On Writing a Novel Inefficiently
I had plans for this long, semi-instructive post about writing a novel. A how-to, in ways that might be contrarian to others out there. (While keeping in mind of course, the usual caveats about YMMV, this is what works for me and may not work for you, etc.)
But I kept falling into pitfalls–or places where my brain would stop working, in trying to put forth some kind of prescriptions (and even if they weren’t called prescriptions, they were certainly assertions). I think I need to throw that out the window now. There are certain things that worked for me in writing Total Oblivion, More or Less, and certain things that do not. Talking about those in a nuts and bolts kind of way, however, I think would elide away from certain aspects of novel-writing itself that need to be paid attention to more.
And sometimes I fear the rush to crank things out deflects attention to what a novel’s use is now–I think it’s a vital form, but for every novel it’s worth asking: why? What is it about the novel that does work?
It was much, much harder for me to switch from short story writing to novel writing than it was from poetry to short story writing (and, oddly enough, the one poetry project I’ve been working on the last 2 years has been this 150+ page behemoth of a poem). My thinking about the world radically changed while writing this novel. It’s given me space to put a world inside, and to, perhaps, report a little bit about it.
No matter how much you write, though, and how much world building, it will never be enough. In the first draft of Total Oblivion I deliberately avoided world-building–the family was going down the river, and certain things were happening to them involving all sorts of catastrophes, but I wanted to keep the POV right there with the characters. They didn’t understand most of what was happening to them (Scythians taking over the upper Midwest, e.g.) and I didn’t want to either. I owed my characters that, at least. In the 2nd and (now) 3rd draft I added some sections that were of a much broader, omniscient perspective, alternative between the characters’ past lives when everything was “normal” and larger sociopolitical issues dealing with the altered landscape (literally and figuratively) of the Mississippi river region and beyond. But that came later. Those briding sections became a way to make the world fuller, but it can never be full.
Similarly, there’s little you can do as a novelist, while writing a novel, in terms of some kind of public persona. Sure you can talk about past works. You can read snippets at a reading (though those will by definition be incomplete). But for how many years you’re in the middle of the novel, it’s going to be like:
Q: So what are you working on?
A: Oh, a novel.
Q: What’s it about?
A: …
And yeah, you can try to give some kind of clever synopsis, an “X meets Y” kind of angle (and god knows I’m in love with those!), but it’s not going to be enough. It’s not like a poem that you can write in one afternoon and post on your blog, or a short story you can crank out in a week and start submitting. There is always the serial model that Dickens and other novelists have used throughout the years, but In terms of scale it’s something much thornier, and, yes, scarier–because even after years and years you can still fail at the novel, miserably and spectacularly.
And you have to live with that. (By “you” I mean “me” or “I,” of course.) Any novel is an act of courage–and it gives us, in our ordinary lives, a project of sustained courage. (Not to be confused with political or ethical courage, btw, although a novel can sometimes fulfill that as well.)
This is the precarious, existential handhold. However, this novel writing process is pretty much antithetical to the way novels are packaged and marketed. Marketing novels is anything, most times, except courageous. It’s fine–and it’s good to think every once in awhile about how people will think about a novel. Pretending that the marketing component doesn’t exist (that BEA doesn’t exist, eek) is only, in the end, fetishizing the market through its forced absence.
But thinking of marketing every once in awhile doesn’t mean using market forces as a substitute for that courage. Because it’s pretty much the most important quality that you as a person–never mind as a writer–can possibly hold inside yourself. I really believe that. It can spill out into other aspects of one’s life in unexpected ways.
Certainly there are aspects of craft that are important, and tricks that you can play on yourself to keep writing (god knows I needed those!). But in the end, a novel is a BDO (Big Dumb Object, to use SF’nal parlance) and, if the cards are played right, dwarfs craft and trickery. The scale of a novel is that of a supercollider/atom smasher. It’s daunting. It’s supposed to be daunting and difficult. And not only does it have to work–like an atom-smasher–it also has to look pretty. So it has to have an aesthetically pleasing structure and great landscaping and everything. It’s the whole deal: a supercollider where you’d want to get married or have a big party, or send a postcard of which to send to your grandmother.
