I think Mr. Saunders has given you a superb answer. And I feel your pain. I know what it is to have a big huge manuscript that leaves the writer feeling overwhelmed and baffled. There's a certain fatigue that sets in just from dragging it around. It's like working on a huge quilt--the damned thing is so unwieldy and drags on the floor; the octopus is so muscular, refusing absolutely to be put to bed.
The one thing I know is that when you're trying to make sense of it all, you should handle it it physically. If you have a typed summary, cut it into sections with scissors, and tape the parts that you know fit together. Or cover your dining room table with graph paper, and use colored post-it notes for different themes or characters or plot points. Don't try to think with the computer. Draw maps of the story with crayons or charcoal. I don't know why chopping up the story and manhandling it helps, but it does. Computers can be damned deceptive at a time like this. They make everything look too much the same. You need tape and color and torn paper. Maybe even a stapler.
@Laura Brilliant advice! I love ink, acrylics and charcoal :)
I use a 3D mindmap application, work onscreen whenever I'm up to threading out new edits on any ms on the block. But at a certain point in time, I need to see the big picture in space. I always add images to my elements in the mindmap, and when I "go physical" I printout those same images. Rather than having text to look at, I feel familiar enough with my images that in the physical realm they unreel the scenes in my head.
I've worked as an animator, sound designer/editor for film, and musician, all of which inform my creative process. Cutting my narratives comes back to the same ideas that informed my soundwork/film edits.
For me there's a music at play in every story–dynamics, tension, themes, turning points, and passion–all give shape and direction to the work. In re-writing I go out of my left brain (typing abstract symbols on a flat screen), and feel the story come alive on the screen between my ears. My decisions come as clear and uncluttered as a river pouring off a cliff's edge. This is alchemy, where I recognize the point where my creation takes on a life of its own. To me, this is my creative focus throughout drafting and re-writes. It's knowing when my drafts are becoming works of art.
Ooh, I love the idea of assigning images to story points and making a visual map, entirely text-free. I used to do a lot of multimedia art with my grandmother, but when it comes to story for some reason I'm often too "lazy" to get physical with it (beyond simply writing by hand). I'm realizing how much of a shame that is. It's so fun and freeing to play in a physical/visual space, and probably gets far more of the brain and body involved than are available while staring exclusively at glowing text, or even writing with a pen. I'm going to take inspiration from your post and try getting out some art supplies.
@Harirai Yay multimedia :) Loved reading that you shared this with your grandmother! My grandmother was also my first collaborator in art when I was but a fledgling artist.
I slam dunked my original post just before the café was about to close. It was a happy surprise to see that it inspired a bit. Then I decided to dig out an old handout that I gave to a few clients who wanted to know how I worked on my own personal, and gargantuan, speculative fiction octopod. I cut a segment from it, I hope this is an OK place for sharing it–
...Most importantly, getting the benefit of playing in natural media works best by staying uncomplicated.
Here's one simple low tech approach I like. Use large sheets of heavy weight 250-300 lb. paper suitable for brushing with water, as in prep for watercolors or acrylic inks. I like “real time” natural media, that demands a fast, not over-thought out, and effortless hand before it dries. I cut the big sheets down to a usable size and start with with applying a water wash to a tile before going at it with the watercolor, acrylic ink, Aquarelle pencil (colored pencils made for wet media), and even ground pigment shaved from a set of sticks, like the super vivid kind that come in a box in high intensity colors. For each tile that you prepare, use hues that reflect certain points in your story. I go after mood, tone, something that resonates with the drafted words.
Over time, I’ll get inspired to draw onto these tiles, or stick photos, hand drawn, or photocopied elements onto them. I hang these on the lines strung around my studio. If I find myself overworking, or being overcritical of a draft, I find that making these tiles pulls me out of the part of my brain that is weighing the sheer volume of the work, the weight of having carried this story around in one form or another (for much too long to admit here).
Clothesline grade twine, strung around in lengths of your choosing, can represent in each line any of the dynamics of story. Character arcs and timelines, the arcs of developing themes, environments/change of seasons, loose ideas that are still floating just above the “cutting floor”, and streams of ephemera for building speculative worlds, to name a few. Having a place to put all that’s swirling around in your head offers a good feeling in itself.
