Finishing What You Start

I was reading a novel in a bar recently when some friends walked in, so I put my book away and we all started hanging out. I told them I had started reading the novel with high hopes, but I was growing increasingly more disappointed in it as the book progressed. In fact, I had decided that I didn’t like the novel — but I still intended to finish it.

“Man, life’s too short,” one of my friends said. “If I start a book and wind up not liking it, I put that sucker down.”

“Ordinarily I would agree with you,” I said. “But this is the year when I am attempting to write my first novel, and I’ve already tried that once and failed before I got to chapter 7, and this time I intend to finish. And all my reading is pointed toward supporting my novel right now, so the only fiction I’m reading is novels; no short stories. I’m trying to turn myself into a novelist, so I’m inundating myself in novels. And I’m finishing every novel I start, no matter how I feel about it partway through, because this is my year of finishing what I start.”

I did finish that novel, and I remained disappointed in it, but the time was not wasted because, as a novelist, I can learn from that novel’s mistakes; and because I won a moral victory by finishing what I started. A moral victory has value beyond being moral and beyond being a victory. A moral victory also builds strength of character, and if there’s one thing a novelist needs, it’s strength of character just to finish writing the damn thing. Salman Rushdie has said that a novelist needs “bloody-mindedness,” by which the British mean a cantankerous stubbornness, and he’s right. Most of us are not born with strength of character or cantankerous stubbornness, but it can be developed, and I’m working on that.

The best way to get good at finishing novels is to actually finish one, and I’ve reached a milestone in that regard: I just finished a complete first draft. It weighed in at about 140,000 words. Let me tell you, it was a powerful good feeling to type that last period, do that last save, back the file up, and shut the machine down. The very next thing I did was buy a bottle of champagne. That’s why I haven’t blogged in about a month; I’ve had a near-demonic focus on getting across that finish line.

Now that I have, I’m going to take a breather for about a week and let the novel cool on the windowsill, as my friend Jason Lundberg likes to say about just-completed fiction. I’ll read (Tallula Rising by Glen Duncan; Little, Big by John Crowley) and do a lot of staring out of windows. Then I’ll plunge back in for the next stage of this epic journey: the revision of the first draft. For Lord of the Rings fans, I feel like I’ve made it to Elrond’s house. Now the rest of the journey to Mordor begins. And as we all know by now, one does not simply walk into Mordor.

Brief, Brilliant Thoughts

No, not mine, silly. My thoughts are usually neither brief nor brilliant, which causes no small difficulty in my life, as you can imagine. (Some of my closer friends out there don’t even have to imagine. They KNOW.)

No, I’m going to tell you where you can find brief, brilliant thoughts that are especially relevant to writers. It’s the Twitter feed of the Paris Review (@parisreview), which consists almost entirely of quotations excerpted from their long, venerable, valuable series of interviews with writers.

I’m deep into my novel, which means I’m in danger of losing sight of the big picture. What is the point of this novel? What is the point of any novel? What is the point of writing? Why did I even get out of bed today? That sort of thing. And like a little burst of smelling salts, here came two quotations that cleared my head, and with these, I shall leave you:

The first obligation of the writer—which I would also regard as his last obligation—is to be interesting.
— John Barth

Writers must describe the terrible.
— John Irving

How to Write in a World Where Beloved Has Already Been Written

A couple of days ago, when I was almost done reading Beloved, I made the following post to Facebook and Twitter: “The problem with being a writer is that I live in a world where books like Beloved have already been written. Earth-2 or bust!”

A Facebook friend of mine replied: “I hear ya. You think, why should I even bother?”

My reply to my friend: “Exactly. Yet for some reason, I bother.”

One day in the not-too-distant future I will write a longish blog post about why I write, i.e., what drives me to it, what the motivations are, what the reasons are. I’ve finally figured all that out. It was a question that bedeviled me for many years. I had a hard time answering it because I was using my writing to serve a number of different ends, some of which I was unaware of; some of which contradicted each other; and some of which represented goals that writing cannot accomplish. But today I want to talk about how I can even bring myself to write in a world where Beloved has already been written.

