I begin, and I’m still trying to figure out what style of furniture I want. Actually, even coming to the end, I’m still not quite sure if it‘s a townhouse, a McMansion, a chalet, or a shack in the wrong part of town (it’s a bit like playing M.A.S.H.). Would dwelling on the first twenty pages help me figure that out?

I charged through my first twenty pages and did not look back. Did not edit what I wrote the day or the week before, because how else do you write sixty thousand words in two months with only an hour or two a day? Revisiting and obsessing over anything slows me down and cuts into my breakneck speed typing time. Make a note of the problem, the gap, the thing I‘ll need to think about later, and then move the hell on. I know I‘m going to rewrite it all later, so what‘s the point of trying to rewrite it in pieces, instead of waiting for when I have an idea of what kind of surgery the whole thing will need? (Reconstructive, extensive, excessively risky, with an intense recovery period.)

The final few thousand words

Obviously, I don‘t need to fit either of Zadie Smith’s types. I can write my novel however I want. But I still keep worrying, just a little bit, as I face down these final few thousand words, these last few scenes, that I‘ve gone about this all wrong.

Of course I’m questioning everything I’ve done to get here. Because why not. What I’ve accomplished is just not good enough. Could be better. Could make more sense, have better sentences and paragraphs and chapters. Better character names, more character names. (Fun fact about this draft: the protagonist does not yet have a name; she goes by A.) Could be so much more than what I’ve made of it.

But this doesn’t help. Here’s what I really have to say: I’m almost finished another first draft. It’s easier and it’s harder than the first two and a half times. Different but mostly the same. I doubt it’s going to get better until I really and truly face down the revision process. It’s going to be much harder than getting down a lot of words every day. More things are going to change more often than I can imagine, and I’m probably going to change them back again before I revise it again. And that’s going to be fine.

But not until after I take a vacation. Drive across the eastern bit of this mighty continent, stand on some rocks to look out at the ocean and breathe in the salty air, and drive back again. We’ll see what that will do for me.

Doubt and interrogate

Maybe I shouldn‘t be reading lectures and essays like this when I‘m in the thick of writing. They make me doubt, just a little, that I‘m doing it right. But that doubt can be good, because it keeps me out of the bubble. Keeps me thinking about the parts beyond the story itself, the bizarre reality of what I‘m making with all these words. I do think that helps.

Zadie Smith’s whole lecture is worth the read for anyone embarking on the thrilling voyage that is writing a novel, if only to interrogate the usefulness of the question of aspects of craft and decide that there is no one right way to go about any of it. A little bit of everything seems true. It just depends on the day.

Scaffolding

I‘m going to end this with a part of the lecture that gives me comfort at this stage and which I hope to remember when the time comes:

“When building a novel you will use a lot of scaffolding. Some of this is necessary to hold the thing up, but a lot isn’t. The majority of it is only there to make you feel secure, and in fact the building will stand without it.
…
“I use scaffolding to hold up my confidence when I have none, to reduce the despair, and to feel that what I’m doing has a goal, some endpoint that I can see. I use it to divide what seems like an endless, unmarked journey, though by doing this, like Zeno, I infinitely extend the distance I need to go.

“Later, when the book is printed and old and dog-eared, it occurs to me that I really didn’t need any of that scaffolding. The book would be far better off without it. But when I was putting it up, it felt vital, and once it was there, I’d worked so hard to get it there I was loath to take it down. So my advice, if you are writing a novel at the moment and putting up scaffolding, well, I hope it helps you, but don’t forget to dismantle it later.”

August 16, 2018

1000 Words Every Day

June 28, 2018

I participated in #1000wordsofsummer, a sort of challenge to write 1000 words every day from June 15 to June 29. Jami Attenberg started it on Twitter as a thing with a friend, but it spread quickly on Twitter and Instagram, with hundreds of people playing along. It’s simple: Jami sends an email every morning with words of encouragement and advice from writers. And you write 1000 words every day.

When I saw the original tweet back in May, it seemed like a great idea. Totally doable (I wrote the first draft of two novels last year, not quite at a pace of 1000 words a day, but pretty close) and maybe even fun with a virtual accountability group of strangers. So I added it to my calendar, signed up for the mailing list, and then promptly forgot about it.

At the time I was working on the second draft of one of the aforementioned novels. I wasn’t thinking about a new project but struggling through the problems of the current one. I had reached a point where I had no idea where the story should end up. The book wasn’t playing, and I wondered if it was time to try something different.

Then I kept seeing the challenge in my calendar as the start date approached and, without thinking about it consciously, without planning it at all, a new idea began to brew.

I made some notes the night before and started writing the first draft on June 15. It sounds simple when I put it like that. But it’s an accumulation of what I’ve already done. It’s a different approach into a universe I’ve been writing in and thinking about for a while, something that finally feels like the beginning of something. It starts at a simpler place, at a point further away from where I’ve already been. Just to see where it goes. No pressure.

What’s become clear from this experience is that I’m all too eager to start new projects. The revision process is so difficult and, so far, uncharted. I have no idea what I’m doing. The process of writing a first draft, however, is familiar now. I know that I can write a novel-length project; when I sit down, the words will come eventually. At this point, that part is comparatively easy. What I haven’t figured out is how to take the next step, closer to the finished project. I don’t yet have faith that I am capable of editing a project to completion. And at this point it’s still scary enough that beginning a new project feels safer.

So far I’ve been able to avoid facing the flaws in the projects that are still in draft. I haven’t had to deal with the mistakes I’ve made, which means I haven’t been able to learn from them. After not having anything close to a finished product, that’s the next worst thing: I could be writing better first drafts if I were more intimately acquainted with what I’ve been doing wrong in them, by having to fix them in subsequent drafts.

My routine for the last two weeks has been the same as before: I write morning pages for about ten minutes first thing in the morning, drink a cup of coffee, and get to writing. I usually get the day’s 1000 words done in an hour. On a good day it’s more words in less time. On an imperfect day, I need another half an hour later in the day to make up for the slack. That’s the beauty of this challenge — without it, I would be satisfied with 300 or 500 or 700 words, but I have a goal to reach, so I put in some extra time to make it happen. Always it’s easier than I think it’ll be. Which doesn’t make it seem any less impossible when I sit down to begin.

Some of my favourite parts of the #1000wordsofsummer daily emails are Will Leitch quoting Roger Ebert — “The muse visits during the act of creation, not before” — and Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney talking about “the deeply unglamorous task of tolerating yourself long enough to push something out” and Hannah Tinti comparing writing to pottery because the failed creations recycled into the clay ages it like a fine wine and Ada Limon on silence being the place where writing begins. I almost never read the emails until after finishing my 1000 words every day, but they remind me of what I’m working toward and what I aspire to do.

If all goes as planned, by September I’ll have another first draft completed. So many things could happen before then! If I get there, it’ll be time to get beyond the first draft. It’s terrifying to face what once made you so proud but may turn out to be a pile of garbage. It’s not enough to be proud; you have to keep going. You have to figure out where you went wrong and how to fix it. So that’s my next step. After this one, enough of first drafts. Time to face it.

June 28, 2018