Lessons from My Latest Novel

It took a year because . . . life.

Every time I write a novel, I’m a new me in a new situation. 

The process is never the same twice, and I don’t think I’d want it to be. 

I write a novel, and I become someone a little different. I grow. I’ve struggled with the process in a new way, working within new circumstances, and I emerge on the other side changed for the better.

I have had many phases of my writing life. I was a freelancer at twenty-two years old, and then I went to law school. I married, had two kids, worked in the auto industry, and wrote a novel before I turned thirty. We moved from Michigan to North Carolina, and as a parent at home, I wrote short fiction, essays about graphic design, and a couple books on legal services. And then, in my forties, when I was teaching middle and high school, I resolved to start a new phase.

I resolved to write a novel every summer.

As a teacher, I had two months off in the summer, and it was wonderful. I’d been mulling over my novel ideas for years, but I never seemed to have the time to devote to the longer form. I just kept writing short pieces, like essays and stories, and I wrote them quickly, like sprints in the pauses between work and family life. By 2015, though, my kids were older, and I could retreat to a relative’s beach house in South Carolina. 

I could hide for a month and write all day and then go to the beach. I’d planned my novels for years, so when I arrived in Myrtle Beach, I had character bios, detailed notes, and thorough outlines of the four acts of my story, ten chapters per act. That enabled me to write a chapter or two per day and finish a rough draft in a month.

I took advantage of my circumstances. I had time. I planned like crazy. I hid from the world for a month. And so I was able to complete full first drafts—sometimes underwritten, sometimes overwritten, usually both, but written to the end. I did this in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. 

I was paying a price for this, however.

I was spending too much time away from family during the summers, and so that little experiment in selfish creativity had to end. I had to alter my approach, which I did. I tried to sneak my writing life into my family life, which I was used to doing with short pieces, but I struggled to do this with a novel. I didn’t get to hide away as a scribbling hermit for a precious month, and my lack of focus shows in the writing I was able to complete in 2019 and 2020. It wasn’t as good.

Circumstances changed again.

When our kids moved out to live on their own, my wife and I seized this midlife opportunity to take a break, move back to Michigan, be with family again, and basically hide. I used to hide for a month in the summer to write my novels. Since the fall of 2021, I’ve been hiding all year long.

I was pretty excited for my self-proclaimed sabbatical in the fall of 2021, and I wrote two novels in three months. I wrote A Box Came for You, which was 65,000 words, and I wrote Locke Writes a Story to Save His Life, which was 44,000 words. I finished the first drafts of both before the end of 2021.

I was pretty pumped. So I did something a little silly.

I kept going.

In January of 2022, I started yet another novel. I had some wacky concepts about incorporating the language of streaming television into the novel (like titling chapters “Log In,” “Top Ten,” and “Watch Party”) and writing screenwriting lingo into the narrative (“We see a man leap into a volcano”). I was having fun . . .

. . . until I developed the story to the point that I realized it was good. The flat world of the page, filled with my shenanigans, had bloomed into a living fictional world with characters who demanded I step it up if I were going to do justice to the story.

I finished the first act by the end of January, at which time I stood at the edge of an abyss. I looked out into nothingness. My mind was blank. I removed my fingers from the keyboard. Playtime was over.

There were two main reasons for this.

First, I was a little cocky to believe I could write two novels in three months and, like Stephen King, just start a new novel without a pause to recharge the imagination. My imagination had crossed a desert. I needed to stop at the nearest oasis. I didn’t.

Second, I had failed to fully imagine the world of the second act. Many writers will recognize the situation. You get all excited about the next project. Just have fun. Jump in. Don’t think too hard. Get writing. If you write quickly, you won’t have to do any research. Just type!

And then you discover that typing may be good exercise for the fingers, but writing a novel is a work of the imagination. And if you haven’t imagined your characters in their world, then you reach the edge of an abyss. You’re standing atop the manicured plateau of the first act, which was so much fun, but at the raggedy edge of this imagined world, you stand before an unimagined darkness, an emptiness of spirit. If you haven’t built the world in your mind, you can’t build it with your tippy-typey fingers. You have to imagine the world of the second act before you take that next step into the second act, or . . . you fall over the edge into the abyss.

So I fell. 

And I needed to anyway. Come on. Three novels in a row without a break? Silly and unnecessary. 

What do I do when I hit a wall, fall into the abyss, feel burnt out and grumpy and hollow?

I make art. 

I read.

I edit past manuscripts.

I keep a journal.

I play drums.

I exercise.

I cook.

I go for walks.

I travel.

ART. So I do lettering on paper. I use ink pens and colored pencils, watercolor and all kinds of paper. I’ve been doing this since 2014. In January and February of this year, I did my impulsive lettering and doodling on about 400 sheets of paper. It’s another outlet for my creativity that has nothing to do with writing a novel. I engage a totally different part of my brain. The whole point is to make marks in a spirit of improvisation. I try to live in the moment.

READ. I check out dozens of books from the library. I read about 80 books a year, but now that I’m on break, I read 180. And I read all kinds of genres: novels, plays, poetry, memoir, thrillers, literary short stories, mysteries, current events, history, science, art, humor, scripts, criticism, graphic novels, and cookbooks. I go to the library, and I fill up my backpack.

EDIT. I’ve written eight novels in the past eight years, and I have not published any of them. So I keep editing. I share the manuscripts with friends who read them and give me feedback, and I use their feedback to fire myself up to edit my novels with renewed energy. I reread my past novels with a critical eye and an ear for the rhythm, and I make improvements with every new pass.

