The Loose, Baggy Monster

Writing a Novel: Each Time Is Essentially the First Time

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A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned in an email that she’s working on a novel, and she joked about how much easier it is to read novels she hopes hers will ultimately resemble than to write her own. She asked if I’d consider writing a post about how I managed to write and publish three novels without losing my mind.

I’ll record here in more associatively than deliberately logical fashion what I’ve learned over the past three decades about novel-writing, and how, specifically, I wrote Little Known Facts (Bloomsbury, 2013), Paris, He Said (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos (7.13 Books, 2022).  

Some context: during many of the last 30 years, I’ve probably spent more hours at my desk writing or trying to write than I’ve spent doing anything else—other than sleeping. It requires faith (and lunacy, to a certain extent) to keep going.

I’ve written several more novels than I’ve published, every one of them, other than Paris, He Said, written on spec—which is how most novelists are required to work.

An imperfect metaphor: writing novels is not like making dinner and sharing it with friends. You’re not guaranteed any kind of reward when you’ve finished a manuscript—other than the novel itself. It’s more like making dinner and your friends canceling at the last minute. And there you are, all alone with the whole spread.

But if you love cooking and are able to enjoy the process of putting together a nice meal—this is the sort of mindset being a committed writer requires. And it’s possible someone (or many someones) will show up and share the feast with you, but not on the timeline you’re probably hoping for.

Henry James’ loose, baggy monsters? (Calvin Dexter, illustrator)

I think often of something the Irish novelist Anne Enright said in an interview years ago: “If you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day…it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.”

(You could substitute “happy” for “free,” too.)

A few reminders/obvious truths: 

- A novel gets written by saying no to a lot of other things.

- It helps to find a writing practice you can in fact stick to, i.e. don’t set punitive goals—life is punitive enough without writers creating their own personal penal colony in the rooms where they write. I’ve lately adopted a practice my friend Adam McOmber (Fantasy Kit, This New and Poisonous Air, among other titles) suggested: writing first thing in the morning for an hour. Don’t look at your phone first or you can fogettaboutit. (Okay, sometimes you will look at your phone, but then promptly stash it in the next room.)

- As many other writers have said, you have to write the book you want to read/wish already existed.

- Each new novel will most likely feel as if you’re writing a novel for the first time. It’s as hard to banish self-doubt as it is to put words on the page in an order that holds your interest, one sentence after another.

- Perhaps the most important thing is to write about subjects and characters you want to spend time with. I can’t see a novel through unless I’m with characters that inspire curiosity, suspense, and love. (I really do want to know what will happen next. Sometimes I might screw it up, but that’s what revision is for.)

To underscore the note above, the only rule is no tricks, i.e. don’t try to force yourself to write something you have little to no interest in. So what if someone told you that novels about witches and orphans are popular? Unless you want to write a witch or an orphan novel, don’t bother. About 8 years ago, I wrote a novel I hoped would be commercial in a way my other books hadn’t been—i.e. more plot-driven than character-driven, and my hope was that my agent would sell it under a pen name.

To which my agent said, “This is good enough that we’ll put your name on it. P.S. Here are my notes for revision.” Her notes were extensive. I did not want to spend a year rewriting a book I did not want my name on, one that might not sell anyway. So it all went…exactly nowhere.

- On a different note, what if you’ve already written 19 stories about a couple that goes to the beach and breaks up, but you can’t stop writing these stories? Until you don’t want to write about that couple and their break-up anymore, you’re probably going to have to keep writing this story. (John Updike famously quipped that he wrote the same story over and over. But like Tolstoy, he knew that no two unhappy families were alike—unhappiness and its causes and effects are one of our timeless subjects.)    

If you want to write a story as a series of questions, you should. Or with sentences that all begin with the same few words (ref. Rick Moody’s “Boys”). Or a story about someone whose one goal in life is to walk on stilts in a rainstorm in all fifty states. You get to decide. Don’t let the dubious marketplace decide for you. There are no guarantees, other than the sometimes spirit-crushing uncertainty of this calling.

Little Known Facts

Having written short stories for several years before I started writing novels, I found that the best way to write Little Known Facts was to structure some of the chapters, especially the earliest ones, as stand-alone stories. The later chapters (there are 11 total) are not stand-alone, but I nonetheless tried to approach them with the same narrative compression that I aim for in a short story.

Even if I don’t know at the outset how it will end, I do know the ending of a short story is just out of view. A novel’s ending, however, is so dauntingly distant and abstract that I can see myself veering disastrously into the poisonous weeds if I undertake this loose, baggy monster (to borrow Henry James’s description of the form) in a traditionally linear, one-POV-character fashion.

Another choice that helped enormously as I wrote Little Known Facts was changing the point of view character with each chapter. This likewise added a sense of novelty and possibility, and because the novel’s focal character, Renn Ivins, is an extremely famous man, someone with stature equal to Paul Newman’s or Harrison Ford’s, the different POVs allowed me to show Ivins through the eyes of seven other characters, most of them his familiars, all of whom had conflicting feelings about him.

Paris, He Said

Paris, He Said has only two POV characters, but it’s written in three long sections, two in first-person, and one in third-person. This novel was much harder to write than Little Known Facts or Please Be Advised. When my editor read the first full draft of Paris, He Said, she sent me a long editorial letter and an alarmingly marked-up manuscript. She must have been very disappointed in this draft but had never said this to me outright. I understood where she was coming from—the novel wasn’t warm. It wasn’t like LKF, in which I balanced lighter and darker elements less ponderously than I’d been able to do in P, HS.

I ended up rewriting about 90-95% of Paris, He Said. Starting over was nearly panic-inducing, and for some time, it felt like I’d swum too far from shore, but I knew I couldn’t let myself go under—Bloomsbury had already acquired the book based on its first hundred pages (the first and only time that’s happened to me).

A little while into this major rewrite, I realized the book needed a second POV character, which turned out to be the female protagonist’s benefactor/much-older romantic partner, a Frenchman named Laurent Moller. As soon as I began writing his section, I felt I’d found the light switch I’d been blindly groping for. My editor, however, had to sit with this new draft for a little while before she decided Laurent’s section could stay.

Titling chapters or sections also helps—even if these titles are eventually jettisoned. (I often begin short stories with a title, the characters and situations following). I came up with chapter and section titles to Paris, He Said as I wrote. I’d done the same two years earlier with Little Known Facts—some of the titles I came up with before I started writing the chapters: “The Finest Medical Attention,” “Every Gift You’ve Ever Given,” “A Good Person,” “Stolen Gods,” and “Flattering Light.” 

Please Be Advised

Please Be Advised is written in memo format, as its subtitle advertises. That book, most of which I wrote in late 2017/early 2018, was a book I wrote to get another book I’d just written out of my system—I missed that book and wanted to keep writing humor, and the memos could be written four or five at a time. They needed revision, painstaking revision, because they were predicated on one joke after another and the jokes needed to be sharp, but the initial drafts weren’t daunting because many of them were only a page long.

Linked thematically and by character, I wrote these memos in a patchwork fashion—changing the order of the memos as I composed the manuscript to add to a plot thread, to introduce a new character or subject.

Little owl ❤️ (from Audubon’s “Little Owls'“ mini calendar)