Writing

Book Two: the doubt speaks up

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Book Two is in the works.

However, the works are a little jammed up. 

The process of writing book one had such a nice rhythm to it, or at least so it appears in rosy hindsight. I often felt like I knew what needed doing next to inch it closer to what I had in mind.

Now that I’ve paused working on that one for the moment, I’m trying to get moving on a very different idea to keep myself writing. But choosing which of my ideas to get started on was a little hairy, and now that I chose one and got partway down the path of planning it, the doubt gremlin (N.B.: a close cousin of the fear gremlin) is noisy.

“It’s a dumb idea,” says the gremlin. Thanks, I grimace.

“No one would be interested in that concept except you, and you’re only barely interested.” Yes, thank you for that contribution.

“Even if anyone likes your current draft, they would hate this one.” Let’s leave that up to them to decide, shall we?

“You’re not even spending any time working on it.” That’s an exaggeration. I’m just spending almost no time working on it, which is different. 

“Why don’t you get started on the better ideas?” Well, obviously because those ones will take a lot more research and work, and I’m tremendously impatient and a little sleepy, I admit.

“Those don’t seem like great reasons to commit to this idea,” says the gremlin, looking taken aback, and I have to agree.

But here’s the thing: the doubt only matters if I’m attaching some great weight to doing this. If I need my two-weeks-to-several-decades of work to be of maximum efficiency, resulting in the written product that will create the most good for the most people in the shortest amount of time, then I’m doing it very wrong. 

That’s okay, because that isn’t really what I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to stretch the muscles and follow the curiosity. I’m trying to make myself laugh sometimes, and make myself feel stuff other times, and those stakes are a lot lower. The payoff is pretty high, too, because being able to make yourself laugh while you get better at something is pretty rewarding. 

Anyway, on with it–whatever it is. 

…depending on how you count.

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Tonight someone who had just read my book asked me how long it had taken to write. And as I generally do, I responded: “It depends on how you count.”

Really, how long does it take to write a novel?

All I have is my own minimal experience, of course, but let’s try to tabulate. Our counting options are below:

  1. Hours. I wrote for an estimated average of thirty minutes a day for roughly 182 days or six months–at least for the second draft. This works out to about 91 hours, or a hefty two-week timesheet.*
  2. Months. I wrote consistently for six months in one year, then let it sit for a while, then wrote for another six months, during which time I ended up rewriting virtually the entire thing. So that’s either six months or twelve, depending on whether I credit that first draft with really being part of the finished** draft.
  3. Years. I started seriously planning this book a little over three years ago. Serious planning involved making outlines, character sketches, and doing some research. This planning bears almost no relationship to what’s in the draft now, but it was a start. In short: planning in 2016, first-drafting in 2017, introspection and re-planning in 2018, and second-drafting in 2019 (with further edits TBD, perhaps also in 2019)?
  4. Decades. This story has been banging around my head as a little novel kernel since I was a kid. It was pretty insistent on getting out one of these days.

So there you have it, folks. If you’re looking for anecdata about how long it takes to write a novel, it’s somewhere between two work weeks and your whole life.

*I work in the government, after all.

**Ha.

Indecision fatigue.

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It’s a time of plenty, friends, by just about any measure (which isn’t to say that this plenty is properly distributed, or that there is no room for improvement, but that’s another matter). And yet I notice quite often that my mind has a habit of seeing scarcity everywhere. See, for example, my almost perilous aversion to wasting food, culminating in narrowly avoided tragedy in the glass-shard soup incident of 2015. My grandparents lived through the Depression, yes, but why is its hold so strong on me still, when I grew up wanting nothing?

Scarcity looms everywhere, though, probably as a form of the common human negativity bias. It tries to keep me alive by telling me to make hay while the sun shines, (seriously, get out there, it’s sunny, what are you doing, the sun will go away and you won’t have enough hay, dummy!) It keeps me alert to potential danger by reminding me that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush (and, hey, you’ve only got one bird in that hand; what are you going to do when you’re next in need of a bird? You think birds grow on trees?)

Pretty obnoxious, really. And one place it comes up in this kind of meta way is when I am working on an idea: some little voice in the back of my head is piping up: “Hey, what about the next idea? Is this the only one you’ve got? You might never have another. Just thought you should know!”

It is, to say the least, hardly helpful. There’s nothing less creativity-inspiring than worrying about the potential future scarcity of creativity, just as there’s nothing less satisfying to the stomach than fretting about where one’s next meal will come from. Yet even as I’m working on picking what I like and seeing how it grows, the little scarcity gremlin looks over my shoulder and warns me that I’m probably going to run out of ideas soon, and probably half of the ones I’ve got are going to fizzle out before I can finish…just trying to be helpful!