JOURNAL. I keep a journal that I write in when I feel like it. Sometimes I write every day. Usually that’s when nothing dramatic is happening in my life, so I have the time. Other times I write once a week, and that’s when dramatic things are happening in my life. I keep it simple, no pressure, open-ended, and easy-peasy. That enables me to open the doc at any time and start typing. I have no hesitation because I have no barriers set up between my expectations and the output. I just type. It’s freeing. And my lord, the amount of writing I’ve done in the last nine years! Since 2014, I’ve written nearly 200,000 words in my journal.

DRUMS. I play drums maybe once a week. It’s another thing I do for the in-the-moment primal fun of it.

EXERCISE. I try to exercise every day, which means I exercise every other day. I exercise to live; I don’t live to exercise. So if life happens, I live it. That’s what the exercise is preparing me for in the first place.

COOK. I love cooking. It’s creative. And once you get a handle on cooking, you never want to stop. I taught myself during the years that I was the parent at home. I studied dozens of cookbooks, from Escoffier to Thomas Keller’s books. I’m always trying new recipes on the NYT Cooking app and from cookbooks I get at the library. I also need to cook meals for myself because I’ve been eating healthy in the last decade or so. I was vegan, then vegetarian, then pescatarian. And now I’m pegan or something. See Dr. Mark Hyman. He’s on Instagram. Anyway.

WALK. Walking is great for writers. I love walking wooded trails. I will take a walk down a familiar trail in Davidson or Myrtle Beach or Paint Creek Trail in Rochester, and I’ll recall a novel I was working on when I was walking these trails years ago. When I pass a certain bend in the trail, I’ll remember a character I was developing, or I’ll see a distinctive pine tree and recall a particular scene. And just as often, I’ll get a voice ranting in my head about something or other, and when the walk is over, I’ll let the whole thing go. I just needed to air out that voice and let it dissipate into the woods.

TRAVEL. I travel to see family. We’re spread out in multiple states. 

So in 2022, when I was blocked in the development of my novel, I let life carry me away. I made art, played drums, cooked, exercised, read, and traveled. And then my daughter got engaged to be married, and my wife and I planned her wedding, held in July of 2022. After that, my wife and I vacationed in Myrtle Beach, and that’s where I told myself it was time to get back to working on the novel.

I have what most novelists dream of having: time.

I have no one pressuring me to write a novel a certain way for a certain market. A genre novelist is often on contract to write the same kind of book every year, one after the other in a series. I’m not under that pressure. I’m not under any pressure except what I put on myself. So I can do what I want. I can write a horror novel and a coming-of-age novel, followed by a romantic comedy and a work of literary science fiction. So I try to take advantage of my ideal circumstances, because they’re awesome . . . and because I don’t know how long they’ll last.

Meantime, though, I get grumpy.

I put too much pressure on myself. I figure my grumpiness is a natural thing, like a season. I’m up. I’m down. I’m a writer. What can you do? So in August, during our vacation, I struggled, still, to get back into the book. Six months had passed since I’d worked on it. I still hadn’t envisioned the second act or the characters. I was writing a romantic comedy of sorts, and so my wife and I watched a dozen rom-coms. I took notes. I read the scripts. I learned about rom-coms.

That was the slow but steady onramp back onto the highway of the book.

So in September, I did the work. I marched through the cast of characters, the rules of the world, and the twists, turns, and revelations. I tried to find a fun way into each chapter so I’d be excited to leap in and not procrastinate. I made great progress in October, got Covid-19 in November, and raced to finish the last chapters on the last day of December to meet my self-imposed deadline of December 31.

I did. 

By the end of 2022, I finished the first draft of Let’s Not Do Maybe Again, which came in at about 88,000 words.

On January 1, I couldn’t help myself. I edited the last three chapters and fussed with them for the next week. Then I took a break. It was January 2023. I let the book sit. Okay, no, I couldn’t stand to be away from it for long, so I reread it and had my wife read it. She hated some of the wind-up sections in the beginning as well as this running conversation that popped up once or twice an act. I deleted those 3,000 words without a second thought. It was a running gag that distracted from the main storyline. It was scaffolding, and it had to go.

I made art. I exercised. I cooked. I played drums. I did not think about the next book. Instead, I returned to my past manuscripts and reread those and improved them.

And so what are the lessons I learned from writing this novel? 

I learned that, in my new circumstances, it’s part of my process to start out with a playful spirit, let the work sit, allow life back into my days, forgive myself for being frustrated and grumpy and depressed, and trick myself in any way possible back into a playful mood, sneaking back into the process step by step, task by task. 

And I know it’ll happen exactly this way next time. In fact, it’s happening right now! I wrote the first act of a new novel in February, and I plotted the next acts . . . and then nothing. I walked to the edge of what I’d imagined, and I looked into the abyss of what I had not yet imagined. 

I knew I was standing at an abyss, again, but this time, I understood the dynamic.

I had to take action, however modest. So I made charts. I named characters. I thought of funny stuff that could happen. I know now what to do to work through the process. However, I don’t think there’s much I can do to avoid the ups and downs, the bad moods and the brick walls, the off days and the abyss. I do know better how to keep these stages in proportion so they don’t mean more than they should. I regard them as natural parts of the process, given my current circumstances. The abyss is not the end of the world, so to speak.

Meanwhile, I cook. I make art. I read. I exercise. I edit. I talk to friends. I plan trips. 

I set my fingers on the keyboard. 

I keep going.
_____

PHOTO: One of my little doodles that keeps me sane