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