So there I am, clinging white-knuckled to the little list of ideas I’ve got, squeezing the life out of the poor things. But in Big Magic, which I read recently (and you should too, if you want to live a more creative life and could use a little boost), Elizabeth Gilbert has an interesting idea that turns my scarcity gremlin on his head: she pictures inspiration as a sentient force, a personified entity, that goes where it likes, and stays if you entertain it generously. With a straight face, she tells the story of the time that the idea for a novel visited her for a while, then once she’d demonstrated that she didn’t have the space in her life to tend to it fully, entered the body of Ann Patchett the day that they met. Ann Patchett ended up writing this book that so badly wanted to be written. Which is not to say “cling harder and panic when you have an idea, lest it enter the body of a more talented nearby artist.” (That would be our neighborhood scarcity gremlin talking again). I suppose it’s just to say: be grateful when it’s there. Welcome it. Don’t squeeze the life out of it.

Now I’m doing better, taking some deep cleansing breaths and welcoming the friendly inspiration spirit in. I’m living in abundance mode, not scarcity mode. I’m countering that negativity bias. Noticing the plenty, not the lack.

But then–oh no–such plenty. Ideas coming so hot and heavy that I have several different digital to-do lists, like so many crumpled purse-bottom post-it notes, cluttering up the joint. Ideas coming so fast and incomplete that they talk over each other and my mind starts to feel all jerky and fuzzy like it does when I’ve been visiting the portal too much. Each one is a welcomed guest but, “well,” I begin to say to the throng of them in my living room, “I do visit the portal a fair amount, and I have my day job to consider, and my social life, and I’ve got to stay showered and need to shop for groceries now and then, and as it is I’m already halfway through two of you, so I might not get to you” (pointing to one of them in the back, a new arrival staring at me slackjawed) “until halfway through next year, at the earliest, I’m sorry to say.”

How do I pick what I like and see how it grows when I struggle to follow a thread long enough to plant it, and when I like quite a lot of things?

Don’t be fooled. This is scarcity talking. Scarcity of time. Like any other scarcity fear, there’s a grain of truth within it, but it’s hardly helpful to let it run the show.

So you have to conquer the first scarcity, the fear that ideas will come at all; perhaps you do this by trusting that the idea has its own will, and will find you if and when it pleases, no matter how tightly you squeeze or how much you suffer in the meantime, so you may as well relax. Then, when you’ve caught one, you have to conquer the second scarcity fear: the fear of scarcity of ability, the fear that you won’t do the idea justice and shouldn’t even try. You do this by learning to entertain it gently, and just follow it where it leads.

But how do you conquer the third scarcity, of time to follow the many possible leads you’ve got? You’re indecisive. You don’t know which one is top priority. (After all, if everything is top priority, nothing is, and there we are in the bowels of the couch playing Flash games until long after our bedtime). Okay, so just do something. Do literally anything. Print out a list and throw a dart at it, see which one it lands nearest. Use a random number generator. Just start. Just for ten minutes. Just mess around with it on your phone while you wait in line at the pharmacy.

But the fear is still there. The gremlin hasn’t left. It says: “okay, you’ve got a lot for now, that’s great. But what will you do in five years? You haven’t really got five years’ worth on that list, do you? Aren’t you worried that you’re going to to flame out in a while, even if you do find the time to do any of them?”

That’s when I look that gremlin in the eye and go, “listen, buddy, I know this game.” I know all about trying to pin my future down and buy it an insurance policy. It’s a fool’s errand. I look back to what I was dead certain I wanted my long-term future to look like when I was 15, 18, 20, 22, 25, 28…every single time, if I could have locked it in, of course I would have. But every single time, I either didn’t get it, or I got some very different version of it, and thank God for that, because I can’t imagine much worse than being trapped in a life younger-me chose. She doesn’t know anything about me.

So ideas will come. And I’ll entertain them as best I’m able. And I’ll get new ones, or I won’t, because maybe me in several years won’t even want them, and that’s totally fine. And I’ll find the time, here and there, or maybe future me will. She can figure it out.

Book Two.

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I recently finished a draft of a novel. It was a meandering process, guided by occasional spurts of planning, and then re-planning around the total chaos that ensued when I actually sat down to write.

