As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, I finished a draft of a new novel.
YAY!!!
It’s only a rough draft of what was once a short story that was trying to do too much and now may well be a novel that’s doing *just* enough.
At the beginning of the year, I took part in the Crystal Lake Mentorship programme (which was fantastic!) and I got a lot of great notes on this particular story from none other than Stephanie Wytovich.
The most important of which was slowing way the hell down and exploring the things I was writing.
However, as I was writing another novel at the time it took a few months to gear up to writing this one but — checks notes — around mid May according to my file dates I started trying to flesh out the story in earnest.
Overall, I’m really happy with the result but it’s very different from what I thought I’d have. It began as a retelling of the Pied Piper and then just veered far off the beaten track with new characters, locations, and monsters appearing throughout.
So I have a LOT of rewriting and restructuring to do but I’m suuuper happy with the idea and the characters and world have a lot of fire and energy.
Side note, I haven’t done anything on this site in months, so maybe I need to revamp things a little. New picture maybe.
‘Writing updates’ as a genre provide such a dopamine kick. (Particularly on social media but you also enjoy telling your very patient and supportive girlfriend, too.)
You have no “following” but simply writing something about the routine of writing, how it’s going well or badly, dispatches into the vast space of The Net provides a sort of Feel-Good-INC. euphoria. Melancholic but hopeful.
You feel suspicious of it though. It’s self-congratulatory before you’ve even done anything, right? Or is it? Have you done anything by writing for an hour? Twenty minutes? Five? At all? Do you deserve dopamine?
Fears
Sometimes writing doesn’t “go great”. You may feel bad then. Most writing days, you come to realise, are fine to shitty. Making time for it is the achievement then. This is all there is. Being okay with that.
But then you can’t update anyone. You have to stay quiet for a bit. And then people might politely ask, how’s your writing going? And you go, yeahhh, and make a face, maybe laugh it off. But now you hear yourself and how self-regarding you are and you realise that you sound like a baby playing an incredibly low-stakes game.
And then you feel bad again.
Obstacles
It’s a self perpetuating cycle and the repetitive nature of
a) telling yourself “I am enjoying this and feeling good” or “Today was bad I didn’t write (well/ enough/at all)”,
and
b) giving anyone who will listen a State of the Union address on your Writing (with a capital W)
feels like the equivalent of tonguing a particularly malevolent mouth ulcer.
You go to bed marking the days since you started this project. How that will affect how people “see” your work etc etc. The list of these tiny, self-made irritants is long… and annoying to recount.
Resolution
You remind yourself that none of this matters. No one cares. Not a single person is bothered if you finish that story, flesh out that character, study The Great Works or anything else you tell yourself is important. It’s just you.
I love reading about the craft of writing. Whether it’s how to plot successful stories, craft great characters, or even honing and sharpen sentences–I’m all in.
However, I know myself well enough to know when I’ve had too much of a good thing.
In it he talks about a writer’s anxiety to move away from the claustrophobia of the sentence onto the next one and ultimately leave behind pages of unfulfilled prose.
The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language.
Gary Lutz, The Sentence is a Lonely Place, The Believer
After reading George Saunders’ Paris Review interview earlier in the week, I’d started playing around with words more and trying to figure out how I could be a better writer on the sentence level. So Lutz’s essay really spoke to how I was feeling.
Writing was, for yet another reason, becoming great fun… This particular joy kept up for about three days.
But then I was rereading parts of A Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. It’s a sort of 21st century writing guide on quality prose and what makes it so. I also skimmed back through Palahniuk’s Consider This last night just to see what he said on sentences (a lot, unsurprisingly!).
All this would have been fine by itself. Clustered together, however, it came to a head this morning.
I started rereading a passage I’d been working on from an opening chapter and I just couldn’t get past it.
So far, so normal.
I read, reread, moved things around, edited, reread, edited, read under my breath, edited, finally at last moved past it only to come back later on (30 seconds maybe) thinking about a million questions which don’t really need answering in the drafting stage I’m currently in.
Does that sentence use assonance in a subtle way? How could I double up the l and k sound here? Is there tension within the scene, what about the pacing? Are there enough stressed syllables in the sentence? And so on, and on, ad nauseam.
The claustrophobia was now firmly in my own head which should really be the most wide open space.
I stopped writing. Stepped away from my computer and assessed my problem.
A brain-cleanse is in order. I’m not sure what that would entail (is there a brain scrub on the market?) But it’s a comin’.
Will Christopher Baer – The Age of Reason – Truthfully, I still haven’t read this story but I love Baer and I’m really excited for his non-fiction book that’s coming out soon(?) ish(?) on his time working in psychiatric institutions. And I’ll probably read it by the end of the day. If you haven’t read the Phineas Poe trilogy – get on it.
Weaveworld, though I only read it two years ago, has had a profound influence on me and how I want to create my fiction. It’s arguable that that book is a bit too long but so what.
Still working my way, slowly through the Books of Blood.
I’m fascinated by the world we operate within and how I know far, far less of it than I really should. Reading articles like these and others from the same writer helps put things into some perspective.
“The difference between a so-so writer and a good one, or a good one and a great one, is in the quality of the intuitive decisions she’s able to make at speed.” – George Saunders
And lastly, I’m obsessed with this song by Phoebe Bridgers… Have a listen.
Jonathan Cosgrove 