The Flexible Writer

So, a small confession: though I’ve been writing, I haven’t been working on my current novel-in-progress much lately, and I didn’t know why until this morning. The project started out with a bang—two quick chapters, a half dozen extended scenes, a clear sense of character and setting, and a basic premise: “A wannabe rock star named Kev Cassady returns home after eight years to the town of Accident, Pennsylvania, for his father’s funeral and has to face the ex-band mates he abandoned when he took off for California to become a ‘star.’”

I’m not a planner—I encourage my students not to “plot out” their work before they write it. Writing is not like following blueprints, I tell them. There are no recipes or instruction manuals. Sit down and reconcile your characters lives on the page—tell your left brain to go on vacation while you draft and invite the right brain to play quietly in the background. So, for me, that one line was just enough—all I needed in the way of planning. I’ve got a character, a place, a dilemma. All systems go, right?

Except, I never achieved true lift-off.

There is still a lot I don’t understand about the novel writing process, but I have learned, over the past three years or so, that writing a novel differs from writing a story (or even a story collection) in more ways that we might realize when we first sit down to try it. Take for example, what I call the late season slump. About 2/3 of the way through the writing of a novel, things suddenly seem bleak. The book is chugging along fine, but nothing satisfies you and you are relatively certain that the book is crap—not worth writing anymore, destined to never be published. You start looking at brochures for truck driving school, take the civil service exam, maybe consider learning to become a radiologist or an x-ray technician. At the time, it seems like your project is destined to die on the table, an unfinished book. But, as I came to discover, this is actually quite normal. I don’t know if every writer experiences it, but plenty have told me that it happens to them every time they try to write a book. And, imagine my surprise when, a few years ago, while in the throes of just such a panic, I picked up Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel and read that it’s not uncommon for her to go through a similar slump around the 100-page mark. You recognize it as a part of the process, ignore it, and move on.

But that doesn’t apply much to my current problem: Forget 2/3, I haven’t even gotten to the 1/4 mark yet. So what’s going on? I mean, I’ve never had this happen before. Yes, I had written a single chapter of Hungry Town during the first year of my Master’s program and then not returned to the project for three years, but that was mostly because I had come to discover that, if I wanted to have the kind of workshop experience I’d been desiring, I needed to bring stories to the table, not a novel. In doing so, I found that I really enjoyed story writing, and I’m glad that I focused on that first. It made a lot of things easier in the long run for me, and I got a collection out of it. When I was done with workshopping for good, I went back to that novel and though the writing wasn’t easy (it never is), I was very productive.

So what’s my deal?

Do I not really want to write this book? That could be a plausible reason—the heart just isn’t in it. The only problem is that, though I haven’t been writing about them much lately, I’ve been thinking about the characters almost constantly. And that doesn’t happen if I’m not interested. I’ve also been reading at double my current rate—anything and everything about rock and roll, including a number of great essay and story collections like Debra Marquart's The Hunger Bone,  Steve Almond's Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, and Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mixtape. And I’ve been listening to music more than ever—2 to 3 hours a night, on top of whatever listening I do in the car or in the office. To steal from Johnny Rivers, I’ve got the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu here. So, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t want to write about rock and roll.

I pondered the idea that maybe my accidental hiatus had something to do with the disruption I’d recently experienced when my computer hard drive crashed this summer. I’d lost a lot of data, including all the work I’d done on the novel-in-progress-in-question, and though I eventually recovered most of it, it’s taken some time to reorganize everything and figure out what I have and what’s gone. Perhaps that’s thrown off the equilibrium? Nah. That sounds like one of those excuses we come up with when we don’t want to admit the truth: we aren’t writing because we aren’t putting in the necessary time and effort.

And yet, I am writing. I’m just not writing what I want to be writing most.

Okay, get to the point, you’re probably thinking. Well, it turns out that I had overplanned. You know that line I started with:

          “A wannabe rock star named Kev Cassady returns home after eight years to the town of Accident, Pennsylvania, for his 
           father’s funeral and has to face the ex-band mates he abandoned when he took off for California to become a ‘star.’”

You know how I said it was just enough? Turns out it was too much. In the shower this morning, as I got ready to leave for work, I realized that my protagonist Kev isn’t returning home for his father’s funeral at all. He’s returning home to attend the funeral of one of his ex-bandmates. A small difference? Maybe. But that small difference is going to mean scrapping half of what I’ve written so far, and abandoning most of the ideas I had in my head about where the novel was going. (Yes, yes, I know I said I don’t plan, but I’m only human. I think about the novel, and plot points pop to mind. I just try not to grow too attached to them until they’re on the page.) 

I’m no fan of morals, but the take-home lesson from all of this, if I were to offer one for my students (which is mostly why I am writing this blog) would be that you have to allow yourself a certain flexibility when you approach a work of length, especially in the early stages. If I’d had my shower epiphany a hundred pages down the road, I think I’d be inclined to disregard it. And rightly so--that’s just the anxiety, the slump, working on my psyche. It’s no time to start second-guessing yourself. Finish the project and then see if you still feel that way when you approach the work again in revision.

But in this early writing stage, I think I have to trust my gut, that feeling that something has just clicked on—the ignition button, perhaps? Will it happen again? Will I go back to the father storyline? I doubt it, though anything is possible, I suppose. But for right now, I know what project I will be working on tonight. And that feels good.