What’s more, it was based (semi-closely, in places) on true events, so I didn’t have to make everything up on my own. I also couldn’t make everything up on my own, to the extent that I felt bound to be loyal to the true events. Sometimes this took away from my ability to follow the ideals of story crafting. (Or, isn’t it pretty to think so, a nice excuse.)

Now that I’m done with that draft, I’m going to try to do another one. Different genre, not based on true events this time, no longer historical fiction. In other words:

The grand plan is to spend the next six months or so planning Book Two, and then hammering out my SFD (“shitty first draft,” for anyone who is rusty on their Anne Lamott.)

I come prepared so far with a very rough outline: as I see it now, it’s three mini-novels, unified by a common story that underlies each part. I have the loose sense of where I want each part to go, plot-wise, and the feel I want each part to have. I know, for now, where each part is set and a lot of what might happen. But what I lack right now is something tremendously fundamental to a readable novel:

Characters.

Sure, I have the vaguest sense of a few of them. One of them looks like Bebe Neuwirth in her Frasier years. I know their Enneagram types, because naturally I would. And that actually is something: it gives a framework to start building on, both with what the behaviors might be and with the directions these people might go when distressed, or when secure (about which more later.) But I don’t know much else about them, and that won’t do.

A tool that is often helpful for people in building characters is doing an exercise that I have been internally calling, grotesquely, a “character dump,” but Google is giving me no reassurance at all that this is a phrase anyone else uses. Could it be that I, on my own motion, started calling it that? Horrors. In any event, this exercise is one in which you sit down and start writing down a bunch of details about a character. When were they born? What do they like to eat? What do they wear? What was the saddest thing that happened in their childhood? What makes them laugh? Who is their best friend? What dreams do they have? Do they think a hot dog is a sandwich? And on and on.

Now, you may say, “you just said a few paragraphs up that you don’t know much about your new characters yet. How could you possibly know all these details?” Gentle reader, I don’t, and I probably won’t even after I finish this exercise. I’ll make some stuff up, like a kid half-assing an English Lit final, and maybe some of it will resonate, but most of it won’t be helpful. That’s okay. This process isn’t what you might call efficient.

Then, later, I’ll do other exercises relating to plot. They might similarly be inefficient, but then I’ll have more words down, about both these half-formed people and the half-seen things that will start happening to them. Then I’ll sit down and start writing the thing. Every 200 words or so, I’ll realize I’ve got a plot hole, or my character isn’t wanting to behave the way I expected. Fine. I’ll make new stuff up. I’ll do some tailoring at the edges of the plan. I’ll start a new plan. I’ll write more. I’ll find some massive hole. I’ll give up for a day or two, binge some romantic comedies on STARZ. I’ll come back to it and realize I have a way out that is just brilliant. I’ll write in a delighted frenzy for a week. Then I’ll realize I created an even bigger hole than before, I’ll fix it. Someday I’ll have a draft, and I’ll start over and write draft 2.

It’ll be fun.

I wrote a novel.

/ thepsychopomp / 6 Comments

(Full disclosure: I moved this text over from a Google Docs document I started when I first started thinking of starting a blog. Writing as though on a blog, but in a Google Doc, felt very Creed Thoughts, so it’s quite a relief to know this is going out on the actual internet.) 

A few weeks ago I finished my second draft of a novel I wrote. Right now it’s out with a handful of generous people who were willing to read it. In the long run, I’d love to publish it–but for now I’m here, and here is in a welcome pause in the writing process while I wait for feedback. 

Copyright 2019

It was a long process to write the thing, taking anywhere from six months to three years, depending on how you count. Mostly it happened in little half-hour chunks before or after work, or on weekends. There were times I thought I’d never finish. But somehow I wrote a whole book in 2017, about 115,000 words, then set it aside, and wrote it all again almost from scratch, about 130,000 words, in the first half of 2019.

In the last few months while I worked toward the finish line, I fantasized about what it would be like to be Future-Kate, who was done with the draft. She was going to read so many books, make the most of living through the Golden Age of Television (literally, what a time to be alive!), go out so much more, be much better at working out and socializing. She was going to sleep more and cook like a champ and deep-clean everything. But writing seems to breed writing. I’m Future-Kate, and I started this project. Go figure.

I plan to write more later on the ideation, writing, and editing processes. I also hope Further-Future-Kate will know more than I do: will the draft go into the ether like Creed’s thoughts, or become a “real” book? Although after spending that many hours on the drafts, there’s one thing I’ve learned for sure: either option has to be fine or else it isn’t worth doing. Writing has to be its own reward, because there are much better ways of spending time if it isn’t.