Just a collection of thoughts, maybe they will encourage, hoping not to discourage, and thinking they will be educational.
The Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio is something I ran across a while back and never quite back to until today. Well, I've not got a novel ready and Google Keep is getting weird (especially on Firefox), and this was in my notes. This seems to indicate it should be here:
Writing a novel can sometimes feel like a daunting, lonely undertaking.
How will you ever find the time to get your novel done?
What can you do about those private doubts that get in your way?
And how will you figure out everything you don't (yet) know about writing a novel?\
If you'd love some guidance and companionship on your novel-writing journey, the Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio is for you
Jane Roper on Learning How to Have Fun While Writing Fiction
Enter British author Jim Crace. His novels, including Quarantine, Being Dead, and The Gift of Stones, imagine a vast range of milieus, eras, and states of consciousness with incredible vividness. Crace visited my MFA program during my second year to do manuscript consultations, and I submitted the first fifty pages of a novel in progress to him—a World War II-era story loosely inspired by my grandmother’s life. I was, of course, hoping for praise and validation. Instead, Crace looked at me and said something I’ve never forgotten: “It’s well written. But you don’t seem to be having much fun.”
I was confused. Fun? Didn’t he know writing wasn’t supposed to be fun? Was this a British thing? I made some sort of half-hearted protestation. It wasn’t as if I was miserable while I wrote. I many times experienced those frissons of satisfaction that come with hitting on the right detail, successfully solving a tricky plot problem, or crafting the perfect scene. That counted as fun, right? Also, I really enjoyed commiserating with my fellow writers over too many beers about how hard writing was. That was definitely fun.
Crace was unconvinced. He told me that I needed to figure out what and how to write so that I could really dive in, let loose, and enjoy myself. My work would come alive when I did.
I nodded politely, and went back to plodding away, convinced that if writing felt like exercise—the un-fun kind, done on weight machines and stair climbers—I was doing it right.
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I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to let go of what I thought I should write and embrace what I did best and enjoyed most. But you can’t choose how long it will take you to hit your writerly stride. Apparently, I needed years of rejection to get it through my skull that I should be doing things differently. (Sorry, Jim Crace. And sorry, husband.)
But maybe my journey wouldn’t have been quite so long if, as writers, we spent as much or more time talking about the joy of writing as we do about the pain. Maybe, as teachers and mentors, we need to more forcefully exhort aspiring writers to lean into the aspects of their work that they find the most satisfying and exciting. In my case that means humor, but for others it might mean incorporating more of their real-life passions or obsessions in their work, writing in a different genre, or experimenting with language or form.
Complaining about the pain of writing—which I still do from time to time—is undeniably fun, and makes for better bon mots for the bulletin board. But bringing your full self to your work, wielding all of your tools with abandon, is fun at a whole other level. And, in most cases, it yields much better art.
The Nursery, Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel chronicles the earliest days of coexistence between a new mother, Miffo, recovering from childbirth and her ever-hungry baby daughter, Button. Overwhelmed by the seismic shift in her body and identity, Miffo burrows deeper into her apartment and psyche, to the brink of madness. Told with radical honesty and emotional precision, The Nursery is an essential addition to the growing canon of literary works reckoning with the complexities of motherhood.
I talked with Molnar—who was born in Budapest, raised in Sweden, and now resides in Austin, Texas—about her revision process, fictional depictions of motherhood, and the choice to make her protagonist “float.”
Shannon Perri: The narrator of The Nursery, Miffo, a woman who has spent her career in the heady space of literary translation, struggles deeply with how much childbirth and her newborn demand of her body. I was fascinated by how she compares and contrasts her roles as a mother and translator. She notes that both are often unseen work and made up of small choices. And yet, she longs for her work with words, where she felt more control than she does in the space of new motherhood. Was this central tension the original engine for the novel?
Szilvia Molnar: The central tension was “the birth of Button is the automatic death of Miffo” and a knock on the door would keep shaking things up. But I also had to decide how “big” of a life Miffo was losing for this new role. A translator somehow felt simple but just right.
SP: New motherhood is a particularly isolating experience for Miffo. Her parents are gone. She is from abroad. Her husband gets little time off from work. Did that impact the way you wanted to tell this story?
SM: I intentionally wanted Miffo to “float” even before the arrival of Button because I didn’t want too many outside factors to distract the reader from thinking about the mental turmoil she is going through.
SP: What do you mean by “float?”
SM: I guess I mean this idea that she’s not rooted to the place where the novel is set and doesn’t have family or many friends nearby. You don’t really know much about her past or history, only the flashbacks she gives you while she’s in the present with her husband John, Button, and her neighbor Peter. Because of this, my hope was that more readers would be able to relate to her and expand their own ideas about her.
Shannon Perri: The novel moves around in time seamlessly, though the story covers about a week. How did you land on the structure of the novel? What came organically and what came through revision?
Szilvia Molnar: At first, I had a kind of “before” section— before the arrival of Button, when Miffo is pregnant— and “after”—after Miffo gives birth—but it was my agent, Kate Johnson, who recommended that I braid the two timelines together, and I knew she was right about this, but I didn’t know how to do it until I tried for a few years.