Beloved, in case you didn’t know, is a novel by American author Toni Morrison. It won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and deservedly so, in my opinion. It’s set in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873, and it’s all about how slavery deformed people in this country — the enslaved and the enslavers. I just finished the book and I feel very full with it. I’ll be digesting this one for days, like a python that has devoured a dog. It wasn’t a perfect book, but that’s true of every novel. Some famous writer, I can’t remember who, once defined the word “novel” as “a narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it.” Amen to that. Still, I feel so enriched by this book — enlarged by it.

I also feel intimidated by it. As a writer, I have to ask myself: Is my novel on this level? The answer, of course, is Certainly not. So then I have to wonder, well, why am I even writing? We’ve already got books that are far better than the one I’m writing. Why should I continue? As my friend said, why should I even bother?

It helps to remember that when Toni Morrison sat down to write Beloved, she had to do so in a world where For Whom the Bell Tolls had already been written. And when Hemingway sat down to write that one, he had to do it in a world where Absalom, Absalom! had already been written. And when Faulkner sat down to write that one, he had to do it in a world where The Great Gatsby had already been written. And Fitzgerald worked in the shadow of Henry James, and Henry James worked in the shadow of Jane Austen, and all the novelists have worked in the shadow of Cervantes. Cervantes himself worked in the shadow of Shakespeare. The regression keeps going backward as far as you want to look.

All great novels — and all the mediocre ones, and all the shitty ones — have been written in worlds where masterpieces already existed. Thank goodness Cervantes didn’t let the fact of Macbeth stop him from making his own run at the prize. And thank goodness that Morrison didn’t let the fact of For Whom the Bell Tolls stop her from giving us Beloved.

If you want to write, the proper response to greatness isn’t to say, Why bother? The proper response to greatness is described in the sage advice of author Richard Bausch, in his “Letter to a Young Writer”:

Say to yourself, “I accept failure as the condition of this life, this work. I freely accept it as my destiny.” Then go on and do the work. Never ask yourself anything beyond “Did I work today?” If the answer to that question is “yes,” then no other question is allowed.

My novel is no Beloved, but fortunately, it doesn’t have to be. Did I work today? Yes.

Life in the Bubble

Stop the presses: I finally finished Anna Karenina.

What’s that you say? I’m acting like I deserve a medal? Well yes, I think I do deserve a medal for finishing a book that’s almost 1,000 pages long and that contains long, didactic passages where characters act as mouthpieces for the author’s opinions about Russian society and culture in the 1870s.

What’s that you say? If I feel the need to gripe about it, why did I even read it? Because although the experience of reading this book had its chorelike aspects, it was also quite rewarding. The writing at the sentence level was always good and often exquisite — and sustaining that level of prose excellence over 976 pages is no mean feat. I think my favorite thing about the novel is its finely detailed, completely convincing depictions of human psychology. These characters were the most human, believable, alive characters I’ve ever read in the pages of a novel. You simply won’t find a more true-to-life portrayal of what it means to live a human life, to have the human experience. So, as a reader, I enjoyed the book, and as a writer, I learned a tremendous amount from it.

And there was another benefit to reading Anna Karenina — almost a side effect, but a very welcome one. I found that the act of reading it started to feel a little bit similar to the act of writing my novel. When I sat down at my computer, opened the Kindle app, and started reading where I’d left off, I felt the same sense of discipline and conscientiousness and duty that I feel when I sit down at my computer, open Scrivener, and start writing where I left off. The act of reading Anna Karenina started to feel as if it was part of the larger act of writing my novel.

As I would go through my day, I found that when I wasn’t thinking about my novel, I would often be thinking about Anna Karenina instead. My thoughts about Tolstoy’s novel started to swirl around and intermix with my thoughts about my own novel. I would read or see or do things during my day that had nothing to do with either novel, but I would relate those experiences back to one or the other or both novels.

And when I would get some spare time with nothing to do and no plans, my thoughts began naturally to turn to either my novel or Tolstoy’s. I became obsessed with them both. Still, writing my novel was more fun than reading Tolstoy’s, so in those crannies of spare time, I wrote more. I wrote more and more and more, and I still am — up to 100,000 words as of today.