Fast, low-tech, simple, visual. It all works to put down those weights tied to the belief that rewriting is something really hard and sometimes a bit airless. All that's in our heads. The key is to connect with arts that will loosen things up, to open up to a sensed spaciousness with our stories.
Getting juiced to keep going with the process, seeing how our drafts literally grow and evolve before our eyes, gaining insights into new levels of what’s written, seeing the resolution, the closure, or the place for cutting to the next in series–if you find any of this happening for you in your visual experiments, then hooray!
Wow, thank you for sharing this! Fast smears of watercolor are my favorite medium, so this is great. It will take some strategizing to figure out where I can put up these strings, but I very much love the tile idea, even if I don't manage to get them hanging.
I went through a phase of experimenting with outlining using post-it notes on one of those tri-fold cardboard displays that are made for things like school science fairs. It was nice because I could move the post-its around at will but I could also fold up the whole board and put it away. Turns out moving post-it notes around a board isn't much creative use to me anyway, but I can imagine a revamped version with small art tiles as a portable alternative to the method you described.
In any case, I'm thinking I might spend tomorrow's writing slot downstairs with the art supplies and see what I learn.
My debut novel was originally going to have flashback sections that then later turned out to be memories from a whole different character. It was all fun and games, but I noticed while writing that I felt I ‘needed’ those sections to make the book interesting, when in reality they caused mostly confusion for the reader. It’s this idea we often have, don’t we, this imposter syndrome, that makes us think we need the glitter and the pink paint and the feather dresses to somehow upscale a simple human story, which in it’s simplicity can feel almost too vulnerable to share. I ended up only telling the main story, and while I do sometimes regret cutting those things cause they would have made the book more unique maybe, I’m happy that I let the bare essentials shine and didn’t try to rely on tricks and twists.
I have a question, Ansuya. Your story of surviving a painful illness that prevented you from participating at your fullest in your young life - how did this end? At what time were you freed? What did you do? Indeed, what changes did your trauma make that arc through your present life.
I was surrounded by family suicides before I was 30, and they took all the life out of me. I had one child, whose father was dead, and a second, whose father was dangerous. My parents both died by suicide. At the end of a couple of decades of struggle, what did I have? What can I give a character if that character is not me? I have to decide - or invent - what I was left with, or there is not book. Is your story similar, or do you know what you were left with? What from your illness has fed the successes in your life? I'm having trouble finding successes. I survived - that seems lame! What are you doing, I think is what I'm asking, with the events of your past that were so traumatic?
first of all, I'm so sorry to hear this. Thank you so much, for sharing this.It means more to me then I can say, to be honest. I can answer your question but it's not a cheerful story of success -anything but. If you want to hear my story, which -and this is no surprise- is a very long one, & I don't know if this is the appropriate place to write about that stuff here, but, well, I was a very very anxious child to begin with. I didn't get the attention from my parents, or what my therapist calls 'save environment' that was needed, got bullied a lot at school. In high school I finally made friends, but I had a tendency to depression and yes, suicidal thoughts. That's why my friends didn't want to 'hang' with me anymore. This was when I decided to improve myself, by starving myself. Then, from my 14th till my 17th year I've been hospitalized, at the worst kind of places, where there is a lot of 'forced eating', you know, ehm, with a tube.
So my trauma really has to do with this experience of being held by grown-ups, against my will, being forced and punished, etc etc.
Afterwords I never told anyone about this, for years. But at some point, in college, I got severe panic attacks, got very depressed, started to lose weight again. At some point I wasn't able to go outside anymore. This is still the case today. The last time I've been outside, was in 2015.
Since then I lived inside, and so I started to write things down. Also, I got addicted to oxazepam, a sort of valium. I'm getting off those right now, which is the hardest thing I've ever done. Well, almost the hardest thing. My mother and I are no longer in touch, she's always seen me as 'someone who attracts evil spirits,' she's very spiritual and to her view my illness as a teenager and problems later on, are things I created myself, under the influence of evil ghosts and so on (you can imagine tis scared the shit out of me when I was a kid) but my father supports me, and I have some amazing friends left.