So, right. Very daunting. Rather than finding the most expedient tools to blow through a novel and solve it, there are opportunities for a writer to find a process that is just dysfunctional enough, but not too dysfunctional. The process should be like a QWERTY keyboard (“Frequently used pairs of letters were separated in an attempt to stop the typebars from intertwining and becoming stuck, thus forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars and also frequently blotting the document”.) These dysfunctional tools are one-of-a-kind for each novel. It’s a design issue and an engineering issue. The soul of both.
This takes awhile. In the new novel I’m trying to write (put on hold for a bit while I finish revisions), I’m trying to use a wiki on my laptop, which is…interesting. It’s not a very well organized wiki. I also have a little notebook with flower prints on the pages, and I leave little notes for myself regarding the characters on those pages too, along the curvatures of the flower drawings. My characters are pretty nasty but try to be kind. I have no idea where they’re coming from, and don’t know if I ever will. I have the design for this novel but not the engineering yet. Not quite ready to split atoms yet!
All of this is over the map, as my blog posts usually are. I’ll end with pointing you all to Meghan’s post from awhile back about Slow Writing.
Keep writing as if you life depends on it.
Alan:
I really enjoy your blog and find your take on things fascinating and precise, in general. But this is more than all over the map–it’s nearly incomprehensible in places, and therefore harmful. Especially by being imprecise.
A few observations below, because some things about novels are, in fact, relatively objective. (And some are subjective enough that an antidote should be offered to any generality suggesting a dangerous empiricism where none actually exists.)
I’m going to seem confrontational below, but I don’t mean to be. I just mean to be forceful. I love your short fiction.
Best,
JeffV
Talking about the nuts and bolts is exactly what you need to talk about to avoid making unsupportable generalizations and, sometimes within the same sentence, mixing observations about writing a novel with observations about what other people do with it (i.e., publishers) once you’ve sold it to them. The nuts and bolts may seem too mundane for you to write about, but they’re what separate a raving lunatic with a pen from a novelist. And that kind of discussion would convince me you know what you’re talking about here.
Re this: “And sometimes I fear the rush to crank things out deflects attention to what a novel’s use is now–I think it’s a vital form, but for every novel it’s worth asking: why? What is it about the novel that does work?”
What rush to crank things out? Yours? Some hypothetical writer? Or you’re talking about the reader’s reaction to a novel? Or a reviewer’s? Or a writer’s response to another writer’s novel? And how does that deflect attention from the current use of a novel? Yes, it is worth asking what it is about a novel that works, but you don’t actually address that in this post.
Re this “Those briding sections became a way to make the world fuller, but it can never be full.”
Yes, fiction can never be as complex as real-life. This falls under the category of cliche, in terms of an observation. (As for world-building, *everything* is world-building, even the absence of information because world-building is simply *not* separable from character in any meaningful way.)
Re this: “Similarly, there’s little you can do as a novelist, while writing a novel, in terms of some kind of public persona. Sure you can talk about past works. You can read snippets at a reading (though those will by definition be incomplete).”
And so what? You’re also a poet and short story writer. Who cares what kind of public persona one projects while writing a novel? Is this truly a problem for anyone? Anyone who isn’t posing in the first place?
As for the fact you can’t write a novel in an afternoon. Yes, a novel is long. It takes a long time to write. You’re not the first to notice this.
As for failing spectacularly, this is assured if you don’t repeat yourself, but that has nothing to do with whether you use a serial model or some other model. It is the goal, however—to not repeat oneself and therefore, eventually, fail. Absolutely correct.
Re this: “Any novel is an act of courage–and it gives us, in our ordinary lives, a project of sustained courage. (Not to be confused with political or ethical courage, btw, although a novel can sometimes fulfill that as well.)”
No, a novel is not an act of courage. It is an act of endurance. And an act of faith. But not an act of courage. That’s an overly romantic view of it, and therefore a false view. And contradictory to your view later about there being too much thought about the marketing of novels. (If anything, writing poetry in a society largely indifferent to it—that takes some courage.)
Re this: “However, this novel writing process is pretty much antithetical to the way novels are packaged and marketed. Marketing novels is anything, most times, except courageous.”
