Long Writing Projects: You Can Do It

This post was written in response to Alexandra's writing prompt from Friday. Thank you to all who responded to my blog block request for prompts. I love them all and will use them when I get blocked, thank you!

Alexandra wrote: If I could, if I may, I would love to ask you to write something for us, telling us we can do it. We can get that book done. We can write. That's what I'd wish for.

Floodgate: opened.

A few people emailed me last week to ask if I am abandoning my young adult novel, Empty Plate. I'm absolutely not. I already wrote my horrible, unpublishable first novel. I believe in Empty Plate. But I'm at the point in the querying process in which it's not fun anymore. When I mentioned this to a few mentors, they all said the same thing: Keep querying, but start your next book.

I resisted. I'm a linear person. I like things to have a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't even like to read more than one book at once, let alone try to write more than one. Here's what I wanted to happen: I wanted to write Empty Plate, get an agent within three months and a publisher within six, a hardback, a paperback, a movie option and an award within the following two years. THEN I wanted to start my next book.

Go ahead, finish laughing. I'll wait.

But that's the dream, right?

Guess what? It didn't happen that way.

I've been sort of moping around lately because it's no fun to sell stuff, at least in my opinion. At this point, I still want to go the traditional publishing route, so I still need an agent, and I can tell from the feedback I'm getting at this point it's a matter of finding the right person. The feedback is no longer about needing more plot in the first fifty pages or having too many characters introduced too quickly or having too much exposition (these were real earlier comments from agents). Now it's more you're a fine writer with a good platform, thanks for the look, but it's just not right for my list. Which is good, actually.

I'm looking for the right person to love it in the way it deserves to be loved, in the way that I love it. I may never find an agent to love it the way I love it, and if that happens, then I have two choices: I can go with a new self-publishing or hybrid publishing model -- and there are more and more of them out there that are interesting to me -- or I can try to find an agent to love my next novel, sell that and then when someone says, "Hey, do you have anything else?" I can say, OMG, I just happen to have a finished YA novel AND a picture book, what do you know? Because I have also heard stories of that happening. I've heard all kinds of stories about nobody caring about a book and then the author has a commercial hit and all the sudden his or her backlist is hot, hot, hot. (Cut to the depressing part about publishing being a business.)

Alexandra wanted me to write something for her, for you, for anyone reading this blog who wants to hear she can do it.

Here it is, my friend: You can do it. But (and here's where I struggle so much to take my own advice) you really do have to do it for you. If you want to be able to look yourself in the mirror at the end of your life and say, "I may not have done everything I wanted to do in life, but dammit, I wrote a novel," then you can do it. I'll get to how to go about that in a minute, but feeling that motivation is the first, best part. If you don't have the fire in the belly, you probably will never finish your novel. And -- here's where I have to take my own advice -- you'll never write more than one. It can't just be fire in the belly for that book, it has to be for writing, your own writing.

I forget that important truth all the time.

In the midst of querying Empty Plate not being fun, I had lunch with a friend of mine last week who is a nationally emerging fine artist. We were talking about process and I was telling him about the feedback I've had initially on Empty Plate and how it has changed and how for a while I got paralyzed not knowing whom to believe and growing afraid I'd edit something that was good into something that was a Frankenfuck. I lost my way for about three months, really lost it, then a former professor of mine stepped in and started giving me very granular, very concise critiques that helped me refocus on what I wanted the book to be. It's a far better novel now than it was when I started and better than it was at the beginning of summer, and it's at a place where could it be better? I'm sure it could. But I like it like this. I am ready to call it good. And my friend said knowing when to stop is a hard thing for any type of artist.

Then he said something more important: Sometimes you also have to do it because it's fun for you: You have to have the confidence that fun for you is also good enough for the world. You have to believe that what you think is good is what is good and then convince others to agree with you. And that takes juegos, you know? It totally does. As he was talking I was remembering the movie Pollack and sort of nodding my head.

But there's more: In order to break those rules you have to prove you really did understand them in the first place. In order to begin anew, you have to have already mastered the rules way of doing things.

