I figured I've done enough posts accompanied by pictures of stacks of notebooks or me writing, so enjoy this juvenile drawing of marine life.
There’s really not a right thing to do when you finish the rough draft of a novel. The thrill of writing the final words on a story you’ve toiled over for at least a month (NaNoWriMo’s ultra-compressed time frame seems to be about the record) feels like it deserves some kind of celebration, so it’s only natural to tell your friends or post about it on Facebook. And while you’ll probably get a ton of likes and praise, inevitably someone will want to know what it’s about. Maybe some writers are better at this than me, but every time I try to describe my writing, I start in the wrong place and pile on twenty different genre labels and always end with “I promise it makes a lot more sense written out.” Even if you can clear that hurdle, though, you’ll still feel like a hack years later when you dig up the post celebrating the completion of a novel that you now know is unsalvageable. The other option is not talking about it, at least not until you’re ready for beta-readers. But you only need to let it slip once (and it’s hard not to, given how much it dominates your life) and suddenly you’re faced with that “What’s it about?” question again, and you feel like a self-important moron for staying silent.
All things considered, it seems like the only right way to do it is to make your novel an international bestseller before it’s even finished, and that hasn’t worked for me yet.
I’ve finished first drafts of seven novels so far. I’ve announced four of them online (two on this blog) and stayed silent on two. Actually, I guess by writing this post, I’m choosing to announce the seventh one as well, which I finished this past Sunday.
To be clear, I’m not bragging. I’m admitting that I’ve written drafts of seven novels, only one of which I’ve ever seriously edited*. A writer saying that is like a mother saying, “I’ve given birth to seven children! One made it to kindergarten, I think. The rest I haven’t heard from in a while.”
The problem, as I’ve written about often before, is that I always get distracted by the next story to wander through my mind. Things were especially bad back when I had a policy of letting each story sit for a year before revisiting it, by which time I’d be knee-deep in a new story, and the awful first page, if I even took the time to look at it, would convince me to drop this story before I could waste any more time on it. For me, writing new stuff is like discovering an uninhabited island, brimming with bright and endlessly diverse life. Editing, on the other hand, is like finding an island that’s been overpopulated to extinction and sterilized by pollution and trying to find some use for the land. As much as I want to see something of mine published, the short-term thrill is addictive enough that I find a way to rationalize my behavior. I say that the next story will be perfect and published the first time around. No matter how many essays and interviews with successful writers tell me that’s worthless, I can’t help believing it. Even now, less than a week after finishing my last novel, I’ve got ten pages of notes on a new novel and I’m half convinced that I should just go ahead and start it, instead of polishing one of the seven novels, seven novellas, or countless short stories and other projects I already have.
But maybe I shouldn’t be quite so hard on myself. Back in early high school, I remember thinking that I’d be content forever if I could just finish anything I started writing. No need for publication, or any reader but me: if I could only give my story an ending, it’d be enough. And at an author-talk last year I heard the novelist Lan Samantha Chang** explain that publication, or even recognition, isn’t the eternal happiness most young writers expect it to be. The story doesn’t become any better once it’s printed and bound and shipped to bookstores. Aside from the odd one-novel-wonder like Harper Lee, most writers are probably never satisfied, and if we were, we’d never be productive again. This isn’t to say that I’m proud to finish seven novels and abandon most of them. But maybe I’m not quite as stuck as I thought I was.
__________________________
* And the one I did do some work on, by the way, has a sexist subplot that I don’t know how to remove and a protagonist who makes it through a good seventy five percent of the story just standing around and blinking. If it has a chance of publication, that’s a long way away.
** Who wrote All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, which I highly recommend.
No comments:
Post a Comment