No, the novel writing process is not antithetical to the packaging and marketing of novels. The two actually have (or should have) no relationship whatsoever. Unless you are talking about cranked-out novelizations or pseudo-novels that slip perfectly into the packaging and marketing pre-created for them. In which case the packaging and marketing are indistinguishable from the novel-thing itself. I rather doubt Salman Rushdie’s sitting there worrying about this. If you *are* worrying about this, you’re already in trouble.
Re this: “It’s fine–and it’s good to think every once in awhile about how people will think about a novel.”
That comment has nothing to do with marketing. Audience and readership, from a writer’s point of view, are separate from marketing. But your argument is already so jumbled that we can’t tell if you’re already on to some other thought or really do think that audience and marketing are the same thing.
Re this: “Pretending that the marketing component doesn’t exist (that BEA doesn’t exist, eek) is only, in the end, fetishizing the market through its forced absence.”
No, actually, that statement is completely false. It’s very clever but it is absolutely and utterly meaningless. It sounds like someone trying to convince themselves that selling out is not selling out. (I know you didn’t mean that, but that’s what it sounds like.) To be clear: not thinking about the market does *not* mean you fetishize the market by pretending it is absent.
Also, if you think about BEA (for example) while you write novels, you are well and truly fucked. But I don’t think you mean that. I just think you didn’t think when you wrote the sentence.
Re this: “But thinking of marketing every once in awhile doesn’t mean using market forces as a substitute for that courage. Because it’s pretty much the most important quality that you as a person–never mind as a writer–can possibly hold inside yourself. I really believe that. It can spill out into other aspects of one’s life in unexpected ways.”
Alan, you’re one of the most deeply uncommercial writers I know and I love your short fiction. Are you honestly sitting there thinking about this bull crap while you write your novel? Seriously? Not to mention, you’re intertwining comments about art and the raw mechanics of what a publisher does after they take your novel to the point that your sentences begin to disintegrate in terms of meaning.
Re this: “The scale of a novel is that of a supercollider/atom smasher. It’s daunting. It’s supposed to be daunting and difficult.”
Isn’t poetry also daunting and difficult? Isn’t anything daunting and difficult, to some extent, for one of at least two reasons: (1) you’re unprepared to actually do it or (2) you’re doing something you’ve never done before.
A novel’s actually almost the opposite of a supercollider/atom smasher: it’s a nerve center of connectivity—strange, odd, unexpected connectivity. It’s not about breaking things down. It’s about building things up (even if you strip them down later for some reason). It’s about the way, when you’re writing a good novel, everything around you finds a place in the novel because your novel is big enough to encompass it.
Re this: “So, right. Very daunting. Rather than finding the most expedient tools to blow through a novel and solve it, there are opportunities for a writer to find a process that is just dysfunctional enough, but not too dysfunctional…These dysfunctional tools are one-of-a-kind for each novel. It’s a design issue and an engineering issue. The soul of both.”
Actually, no. First of all, if the tools work, they are by definition not dysfunctional at all. What you’re talking about is false efficiency versus real efficiency as it applies to the application of time spent on a particular novel. Second of all, some of those tools in fact *do* repeat for certain other novels you write.
JeffV: would it make you happier if he’d said, “for me, writing a novel is an act of courage”? Because whether or not Alan intended this as a revelation of universal truth, I read it as description of his own process… and I’ve no reason whatsoever to doubt his account.
Speaking from my own experience, writing scares the shit out of me; the notion writing a novel is an incomprehensible black wall of fear.
Alan: what I love about supercolliders is that the cross-section of the particles is so incredibly small. So you have these two streams each composed of zillions of relativistic particles — with so much energy that the procedure for unloading the beam at the end of the experiment becomes a non-trivial consideration, and the Department of Defense has even researched using it as a weapon — you have these two streams, and you aim them together like two firehoses… and then maybe, just maybe, two of those zillions of particles will happen to collide. But maybe not.
Um, though I have no idea how to work that into your metaphor. I just think it’s way cool.
Hey Jeff,
I’m glad you stopped by. All of this is subjective on my part, and in a blog post I’m often throwing things up against the wall and seeing what sticks. So I’m certainly guilty of a lack of clarity in some parts, and a lack of stressing on my part that this is how I feel about a subject at THAT moment, and it’s certainly open to change. On other issues we might have to agree to disagree.