I also got diagnosed with ADHD recently, which kind of explains the trouble with my book as well. I also worry a lot about when it gets published, I mean, I want to be there, right at that moment, physically. And I'm sad and afraid that I'll never be in a relationship or have any children of my own. So that's my story. So no, there's happy ending so far. But lately, I've started taking very small steps. I don't know where they will lead. I started seeing old friends. I wrote this letter. Some achievements for me. I'm writing this, here, right now. It sounds like nothing but its a huge achievement for me.
I wish I could help you. If you just want to talk about your experiences and your writing, please email me at ansuyaspreksel@gmail.com
I am a great listener. And I find great comfort as well in talking to people who struggle, like me.
In addition to this, Sallie: my book means everything to me. It's the reason I'm still around. I know this sounds mad, but it's true. This book kept me going, hoping for a better future. And, well, having a very enthusiastic publisher and encouraging publishing team and supportive friends helps a lot. So, at least I can say this: I'm left here, with my book. It's all I have to offer atm. I don't know if it will be enough, but it's enough right now. I really hope this counts for you too. Writing, and reading as well, gives me so much joy. I'm not sure if this is the answer you where looking for, though.
If, with 'what am I left with', you meant, 'what have I gained by going through all this?' Then my answer would be: a story. A story of survival. A very personal story. Write it down. I'd love to read it. It's not for everyone, but I have found great comfort in reading memoirs and non-fiction, as well as fiction, poetry, listening to music and so on, and at some point, when I was very depressed, anything I could relate to, that told me I was not alone, comforted me, gave me hope. So you could write about a character that is you. I did it. I wrote about a character and she's me. I'm only having a hard time in feeling any kindness or forgiveness towards her.
Ansuya, I have no right to barge into your life as if I were Dr Klutz the psychoanalyst, but – in terms of your writing and the difficulties of assembling the patchwork of past and present – I was wondering where the heart of your subject was, since that is key to your editorial decisions (I won't try to do better than GS's marvellous advice above). I've noted two things you've said, that seem to me to be close to the heart of why you're telling this story: "This was when I decided to improve myself, by starving myself, *" and "I'm only having a hard time in feeling any kindness or forgiveness towards her." That's very stark, very hard. You probably have your own ideas about how it came about that you feel so harshly towards yourself. Or perhaps you'd rather, as you say, avoid looking into it. But I can't help thinking you should try.
Forgive me if I've rushed in where angels fear to tread ;)
* as an opening line, that would make me want to read on! But you'd be opening up new fields – we'd want to know what happened next, but also what happened before...
That you feel hostility toward the character that is you -you will, I feel sure, outgrow! You didn't do this to yourself, develop these painful ways of coping with being alone. And the view that you are to "blame," you have already outgrown it. You have already forgiven yourself, as it were, by writing the book. And you have a great support team. Sometimes when who we are in our hearts is "the abandoned one," it takes time to recognize that we are no longer in that position, that there is a path out. And we are on it. No guarantees, of course! But we are on that path!
I'm not so sure, I really despise the character and the book, and myself, most of the time. I often feel a certain aversion to go on with it. With the book and life in general. But then I think about those girls and also feel a certain obligation, as weird as that may sound, to write about it.
Ansuya, i am sitting here, taking in your words, and in awe of you. You haven't been outside since 2015. I think I am dumbstruck at the moment, for once almost completely silenced. That you have been through what you've been through; that you continue to struggle with your existence--and yet you have created this book full of you and your life and feelings--it's pretty much a miracle, really. Of course, i wish i could take you by the hand and walk next to you outside, but I also know that you will step out when you are ready, however long that takes. I will go to sleep tonight thinking about you and your willingness to share these parts of yourself with all of us here. I hope you can see the pulses that i'm sending from my heart to yours at this moment. I can't wait to read your book.
Ansuya, what remarkable strengths you have. It sounds like writing your novel has been therapeutic in many ways. Thank you for putting yourself out here in such a vulnerable way. I'm a mental health provider and I can understand what a big deal all of this is. Keep going. So trite, but true, that you climb a mountain one step at a time.
I've been curious how I fit here with regard to being a novel writer, and not a short story writer (yet) so I really appreciate your question. I thought my novel would involve three character points of view, alternating chapters. I decided to write the story first in the pov of one character, and he took over. Now I have a first draft with just his point of view. I think the other characters may each get their own novel, instead of trying to bring it all into one.
