In terms of volume it’s been a pretty good week. I’m almost fifteen thousand words into the new book.
I’ve stumbled across a couple of new characters; one principal supporting character has already shown me a side of himself I hadn’t anticipated. I find myself falling for him a little bit, so his role will probably end up being larger than I’d assumed.
As the story moves forward, a bow wake broadens behind it; turbulence which affects secondary characters in unanticipated ways. This gives me the opportunity to introduce a new twist or two, a couple of ways to amplify the stakes and the tension.
The bad news is, none of it’s very good. Not yet, anyway.
Which brings me to the awful truth, the first reversal, the monster you need to defy — because it makes the difference between wanting to write a novel and actually writing one.
First drafts, man. They’re just shit.
Writing isn’t digging ditches or milking cows. In that respect, it’s not hard work. But sitting down every day, by yourself, because you’ve chosen to and because you think you can – and then just, well, doing it. That’s hard. That’s probably the hardest part of the whole thing. Certainly, it stops a lot of books from ever being written.
Unless you’re one of those blessed creatures who polish as they go, chapter by chapter — Robert Harris is one, I believe, and Kent Haruf is another — at the end of the day, the week, the month, you’ve got nothing to show even your most trusted reader. Or at least, you shouldn’t.
Trusted readers are a precious resource whose good will and patience is not to be squandered. Never, ever use your first reader simply because you’re scourged by self-doubt and greedy for encouragement: if something’s not ready to be read, you already know it. So don’t show it to anyone; you’re asking them to lie because they love you, which is asking too much.
If that trusted reader tells you the truth — that right now what they’re reading isn’t terribly good, it’s going to embarrass them and it’s going to mortify you.
If – as you’re secretly hoping – they simply tell you what you’re desperate to hear, you’ll know it. And because you’ll know it, it won’t help; it’ll make things worse. You’ll smile through gritted teeth and hate yourself because you’re weak and cheap; you’ll return to your desk as abject as a kicked dog. Nothing is more ruinous to the ego than the tender, well-intentioned lies of a loved one.
You’ve got to trust your own judgement – and during the first draft, all that judgment can really say is: okay, keep going. Right now, it’s not great. But it’ll turn out okay.
Which means the first job of the morning, almost every morning, is to drag your carcass to your desk and overcome a paralysing crisis of nerve.
Obviously that doesn’t include the days you take off because you’re having a paralysing crisis of nerve. But the trouble with those days is, they’ve got a tendency to fuse and merge into each other until months or years have passed and you wake up one morning wondering whatever happened to that novel you intended to write.
A book doesn’t pour out in an uncorrected gush of inspiration; it’s got to be sweated over, built up brick by brick – and sometimes what you’ve built up has to be knocked down with a sledgehammer.
The first draft is crap. You revise it and make the second draft a bit better. You make the third draft a bit better still. You keep going until you’ve done the best you can do. You hope to make it better next time.
To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write — Gertrude Stein.
Every writer I know has trouble writing — Joseph Heller