The nuts and bolts may seem too mundane for you to write about, but they’re what separate a raving lunatic with a pen from a novelist. And that kind of discussion would convince me you know what you’re talking about here.
Plenty of other people online have talked about the nuts-and-bolts craft issues involved with writing a novel in the last month, and it’s mostly helpful advice in the day to day aspects of writing a novel. I don’t know who started that meme–Justine?–but it was a good one and got a lot of people writing about their novel writing process. I tried to do that but didn’t feel like I was adding anything new to what I was trying to write. So I decided to look at some macro issues. That’s all. If I was writing a writing advice book I’m sure I’d include the total picture.
And in all of this–the proof is in the pudding. If a novel doesn’t WORK, then anything I could say doesn’t matter. But then again, you can say the same thing about the nuts and bolts craft issues. They don’t MEAN anything unless the novel is good.
Re this: “And sometimes I fear the rush to crank things out deflects attention to what a novel’s use is now–I think it’s a vital form, but for every novel it’s worth asking: why? What is it about the novel that does work?”
What rush to crank things out? Yours? Some hypothetical writer? Or you’re talking about the reader’s reaction to a novel? Or a reviewer’s? Or a writer’s response to another writer’s novel? And how does that deflect attention from the current use of a novel? Yes, it is worth asking what it is about a novel that works, but you don’t actually address that in this post.
Mine mostly. Talking about why write a novel instead of a short story. I wrote a novel a couple of years ago that was a real smoothie, and super-clever, and it went nowhere. And, hey, I’d wasted a year and a half of my life! That was pretty fun. But it was my own fault because I was writing a novel that i thought other people would like.
Re this “Those briding sections became a way to make the world fuller, but it can never be full.”
Yes, fiction can never be as complex as real-life. This falls under the category of cliche, in terms of an observation. (As for world-building, *everything* is world-building, even the absence of information because world-building is simply *not* separable from character in any meaningful way.)
Oddly, this is the place where I’m providing concrete examples! Sorry it doesn’t work for you.
I’d also disagree that worldbuilding is by default inseparable from character. It can be–and maybe it often is, but a lot of speculative fiction doesn’t seem to operate like this. This might be complicated by stories in which the world acts AS a character. Maybe this is what you’re talking about?
Re this: “Similarly, there’s little you can do as a novelist, while writing a novel, in terms of some kind of public persona. Sure you can talk about past works. You can read snippets at a reading (though those will by definition be incomplete).”
And so what? You’re also a poet and short story writer. Who cares what kind of public persona one projects while writing a novel? Is this truly a problem for anyone? Anyone who isn’t posing in the first place?
OK, public persona isn’t the best choice of words. But I was just noting how hard it is to create community with writing novels at the same time as other writers, in terms of scale. And scale was my main, however half-baked, thread running through the whole blog post. Maybe I could have written: Novel-writing is a pretty lonely business. (Perhaps that’s a cliche too–but onward!)
Re this: “Any novel is an act of courage–and it gives us, in our ordinary lives, a project of sustained courage. (Not to be confused with political or ethical courage, btw, although a novel can sometimes fulfill that as well.)”
No, a novel is not an act of courage. It is an act of endurance. And an act of faith. But not an act of courage. That’s an overly romantic view of it, and therefore a false view. And contradictory to your view later about there being too much thought about the marketing of novels. (If anything, writing poetry in a society largely indifferent to it—that takes some courage.)
Jeff, you’re accusing me of sweeping generalizations? “Overly romantic” views = false views?
And you don’t think our society is largely indifferent to novel writing?
Re this: “However, this novel writing process is pretty much antithetical to the way novels are packaged and marketed. Marketing novels is anything, most times, except courageous.”
No, the novel writing process is not antithetical to the packaging and marketing of novels. The two actually have (or should have) no relationship whatsoever. Unless you are talking about cranked-out novelizations or pseudo-novels that slip perfectly into the packaging and marketing pre-created for them. In which case the packaging and marketing are indistinguishable from the novel-thing itself. I rather doubt Salman Rushdie’s sitting there worrying about this. If you *are* worrying about this, you’re already in trouble.
