Do I know enough? (Or, how to stop stalling and start drafting)

In my intro post, I talked about how I've always wanted to write a novel, how writing a book was always the goal. Writing short fiction wasn't a detour, by any means—it's my craft, and integral to my writing (not to mention the entirety of my career thus far). Writing short fiction taught me about prose, character, and scene. It let me understand how to create emotional effects with words. It was also super satisfying to complete these stories then send them out into the world. I'm not sure I would've continued writing if I didn't have short fiction to ground me and give me positive reinforcement.

That said, I did reach the point where I wanted to practice other skills: how to sustain a story over several chapters. How to build a world you can sink into. How to create a character through layers, discovering them as I go along. Was this something I was capable of? Something I would ever manage?

Until I actually wrote THE END on that first draft, I didn't know the answer. Which was very humbling, as someone who's been calling myself a writer since I was, like, eight.

The thing is, every time I asked a more advanced writer how to write a novel, they would say some version of, "You just have to do it to learn how to do it." I struggled with that response. I wanted a solution, something that would take me from "I can't do it" to "oh I'm doing it." What would make writing the novel possible, when I had so many failed attempts? What would differentiate it from short fiction so that I'd know it was working?

Now that I'm on the other side, I do (unfortunately) agree that the process is so individual. You have to flail along to learn how. But the point of this series is to be explicit about what I did. Today I'll share how I started drafting, and kept at it.

First: you need to know what you're writing.

Next: you need to make the time to write regularly.

All set? Okay. Here's what I did next.

1. I filled my well for the project (aka, the noodling phase)

I'd written a novella version of this project in 2015. So when I revisited it in 2020, I had 33k words of story, start-to-finish, to draw from. I'd also produced a synopsis and about three chapters for a 2018 writing workshop. Plus, the story was based on a Filipino epic. These artifacts gave me scaffolding to work with, but it was never my intention to do a straight retelling, and I was dissatisfied with how I'd subverted the original in my novella. A lot of my initial work was investigating my old drafts and the source material, and making decisions about what to change.

I had a sense that if I started, I wouldn't get very far, because my grip on this version of the story was tenuous. I needed to "fill my well" first, and figure out enough to least "see" the initial part of the story. Thus began my noodling phase, which involved:

• Research, especially for worldbuilding. I read books and articles on Filipino epics, myths, legends, and our precolonial history. I watched YouTube clips and looked at visual imagery. Throughout, I took notes and also made a lightweight story dictionary, which included potential place names, character names, and terminology.
• Asking questions and trying to answer—anything from specifics about the plot/storyline, to more meta concerns about the writing and project. Some examples:
  • What's the tone I want for this story? For the language itself?
  • What's the deal with Urduja's mother? If her mother is actually tough, then what's her gender beef?
  • What's the AU version of this story?
• Constantly re-telling myself everything I knew about the story. I knew what the first 30% needed to be in terms of "what happens," but I repeatedly wrote it out in short bullet form, asked myself questions, then tweaked. I also wrote a lot about the characters and their motivations.

2. I psyched myself up to write.

I read a lot of writing about writing. I looked for clues everywhere. I read interviews on The Creative Independent, Lithub, and The Paris Review. I saved links, copy-pasted sections into my writing journal, and even wrote quotes out by hand. Here are some examples of resources I liked:

People will tell you that you need a thick skin to be a writer, what with all that disappointment and rejection, but I think part of what makes a good writer is the ability to be porous, to be able to feel all the intricate and complicated notes, the particular music of each moment.

—From How to be a Writer: The Map is the Territory by Ramona Ausubel

You can make your flashbacks odd, beautiful mysteries whose significance only becomes apparent over time.

You build tension in a complex structure the same way as you do in a simple structure: by making the reader worry whether a character he or she has an emotional investment in is going to be okay or not, or get what they want or not.

—From a now-inaccessible David Mitchell interview on structure (my link was here, but Googling alternatives turns up nothing).

I know it seems like a good strategy to just keep going, to just get a draft written. But once I feel like I’m on the wrong track, there’s no way I can go on. I have to fix it.

—Laini Taylor, hard work & revisions

I was looking for suggestions on ways of thinking about the work that could help me. In some ways, I was looking for permission. For example, Laini Taylor's note about "fixing things if it's on the wrong track, before proceeding" resonates with me. I know many writers who skip over parts that aren't working, but I usually can't. Neither is right, it's just that writing brains differ, and I wanted to find examples that matched mine.

I did this continuously throughout the whole process. My writing journal and actual journal are full of quotes from various writers, including some whose work I haven't even read. It helped me to know I wasn't alone.

3. I found the opening sequence that would get me "into" the story.

I need my first sentences working in order to proceed. Otherwise, I have to keep trying different entry points.

This is true even in my short fiction. Here are some lines I tried to open A Cup of Salt Tears with:

A. She had often studied her mother’s figure while she bent over the kitchen sink, making dinner. Sazae-san on the television set had been muted, and Minako would sit at the kitchen table, filling in her princess coloring books as a reward for finishing homework. She had often thought that her mother looked like a beautiful woman that had been tugged just a little bit in the ugly direction, to make her look more human.