SP: How did you know when the braiding finally worked? Were you relying on outside readers or mostly an internal sense?
SM: It took about 30 drafts until I finished what felt like a first full version of the story. Then I showed it to four to five early readers, and it still took maybe another 10 drafts. Then also much, much tinkering even after I received notes from my editors. I also added more scenes as I was slowly putting them all together. Only once it went into copywriting did I feel it was working and I could let go of it, which feels crazy thinking back on it.
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SP: What most surprised you during the process of creating The Nursery?
SM: That I wrote it by editing the pages over and over and over again until it grew into a book. I thought that I would write one scene after the other until it all came together but it just didn’t work that way. This process was incredibly painful so, next time, I’d like to avoid it if I can.
Esquire published The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer , but it is behind a paywall. The title says a bit to me, including someone who knows of Milan Kundera.
Nathan Bransford wrote The first draft is always the hardest (and why you shouldn’t fear starting over):
Pushing forward on a new novel is extremely hard. Just ridiculously, mind-bogglingly hard.
It’s like trying to run a race in three or four directions at once. You’re getting to know the characters. You’re fleshing out the setting. You’re trying to see if the events you have in mind are going to work once they hit the page. You’re trying to find the voice. You’re weaving together plots and subplots. All at the same time.
Maybe your novel will spring forth in its ideal form and all of these elements will magically weave together in perfect harmony.
Good luck.
Instead, even if you write slowly and carefully, chances are you’re going to muddle through. You always have work to do when you’re finished.
And sometimes you’ll have a ton of work to do. Particularly after you confront a daunting editorial letter, sometimes you’ll need to go back and rewrite the whole thing mostly from scratch.
But take it from me: starting over isn’t something to fear.
John McPhee on Wrestling with a First Draft - I read McPhee in prison, an essay that it take four drafts; he writes non-fiction, but I found the essay applicable to my writing.
It isn’t all like that—only the first draft. First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of my book on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether. That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over.
Camille Guthrie on Writing Fiction - an interview.
The Terror in The Mirror: On Family, Legacy, and Hauntings:
I have cried many stifled tears, ashamed to say I deserved so much more and needed more out of life, this one chance. The pain upon opening eyes sometimes left me wanting to drown in my bed knowing full well what real change in my life would require. I didn’t want to let anyone down or be perceived as a failure even though I called myself that every waking moment, that demonic voice of self-doubt and loathing.
So I screamed into the void of a blank page, not realizing salvation was there all along. And no it was not easy. I blew up my entire life to really live. Maria The Wanted was my first book in 2018 and now The Haunting of Alejandra has arrived.
If there is one thing you take from Alejandra, or any of my stories, is that personal power and direction are free. It isn’t easy, but this book is living proof that it is possible. Don’t let anyone tell you who you are, who you should love, what you must look like, or what your body is or isn’t. It is no one’s business but your own. Your happiness is your own and you are not the past, or some lukewarm tolerable version of what you want to be.
Emily Gould on How (and Why) to Keep Writing When Writing Feels Pointless makes three points with detailed explanations:
1. Move the goalposts or remove them entirely
2. Eliminate the possibility of an audience
3. The “why” part
This comes from the last point:
Novels pile up; they can seem like a nuisance, frivolous at best and at worst a self-indulgent way of avoiding a reality we’d rather not countenance. But it’s worth remembering that they are also the best technology we have for transmitting one person’s consciousness directly into another’s. Even if it seems unrealistic, or self-important, or just delusional, the act of writing implies that someone in the future will read what we’re currently in the process of writing. That future can only exist if we believe in it now.
Elizabeth McCracken on Savoring the Mystery of Writing:
Beneath the water, in the depths, is the endangered Barton Springs Salamander. It’s a mystery. It lives only in Barton Springs. Like many mysteries, you mustn’t touch it. Some mysteries must be left alone so that they don’t die, even if some readers want you to hold them up in the palm of your hand in the brightest light. That’s as good as any writing advice I have to offer.
sch 4/29
Updated 5/4:
Failure, Patience, and Joy: Tania James on What It Means to Be a Writer
But one can almost get too good at breaking up, can almost become an artist of abandonment, looking always ahead for that perfect book you have yet to write. I was approaching such a state of mind when I wrote the first few chapters of my new novel. They were interesting chapters, but what if there was someone sexier around the corner, involving zombies or spies or zombie-spies? At that point, I sent the chapters to my agent, who told me she liked them very much and, I quote:
“If you stop writing this I’ll turn up to handcuff you to your keyboard.”
In case it’s unclear, my agent is a bit of a dom. And this works wonders for me. I printed out those lines of steely encouragement and pinned them to my bulletin board, where they stayed until I finished the book.
Throughout those years of novel-writing, though, I occasionally paused to experiment with my first love, the short story, if only to remind myself of what it’s like to play.
Kids need no such reminder. In a blink, my older son teleports to the state of play, to imagined worlds of wizards and trolls. He’s inside what he calls The Game, which often extends to bedtime, when I’m begging him to go to sleep and stop muttering to himself. His response: But the game never ends.
What I wouldn’t give to be able to drop down into that play state the minute I sit down to write. To enter the room “where there are no wrong answers,” as a student put it to me recently.
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