OK, first off: THIS novel writing process. Not THE novel writing process, as you say.
I think what you say here is really confusing, in that you seem to be agreeing with me?
I say: “Novel writing process is antithetical to marketing” (I’m just breaking this down to its basic semantic components)
You say: “Novel writing process is NOT antithetical to marketing. The two should have no relationship whatsoever”
I’m not trying to be difficult; just trying to figure out if I’m missing anything. I mean, I’m usually not this persnickity, but you did come in here loaded for bear, Jeff.
Re this: “It’s fine–and it’s good to think every once in awhile about how people will think about a novel.”
That comment has nothing to do with marketing. Audience and readership, from a writer’s point of view, are separate from marketing. But your argument is already so jumbled that we can’t tell if you’re already on to some other thought or really do think that audience and marketing are the same thing.
I’m not entirely sure if readership and audience are separate from marketing, or whether there’s a gray area where they coexist but point well taken.
Re this: “Pretending that the marketing component doesn’t exist (that BEA doesn’t exist, eek) is only, in the end, fetishizing the market through its forced absence.”
No, actually, that statement is completely false. It’s very clever but it is absolutely and utterly meaningless. It sounds like someone trying to convince themselves that selling out is not selling out. (I know you didn’t mean that, but that’s what it sounds like.) To be clear: not thinking about the market does *not* mean you fetishize the market by pretending it is absent.
Also, if you think about BEA (for example) while you write novels, you are well and truly fucked. But I don’t think you mean that. I just think you didn’t think when you wrote the sentence.
I was thinking about something rather specific here with poetry–how the market (or lack thereof) is often the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about (except to decry it). But, probably on the imprecise side on my part.
(BTW, my blog throughout the years has tons of posts that are in this mode, that aren’t exactly razor-sharp in terms of a steel trap argument, but more as a canvas for me to work out ideas. I don’t think this post in particular is radically different from others in that mode.)
Re this: “But thinking of marketing every once in awhile doesn’t mean using market forces as a substitute for that courage. Because it’s pretty much the most important quality that you as a person–never mind as a writer–can possibly hold inside yourself. I really believe that. It can spill out into other aspects of one’s life in unexpected ways.”
Alan, you’re one of the most deeply uncommercial writers I know and I love your short fiction. Are you honestly sitting there thinking about this bull crap while you write your novel? Seriously? Not to mention, you’re intertwining comments about art and the raw mechanics of what a publisher does after they take your novel to the point that your sentences begin to disintegrate in terms of meaning.
Eh, I think this is just mean, Jeff. And I don’t say “I really believe that” for kicks. As I said before, good and noble theories are meaningless if the work doesn’t work (There’s this quote about Graham Greene that goes: “It’s so easy to have an opinion, and so hard to write a sentence that counts”.) But it is what gets me out of bed in the morning.
Re this: “The scale of a novel is that of a supercollider/atom smasher. It’s daunting. It’s supposed to be daunting and difficult.”
Isn’t poetry also daunting and difficult? Isn’t anything daunting and difficult, to some extent, for one of at least two reasons: (1) you’re unprepared to actually do it or (2) you’re doing something you’ve never done before.
Yes, sure.
A novel’s actually almost the opposite of a supercollider/atom smasher: it’s a nerve center of connectivity—strange, odd, unexpected connectivity. It’s not about breaking things down. It’s about building things up (even if you strip them down later for some reason). It’s about the way, when you’re writing a good novel, everything around you finds a place in the novel because your novel is big enough to encompass it.
First off, I said the SCALE of a novel is like that of a supercollider, not the novel itself.
And besides, how is a supercollider NOT a “nerve center of connectivity”? I’m sure Jackie could speak more about this than I could, but the ability to detect subatomic particles, process data, etc., speaks to a particle accelerator as a really complex, interconnected system. And though it may be neither here nor there–look, e.g, at the developments of computer science that have happened at CERN (such as the WWW).
Plus as Jackie said, they’re really fucking cool.
Also, where do I talk about breaking things down? A supercollider is a “built up” structure of massive proportions. I’ll try to elaborate more on the supercollider metaphor later, though I don’t think you’re going to like it.
Finally, I’m not sure a requisite for a good novel is everything finding its place, as you say.