B. Hello, Kawataro says.

Hello, she answers, mouth now lifted above the water, hands over her breasts. Hello, you’ve come again.

C. When Tetsuya fell ill Minako started visiting the onsen more often. It was a thirty minute walk from her doorstep to the entrance to the woman’s side, and she could spend the whole walk thinking pleasant thoughts and humming quietly to herself, ignoring the smell of sickness that hung around her like a dead weight.

Here's the sentence I eventually went with, that let me proceed with the rest of the story:

Someone once told Makino that women in grief are more beautiful. So I must be the most beautiful woman in the world right now, she thinks, as she shucks off her boots and leaves them by the door.

The same was true for the novel. The opening I needed to start drafting didn't survive the revisions, so I feel fine sharing it here:

There were many moments when I thought you were trouble but it came clearest to me when you did not let me look away. It was not forcing. When you reached out it was not my cheek you touched but my hands. 

It continues—that intro is 280 words in total. It set the tone of the story for me: the characters, the vibe, the point. It reminded me about the core of the project, in terms of emotions and themes. And it gave me the "register" I was going for, ie how formal/fantastical I wanted it to sound. In some ways finding that opening is like using a pitch pipe before singing.

Beyond the first sentences, I also needed a structure and POV. I was prepared to throw it out if it wasn't right, but needed a hypothesis. At that point, I'd made a few attempts at telling a straightforward, linear narrative in third person, and it wasn't working.

Ultimately, I decided on a braided storyline to open the novel, for two reasons: (1) I really like braided stories (this is evident from my collection); (2) it helped me with chaptering, and some of the pacing issues I had with the linear draft attempts. It was also more formally interesting to me.

On this topic, Arkady Martine's great essay One Free Trick: How to Use the Writing Skills You Have to Learn the Ones You Don’t is a solid read: "Your One Free Trick is the skill you can build on. The skill you can lean on, while you learn the rest of the craft of being a writer. Thinking about writing craft in this way—as a collection of interlinked skills, some of which you got for free, some of which you have to work for—completely changed how I approached new and hard projects."

Braided narratives, and writing moody, resonant sentences were, at that point, in my bag of tricks. I picked things that were easier for me and that I liked, and used that to worm my way into the rest of the book.

4. I kept a writing journal.

For years I kept several "freewriting" documents that let me write down story scraps, questions, and thoughts about process. These were usually split by year/season, ie: "Fall/Spring freewriting 2014."

When I started working on the novel, I created a doc called "Awit 2020 Diary Let's Write It." (Awit was the working title of my novel; the draft doc itself I titled girls being girls, to remind me of the point whenever I faltered.) I didn't want to track the word count of my draft—intuitively, I felt that would stress me out. I use TextEdit to write for this reason. But the writing journal let me note where I ended every day, and whether I had actually touched the manuscript. If I did, my entry got a day and then the last 3-5 words of that day's work (ex: day 1: goes in for the kill; day 319: grow into a comfort).

I used this writing journal copiously. It contained a lot of my noodling before I started drafting. When I actually started, it let me see things I was struggling with or puzzling over. In this doc, I could whine without shame. It's also where I put all my self pep-talks, of which I had to write MANY. For example:

I will be so proud of myself if I just keep writing this. As hard and faltering as it is—I just have to clod on [sic], and actually get to the end of this draft, this new zero draft that will be distinct from what it was five years ago. Yup. Write the story you want to tell yourself.

Or:

I feel slow. I want to write but when I’m actually there, it’s all ehhhh. But I’m going to keep going! It’s the only way!

5. At some point, I simply started and kept going.

I picked a week where I would stop faffing and start. This was after moving the date back a few times because "I didn't know enough yet" or "I was unsure about the tone." But at some point I felt I had enough ideas that the attempt was worth it. I also wanted to get moving.

One day, I started. And then I kept going for as long I could.

I showed up very regularly (most weeks at least six days, with the help of my writing group and covid lockdown). I don't think you need to write every day, but I think there is wisdom in "touching the project" every day. I also wrote every day I could write. I didn't let myself off the hook if I had the energy. And eventually, it started to feel less like this massive, overwhelming undertaking I'd been psyching up to do, and more like a set of sentences and scenes for me to write.

Rather than trying to explain the feeling, I'm just going to paste verbatims from my writing journal.

December 5, 2020

So!! Lazy!! To write today!!!

It’s interesting to be here, 46 days in. I find myself wondering, thinking, is this what it’s like to write a novel? [...] It’s more of a drag than writing a short story in a specific way. It’s just this sustained tension. Everything is longer. Writing takes longer. Writing takes forever. Because you have to write so much to move the story, which of course was obvious to me on a brain level, but not in terms of what that would feel like. You boil down to the level of the scene because it really is hard to hold the whole story in one’s head. My insights come and they’re sort of like delicately shelved for when I get back to that point in the story, which could be weeks away, because who knows how long it’ll take me to write it. [...]

