A Kind of Inherent Inertia

November 13, 2020

From the novel Flights by Olga Tokarczuk:

“Am I doing the right thing by telling stories? Would it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins, and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single thought gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs? I could use quotes and footnotes, I could in the order of points or chapters reap the consequences of demonstrating step by step what it is I mean; I would verify an aforementioned hypothesis and ultimately be able to carry off my arguments like sheets after a wedding night, in view of the public. I would be the mistress of my own text, I could take an honest per-word payment for it.

“As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds.

“Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is never possible to fully control. They require people like me — insecure, indecisive, easily led astray. Naive.”

I haven’t worked on the novel at all since I last wrote. I’ve barely thought about it except to notice that I haven’t thought about it. I have the time — every week I spend many hours reading. I have the discipline — every day I do things I don’t want to do. But then I look at the notebook I started for the next draft and the probably-too-detailed outline in Scrivener and think, Maybe later. Later when, though? Why not right now?

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November 13, 2020

The Calamity of Novel Revision

August 8, 2020

Each piece in the first section of Renee Gladman’s Calamities begins with the phrase I began the day. In one calamity, she writes about her novel in progress.

“I began the day looking into the infinity of the revision of my novel in progress. In fact, I had just exclaimed, ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to start over,’ into a pre-dawn morning, when space expanded and I found myself in this infinitude. The novel, it was a wreck. I would have to begin again. I said this and looked at the screen for affirmation. ‘I have written sixty pages,’ I said, exasperated. ‘Houses of Ravicka, are you there?’ It was hard to call the book out in this way, as it wasn’t too long ago that I’d called the name of another book — asked it to step out of its hiding place, its refusal place, and come to me — and not only did that book never appear but I’d already written another book about its not appearing. I couldn’t even call for Houses without it feeling like a rerun, and it was this — not being able to call its name but still looking at it, waiting for it — that gave shape to the infinitude, which was ultimately something beyond shape, which couldn’t possibly have a shape and also be infinite. And yet, I clearly sat in a vastness (arguably a kind of shape), my pages blowing about, but never blowing about so much that I lost sight of them (they seemed to go no farther than the horizon: another shape). For months I ran after them, but pages floating so far away just begin to look like sky (infinity).”

I read Calamities near the end of a lengthy revision process guided by The Last Draft by Sandra Scofield, which I found incredibly helpful. After writing another draft at warp speed in April, I printed out the manuscript on actual paper (finally grasping the notion of pages, not just word count!) and spent May and most of June reading it, marking it up in pencil, making a list of things to work on and think about, and keeping a revision journal.

At the end of June I made a fresh outline and pasted it and the bits of the novel I wanted to keep into Scrivener, feeling good about tackling the next draft. It was such a productive spring, mostly thanks to The Last Draft, but also because my view of what the novel is about was sharpened by the way the coronavirus was changing the world. It became easier to see what it was really all about.

Then I spent July working so much at my job that I had no energy to spare for writing, and I haven’t touched the novel since.

“Could it be that every ten years you simply started something that couldn’t be finished, that was impossible to finish because the person you needed to be to write the book never settled into form, or the form came and went while you were off teaching or buying furniture in a little city that stayed little the whole time you were there?”

I don’t know when I’ll get back to it. Maybe not until September. I was about to type when things calm down, but that sounds ridiculous when my life is, in fact, as calm as can be. Steady job, no kids, a safe home, a great partner, no systemic oppression or violence.

I could be working on the novel instead of this or instead of the newsletter or instead of reading five books at a time. (If I didn’t make time for reading, I would never write.) But it doesn’t feel like the right time. I’m too angry and aggrieved, too fixated on the problems I need to solve at work and the problems of our ever-wretched world which I can never solve. But maybe the problems of a novel are in fact exactly what I need.

August 8, 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

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

Writing is Easy Work, but Nothing Lasts Forever

August 25, 2019

From Denis Johnson’s story “Triumph over the Grave” in his book The Largesse of the Sea Maiden:

“Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don’t have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all. If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time, and production wouldn’t suffer. Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever. I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie — although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.”

I haven’t been writing much lately, but I think about writing all the time. Not in a way that makes me regret the weeks that have passed without opening the draft of the novel, but as an ever-present background, a gentle but insistent reminder of what’s still to be done. I’ve been turning the ideas over in my mind, the way I’ve always done. Summer is drawing to a close, the days are getting shorter, the mornings cooler, and soon I’ll get back to work.

August 25, 2019