Re this: “So, right. Very daunting. Rather than finding the most expedient tools to blow through a novel and solve it, there are opportunities for a writer to find a process that is just dysfunctional enough, but not too dysfunctional…These dysfunctional tools are one-of-a-kind for each novel. It’s a design issue and an engineering issue. The soul of both.”
Actually, no. First of all, if the tools work, they are by definition not dysfunctional at all. What you’re talking about is false efficiency versus real efficiency as it applies to the application of time spent on a particular novel. Second of all, some of those tools in fact *do* repeat for certain other novels you write.
From my trusty Merriam- Websters–”Dysfunctional: abnormal or impaired functioning.” So actually, I meant what I wrote there. Making candles by hand is an extremely dysfunctional use of time, as opposed to buying them in the store. So why bother making your own candles? OK, so I’m talking about particle accelerators and candlemaking in the same thought process. But oh well.
Also, I’m sure some tools can be replicated novel per novel–but it shouldn’t be a default decision.
So I hope that my replies clarify a few things. I do appreciate the feedback and hope I can buy you a beer at WFC if you’re going. (And I promise we don’t have to talk about ANY of this!)
Well I certainly think your post was like a supercollider: you threw a lot of particles at very high speed at a lot of people. And most of the people just kept right on moving, but at least one exploded into interesting fragments.
No,let me buy you a beer at WFC.
I find your posts about poetry and the poetic process precise, incisive, and beautiful because of it.
I still find this post non-specific, jumbled, and the rebuttal not terribly convincing–defining “dysfunctional” doesn’t get at my point, even though you seem to agree with my point. (Sometimes you have to make the candle yourself to get the right effect, even if it takes more time. But by definition that is not dysfunctional if that’s what’s best for the novel. Er, candlemaking. LOL!)
Re world-building–unless you write from a completely omniscient point of view, every bit of information in the novel is coming through some character. That means each POV contains a separate world and a separate view of the world.
But rather than debate more of this, I would love to see a post at some later date that separates out the commercial aspects of what happens after you write novel and just focuses on the aesthetics of it. Because I like how your mind works. Usually. LOL.
Sorry. I think it’s more that I really would perhaps like to read an essay on the subject rather than a blog post from you…for the selfish reason that, again, I like the way your mind works.
Anyway, no biggee. I tried to make it clear in the first post that this wasn’t personal.
Great post. I especially enjoyed the Q & A (So what are you working on?) Saw myself trying to explain why my first novel has taken so long – an excercise in futility – and attempting an on-the-spot pitch for the second. Response to the pitch: “Huh?”
Experience has taught me that the best approach is vagueness: “You know, keeping busy; staying out of trouble.” That answer evokes a sense of relief in friends who have inquired about my writing far too many times.
And you have to live with that. (By “you” I mean “me” or “I,” of course.) Any novel is an act of courage–and it gives us, in our ordinary lives, a project of sustained courage. (Not to be confused with political or ethical courage, btw, although a novel can sometimes fulfill that as well.)
I agree with you on the issue of novels as “an act of courage” Alan – at least from a personal point of view. From the moment I decided to write my first novel I was questioned by nearly everyone in my life as to why I was doing it and what could I possibly think was going to come of it. And the weird thing is that I was coming from a good position for this novel – it’s about commerical flying Alaska and I had worked in that field for years, had written a thesis at the Univ of Ak about pilot-error accidents and published articles on the subject in journals and magazines.
In other words, I was already halfway there as far as knowing my subject better than most.
But still – everyone pretty much thought I was being silly. I will never forget how many people said well meaning but hurtful things to me – how many symbolically patted me on the head and treated me like a stupid child for even attempting this. And even now, I’m signed with an agent who has the second revision on the book and loves my work – even now I am still asked constantly if I have made any money or when will I make money or how much money will I make.
Doing this without a predictable outcome and a paycheck to wave in everyone’s faces has been the bravest thing I’ve done in a long long time. Was it endurance, as Jeff points out, to get the novel done? Well yes – of course (Jane Yolen calls this “butt in chairedness”) but it was courage to keep going when so many others thought I was a fool. It was courage that let me be a fool while I did my thing anyway.