In some ways it isn’t so different. It’s just writing forward. Writing long. To me writing the book just feels like a long road stretching ahead, and I’m walking along it slowly because that’s the only way it can be done—at least as far as my muscles will allow, right now. I love getting the little insights, little flowers blooming along the way. For so long the walkway just felt dead—but that’s also because I wasn’t walking it, I was kinda dithering at the start hoping the walk would look more appealing. It only looks better once you start walking it.

December 26, 2020

I do know more. This feeling of extended, kind of drowning immersion, and just hacking away at it through the dark, keeping a pulse on what I know and allowing the rest to be whatever…that’s a thing. It’s like somewhere between plotted and not. [...] It’s the construction of several things to make up a whole. And it’s just so damn expansive. Entire characters and histories and backgrounds that aren’t in it yet. 

January 2, 2021

A small, amazing thing. Every day at the end of the day I’m like “fine I’ll get my two Kelly Link pony-esque words†” and then a paragraph or two comes out. Is that what it’s like to be in the book? Of course they’re declarative and ugly and there is no tension and blah blah, but still—words get written!

April 19, 2021

I realize I was trying to get them to the Cave Sequence by the end of 2020 and it’s now April and we’re still not there yet, haha. Will it go faster once I’m there? I don’t know. All I know is it’s taking the amount of time it takes, and I know what I know, I don’t know what I don’t know, and maybe I can’t really hope for this thing to be good or done within a year, but I do hope I enjoy some of it when I reread it. 

May 8, 2021

Reread chunks of the story today and did not hate them, which is maybe the most one can ask for.

my job every day is simply to take them as far as i can, to do everything possible to move the story forward, and if i’m at a loss, going inward, going for the emotion, just writing a line that sounds somewhat right hasn’t failed me terribly yet.

And...that's how it went. For about 9 months, I chipped away at the draft, writing as regularly as I could, accepting the fact that my novel-writing process wasn't going to have many (or any) of those big, freeing bursts I would sometimes get with short fiction. Instead it was just going to be a kind of dry, steady, plodding process of writing what I knew. It felt very mechanical, workmanlike, most of the time.

There's good advice around novel writing to give yourself a sort of "carrot" each day—a scene you're excited to write, for example. I never really had carrots. I was even worried that I didn't like my characters enough because I didn't "daydream about them outside of the writing process." I'd say for 90% of drafting, writing the book felt more like a massive, continuous "problem to be solved" than anything buoyant or delightful. But I wanted to keep doing it. I wanted to write forward into understanding these characters and telling their story.

My carrots only materialized at the end of a working session, in the form of at least one line or turn of phrase I did not hate. That was all I could apparently give myself, and it was enough.

Rereading my notes, there were three main things I had to learn (by doing) that were particularly different from the feeling of writing a short story:

• It's not going to suddenly feel particularly good or inspired. Sometimes it will feel actively bad. There will be the rare day where a lot of words get done. But most of the time, the feeling is simply, "Ah, I did the thing, like I meant to." Kind of like going to the gym. (Urk!)
• Unlike with stories, I never really "hit a turn" or "broke through" or "figured it out." There was no sudden moment when all the pieces gained clarity, or I understood my characters completely. It was just tiny things to progress the story, every session, every scene—what I called "little flowers blooming along the way." It was chewing the elephant one bite at a time, forreal. (Urk!)
• I gave myself permission to feel bad and bitch a lot, but I did not allow myself to quit, or avoid the manuscript too long. I provided my own relentless encouragement. Not false optimism—I frequently bemoaned the writing quality, my own confusion about the story, etc. But it always boiled down to asking myself: what are you going to do about it? And realizing: I have to keep going. I have to do this for myself.

Laura van den Berg described it this way in an interview: "for me the first draft is an attempt. It’s like putting down a shadow of a thing but you’re not even really sure what the thing is, so you just have the big shadow."

I drafted the shadow, uncertainly, often exhaustedly, but with as much earnest effort and curiosity as I could muster. Proceeding like this got me 30% of the way into the draft. I was writing a novel, convincingly! It was happening, even around a day job, a strangely isolated world, and the launch of my story collection. I was doing the thing!

Then, in June 2021, I wrapped up part one, and started on the next "sequence" of the novel. And I hit a wall that would last until roughly January 2023: 18 months of churning in the murky middle. Why did that happen, what took me so long, and what got me out of it? That's the story for next time.

† This is a reference to a tweet quote I once had from Kelly Link (no longer on Twitter, thus the tweet is lost):

I thought I was going crazy because I couldn't find it, but it's actually referenced/visible in this old newsletter post.

This is already really long, so I'm going to skip the Quick Hits this time. Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed and aren't yet a subscriber, feel free to sign up, or share with a friend. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe—I won't be hurt, and I never want to clutter up someone's inbox.

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