In short, I had entered that state of concentrated creative productivity that choreographer Twyla Tharp calls “the Bubble.” I’ve written about Tharp’s Bubble before. She talks about it in her book The Creative Habit, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to lead a more actively creative life. Here is the passage from her book where she defines the Bubble:

When I look back on my best work, it was inevitably created in what I call The Bubble. I eliminated every distraction, sacrificed almost everything that gave me pleasure, placed myself in a single-minded isolation chamber, and structured my life so that everything was not only feeding the work but subordinated to it. . . . Being in the bubble does not have to mean exiling yourself from people and the world. It is more a state of mind, a willingness to subtract anything that disconnects you from your work. . . . You can function out in the world (indeed, you have to), but wherever you go the bubble goes with you.

Now, I have not “eliminated every distraction” in my life or “sacrificed almost everything” that gives me pleasure. I still indulge in the occasional videogame, not to mention imbibing draft beer at my local purveyors of libations. But I do now feel that my life is structured so that everything in it is feeding the work. I do now feel that wherever I go, the bubble is going with me. There’s now a sense in which my head is always in the game. And I attribute that sense of pervasive commitment to the oddly totalizing effect that Anna Karenina had on me and my writing.

It’s kind of like getting in shape through physical exercise. You don’t always enjoy the act of exercising, but once you’re physically fit, you feel better all the time, whether you’re exercising or not. Anna Karenina helped get me in better shape as a writer. So the next time I’m knocking back a cold one, I’ll raise a glass to Mr. Tolstoy and another to Ms. Tharp.

Next up in the cavalcade of classic literature? Beloved. I have no idea how it’ll affect me or what it’ll teach me. I’ll let you know.

Less Aspiring, More Writing

I watch very, very, very little TV. Some people find this troubling. I’m not sure why. My mom once said about my paucity of TV watching: “Is this an elitist thing?” I said, “Well, if it was, I wouldn’t say ‘yes,’ because an elitist doesn’t think he’s elitist. He just thinks the way he lives is the way to live.”

Mom said, “Yes, but is this an elitist thing?”

I do keep up faithfully with one, and only one, TV show: Mad Men. If you haven’t drunk that flavor of Kool-Aid yet, I highly recommend that you find a cup and start sipping, because it’s some good drankin’. In the most recent episode, we learn that a regular character, an account executive at an ad agency, writes science-fiction short stories on the side under a pseudonym. He’s had some of his stories published and has even attracted the attention of an editor who might want to anthologize them.

The writer’s boss gets wind of this situation and calls him on the carpet to berate him for his divided loyalties. The boss thinks that having a semipro writing career on the side is a sign of insufficient dedication to the hand that feeds you. The account man, chastened, agrees to stop writing. He later tells a friend at the ad agency that he will “leave the writing to the writers.” But in the last scene (shown at the top of this post), we see him in his underwear, writing a new story — and, as the voiceover informs us, using a different pseudonym.

What intrigues me about this little story arc is how it valorizes the efforts of a part-time writer. The account man isn’t characterized as an “aspiring” writer; he’s just a writer, and a somewhat successful one, despite the fact that he works full time and more as an advertising account executive. I think the story is saying that writing has its own value that is completely distinct from the labels we attach to it or whether we’ve “made it as a writer” or what we do for a living. The man’s writing is an inherently good thing that is worth doing and worth protecting, so he does it, and he protects it.

There’s something pure about such an approach to writing. He’s not trying to get successful enough at his writing to quit his day job. He’s not trying to win fame or money or adulation with his writing. He’s not trying to become anything. His writing has no aspirations beyond itself. For some reason, he just feels compelled to write, to keep trying to tell stories that are true and that move people.

I think I know — finally, at long last — how he feels.

Leo Tolstoy, M.D.

No, Tolstoy wasn’t both a doctor and a writer. That was Anton Chekhov. Also William Carlos Williams. Tolstoy was just a damn good writer with a piercingly clear understanding of the human condition. Tolstoy was just the writer who wrote Anna Karenina, which William Faulkner said was the greatest novel ever written. Tolstoy is just the guy giving me fits right now, because I’m reading Anna Karenina, and I’m having a hard time finishing it.

It’s not that I don’t like the book; I do like it. The writing is phenomenal, and he’s got a way of making a character absolutely come to life on the page. But I don’t love it. There are many long passages devoted to social commentary on the cultural and political situation of Russia in the 1870s, and those parts are pretty boring. Also, the novel is very, very, very long, and when I’m in the middle of yet another disquisition on the status of the Russian peasant, it’s dispiriting to consider just how much I have left to read.