He started talking about a painting he'd done in which he had warm images and didn't use cool shadows (which I guess is important, though I know nothing about art). And then he made the girl's hair purple and a line on her face blue and BAM it started to be really fun because rules, schmules. I saw the painting hanging in the wall of a gallery and also a version of it is on the cover of drawing pads.

I pointed out that works for him, it's showing off, in fact, because he's such a stunning realistic artist that he can make an oil painting look exactly like a photograph, so you know, the blue, that's just laughing in the face of everything, that's why people like it. And he challenged me to find my purple hair. Write the next novel the way I want it just because it is fun for me. To be good enough to break the rules.

I needed that kick. I needed it bad.

I started crying on the way home because I do want Empty Plate to see the light of day very much. And I want to write something just because I think it's fun. I desperately want to be that good.

But there's a part of me that is terrified to do that because I still feel like a writing imposter all the time, like my successes are not enough to be considered worth it, like if I haven't made the NYT bestseller list then I'm not really a writer. And you know what? If I made the bestseller list, I know me: I'd say I hadn't been on there enough consecutive weeks. It's me, and I can make life really painful if nothing is ever good enough.

Don't be like me. Especially as a writer -- there's enough rejection in the process, God knows -- don't build it in by doing it to yourself.

So I'm starting again, another project, and this one's for fun. This one -- screw rules about exposition or showing and telling or the timing of narrative arcs or dialogue versus description. This time I'm going to see if I'm good enough to throw in purple hair without destroying the girl's face. I'm going to try to be patient with myself and let it take as long as it takes instead of trying to complete a timeline like I did with Empty Plate. (I gave myself a year to write and a year to find an agent and I am approaching the end of that timeline, so, well, now I've just made myself miserable over a completely arbitrary self-imposed deadline -- you see how great that is? Yeah, it's not so great.)

Enough about the why, here's a little about the how. Breaking the rules doesn't mean having no process at all.

I'm going to try to have some fun. You can do it if I can do it, because I am truly my own worst enemy.

Right now, I'm reading a ton. I'm eavesdropping. I'm getting out of my house and talking to friends, especially creative friends, as much as possible. I'm paging through books I love and trying to remember what I loved about them. I have a new notebook just for this novel and I'm carrying it around, writing down every great sentence, every memory of an interesting time, sometimes just one word I want to use, fragments, bits of news stories, anything I might want to bake in. I have no idea what the next novel is about, though I have an idea for a theme. 

I will do this for a few weeks until I have the theme down. Then I'll create three acts and try to figure out what the main event is in each act. I imagine novels as movies in my head. It's my process -- yours may be different. Then I figure out 3-5 scenes for each chapter. I start with ten chapters per act. All this changed a million times during the writing of my first horrible unpublished novel and with Empty Plate. 

When I'm ready to write, I schedule two-hour blocks of time with myself, usually from 8-10 pm after the little angel has gone to bed. I put headphones in my ears with the kind of music for the time period I'm writing in (Empty Plate was set in the nineties, so there was a lot of stuff I grew up with on my headphones). I start writing out the scenes I imagined in my head. I try to get ten pages in that two hours, very rough, not good, just barfing out the plot. 

I don't reread, I just go from the outline, barf, barf, barf, until I have the first draft.

Then I start paying attention to the stuff you're supposed to pay attention to. With Empty Plate I made a pass for each narrative arc, then a pass for character development, then a pass for good sentences, then five thousand more passes of just complete freaking out.

This time I hope to make a pass for do I fucking like it? Not will they like it?

This time I hope to write more to please me. I am pleased with Empty Plate, but it took probably way longer to get there than it would've had I just cared more what I thought. 

Sleep Is for the Weak was a completely different process, as it was an anthology and there were twenty-five people in addition to me. I'm doing a mentoring session on anthologies next week at the BlogHer Writers Conference and maybe will talk a little more about that here or there in the future -- anthologies are less interesting to me at this moment in time than novels, but I certainly learned a lot about them, too.

The point is that you can do it. Do you want to do it? Why do you want to do it? And will you be able to make sure you're still having fun? Don't lose sight of that. I have lost sight of it in the past six months, and that's too bad.

I think half of this gig is knowing when to start as well as when to stop.