Losing It & Finding It
10 more tools for combatting Novel Writing Confusion.
This is part two of a post about the various tools fiction writers might find necessary to get through the wilderness of a long project. Reading the first post before this one is not necessary, but if you find this useful, there are ten more tools over there.
September & October were really slow when it came to working on the new novel. While I was drafting the first half of it during a residency in August, I felt uncertain about how to open the second part (of four) so I just skipped it and went straight into the scenes of part two I had more clarity about.
Leaving a mostly blank page with only the note [PUT SOMETHING HERE] was freeing at the time, and probably the right choice in the long run, but it created (or simply precipitated) a snag in my process this fall. I wanted to be in revision mode, but I was forced to generate new pages.
Coming upon this unhelpful note from my past self, I feel extremely indignant. Who the hell did I think I was in August? That bitch was on a residency! She had little to no obligations or distractions and yet she expected me— a person not on a writing residency, a person with other obligations to fulfill— to figure this out for her. Honestly, fuck her.
I have spent probably three weeks trying to figure out what [PUT SOMETHING HERE] could be. I wrote, deleted, procrastinated, did nothing, wrote something, deleted it again, worked on a different thing, read stuff, avoided and avoided and avoided. Then a few days ago I was like, Oh! Then it was fine.
And how did I figure out what to put there? Well, I remembered to take my own stupid advice about how it is sometimes useful to simply look at list of possible tricks or tools to get through an uncooperative part of the narrative.
I don’t believe in the “lone genius” idea of a writer. Everyone writes what they write because of the context they were born into, the context they’re living in, the books they’ve read, the films they’ve watched. We do nothing alone.
And yet! I still have this deeply embedded (and deeply annoying) Protestant work ethic, and within that ethic is the idea that you’re supposed to suffer alone, with dignity and perseverance, but most of all in SILENCE.
But I’ve discovered in the last few years (or months? my sense of time is loopy) that despite this idea of trying to face all your creative problems alone, I really enjoy talking to Daniel, my husband and fellow writer, about what I’m writing or trying to write.1
So a week or so ago I was telling him about my problem with the opening for part two, and as I was talking I realized it was a classic “Point A to Point B” issue. For some reason I hadn’t been able to name it while working alone in my room.
What I mean by point-a-to-point-b is that there are times in a novel when you know you have to move a character from one place, or state of mind, or part of the narrative, and into another place/ state of mind'/ part of the narrative. While the journey between point A and point B needs to be accounted for somehow, it’s not always obvious what, exactly, between A and B, is important to the story as a whole.
Cue the paralysis!
My particular problem was that I had two characters who needed to get into a car and rather unexpectedly drive across the country. The road trip itself, I knew, did not need to take up much narrative space but I needed the road trip— even if it was only two or three pages or even a paragraph if I was tricky— to ever so slightly adjust these two characters in preparation for the next part of the story. And for some reason, I just had no idea where to start.
I finally broke through this problem by using a combination tool 11 & tool 18—
(Tools 1-10 are in the other post.)
11 Compression
This tool is so simple I almost forget it exists, or I feel it shouldn’t need to be written down, yet it is so frequently useful.
Often, when we’re writing a novel or story you get locked in a certain pace that has emerged. The level of detail, the rate at which time is passing. Five minutes of action that takes fourteen pages to tell, for instance. And sometimes that’s fine! You want to stay in a certain pace for long enough that a reader gets comfortable, and can see the scene happening without feeling like you’re watching one of those too-rapidly edited films.
However, sometimes your pace becomes a tyrant and you need it to move on. If this happens, you probably need to quickly change the sense of time, to signal to the reader that we have somewhere else to be, and quickly. A single sentence can liberate you— something with a bunch of stacked clauses that functions almost like a montage.
For example (and no, this is not a real sentence from my work) — After they packed the car and left the city, and after they listened to most of a book on tape and gossiped for a while about Belinda and Joe, and after they slept one night at that motel they would never remember again, and after they crossed several states line, it was only then Bill realized that he had left his driver’s license at home, on his desk, beside the vase of half wilted flowers. But it didn’t matter now. The trip was over and they’d arrived.
A sentence like that (and I’m not saying that one is any good, but you get the idea) can wipe the slate clean. Now you can start fresh.
12 An Unreal Real