So why not just quit reading it? “Life is too short,” a friend of mine said to me. “Reading is supposed to be fun.” Well, yes and no. It depends on who you are. The reading of fiction is certainly supposed to be fun — or at least entertaining — for the general reader. But if you’re a writer, you have other reasons to read, in addition to the normal reasons. A writer reads to learn how it’s done, to see what works and what doesn’t, to find techniques to emulate and clichés to avoid. Even as you’re seeking out and enjoying the entertainment in the work, another part of your mind is cataloging, analyzing, assessing, judging. I think that’s part of why I’ve become such a picky reader lately. When I’m reading a book that I really love, that analytical part of my brain goes dormant, and I just read for the pleasure of it. That’s such a good feeling, and I experience it so rarely.

So I’m sticking with Anna Karenina because I’m reading to learn. I’m writing what will be my first novel, so I want to read a great novel and learn from it. And a big part of the challenge of writing this first novel is just finishing the damn thing, because I didn’t finish the last one I started. I have a psychological dragon to slay here, and that monster is going down. And just as it’s important for me to finish the novel I’m writing, I think it will be important for me to finish the novel I’m reading. Giving up on it would send my subconscious the wrong kind of message at exactly the wrong time. Right now I need to display stamina and constancy, not fickleness and fatigue.

So I’ll finish the novel, even though it feels like I’m taking my medicine. I never did like the taste of cough syrup; but it gets the job done. And right now I’m all about getting the job done.

You Load 50,000 Words, and What Do You Get?

Halfway through a novel is what you get! And by “halfway” I mean “halfway through a number of words arbitrarily chosen to represent the point at which the novel might be finished.” And by “arbitrarily chosen number” I mean “100,000.”

Now, I know that exactly four weeks ago I posted about being ¼ of the way through the novel. Have I really written another ¼ of the novel in just four weeks? Jeez, at this rate I’ll be finished by dinner! I’ll have an agent in time for cocktails, a book deal by breakfast on Saturday (mimosa brunch!), and a movie deal in time for a three-martini lunch. Being a writer is so fun!

But I jest. In reality I’m playing the game that many novelists play with themselves — oh, I just realized that I wrote “many novelists play with themselves.” Hello, sketchy search-engine traffic! Glad you could join us. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog, already in progress: many novelists obsessively track word count, chapter count, progress through the outline, anything that will tell them how far they’ve traveled down a seemingly endless path. You don’t get gold stars for putting in a good week of novel writing. You don’t get money (usually). You don’t get sex, or at least I haven’t (although if this has happened to you, please do write in and share your tales of literary concupiscence, you big liar, you). You don’t get cups of energy drink at tables staffed by volunteers. So you create your own little goodies to give yourself. That’s what I’m doing here. My novel currently stands at 51, 657 words, and I’m celebrating that fact, partly because it’s a real accomplishment, and partly because I need to see it as a real accomplishment and celebrate it as such.

The 100,000-word target for novel length is not completely arbitrary. The blog Indefeasible has helpfully provided the word counts of dozens of classic novels and of more recent novels that have won the PEN/Faulkner award (one of the highest awards an American novel can win). Out of those novels, I have abstracted a comparison subset that only includes novels from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that includes only one novel by any given author, and that specifically excludes The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged due to their prodigious length. Some of the novels on my subset list of twenty-three books are Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. The average word count of all twenty-three novels is 107, 636. This figure agrees with the conventional wisdom, bandied about in creative-writing programs and writing magazines and online forums, that 100,000 words is a good rough target for novel length.

I think the 100,000 word target functions as more of a minimum than a maximum, which is why it makes a good rough metric for determining when you may be close to being done. That is, if your novel comes in a good deal shorter than 100,000 words, you are probably in novella territory, which is a territory notably devoid of sales opportunities. But novels can be much longer than 100,000 words without being disqualified as a novel. It will be harder to sell your 500,000-word magnum opus than to sell your 100,000 word hit-it-and-quit-it book, but they’re both novels.

So hooray for halfway through, in some sense of the word “halfway.” And now to celebrate, in some sense of the word “beer.”