I think it makes sense to consider that you really have two novels. What an accomplishment. And I'm over the moon that you have a contract.
Lastly, using the program Scrivener was a game changer for me. I'd never envisioned an entire novel before this. With the program, I can see all my scenes lined up on the left side of the screen as I write. I can move them around or categorize them into chapters. I admit I haven't taken the time to learn all I can do with it so I'm sure there's a lot more. Thanks again and best of luck with everything.
This is so kind, thank you. I was really doubting myself when I just blurted the story out here.
Yes, I was using Scrivener before I had a book deal and an editor, and he prefers to work with word, but since the trouble keeping sight of all the chapters and where they went all started there for me, I guess the better option would be to write the final draft in Scrivener again. There are too many options there for my brain to explore or understand so I just used the most basic program back then.
Yes, I think that's a good idea. I've been compiling into word, then returning to the original on scrivener to make revisions. I love some of the ideas here about creating tangible visuals, as well, like notecards or symbols. We need to not feel stuck to the computer, even though it's a great tool.
Yes, I have! It’s funny: after reading her first piece about ADHD I’ve asked my psychiatrist if I could take a test. Because it felt so relatable, like I could have written that about myself. I never thought about that possibility before. And he replied: ‘yes, I suspect you’re right, because of you’re associative writing in emails.’ So we took the test, and the results were kind of obvious 🫣
Yes--I’m there with you--late (and casual) diagnosis following my kids’ diagnoses. But I believe my parents’ neurodivergences and various successes encouraged me to find and support my own way of doing things...though that’s not the whole story, of course. You sound like you’re doing great work. I hope this conversation helps you move forward. One of the favorite pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten, and need again and again, is the reminder that the answer, the structure, the way to revise the book is not out there to be discovered, but is a decision we get to make.
True, but that makes it even harder, I think. You have to decide what works best. For writing, ADHD might have positive aspects as well. For life, it’s harder. I mean, a lot of pieces of the puzzle of my past fell into place: why I was such a dreamy kid, always wanted to do things differently, follow my own endless imagination. But now I wonder how this relates to all my fears as well. Like there are always tons of things to consider that could go wrong. So sending George a question or writing a comment out here was a huge deal for me, actually.
I did convince myself to send the question because I could do it anonymously, so if people would find it dumb I could just hideout. And then there I was all of a sudden writing all of this personal stuff, panicking again, afterwards. Like hell, what have I just done?
Oh, Sally, how heartbreaking. So many terrible losses. I can only imagine what you’ve been through. Survival is a success. You are resilient. And I’ve followed you within this group; you always make thoughtful and generous comments. That’s also a success. You have a great heart, and real wisdom.
Sallie: Your words "i survived" hold such power! And give others such hope! The very words "I survived" are a balm to so many others. Do you think you must decide in advance what you were left with? Or is it possible to just start writing about a woman, like you, who survived such tragedies? And through the writing, perhaps discovering "what is left." In the meantime, I'm so glad you are here.
Thank you, Mary. I'm glad I'm here too. and most of my writing is like your description. I write and then, sometimes long afterward, see where it is going and then tighten the threads. This is a little scarier, though. I wake up one day, feeling that yes, there's a connection, just do it. And the next I wake up in a hayfield.
It also scares the hell out of me to write about some of my bad experiences, I often feel the tendency to throw it all out. I hate to write about it and hate to read it back afterwords. I even try to find excuses not to work on the book. Or that part of it, at least. Still I wrote it all down. I guess, and this is very doubtful, I did that because I have a silly hope that my book could change things, for the girls who suffer now, I want them to get a better treatment than I did back then.
Hi, Ansuya. Credit yourself for being brave. A lot of great writers return to deep dark realms to write about them and part of what makes them great is the bravery to do so. The first canto of Dante's Inferno highlights this point so vividly in metaphor: the dark forest, the determination to find the straight and narrow path, the rebuttals by fearsome creatures, the providential arrival of Virgil, a mentor, to give him the courage to pass through the gates of hell... So, Dante had Virgil and you have George. What is amazing is that Dante wrote this with you in mind seven centuries ago. It was the ultimate pay-it-forward gesture, I think!
That's interesting. It sounds like it was something that gnawed at him. And how could it have done otherwise? God bless, Kurt Vonnegut. I just queued up a documentary about him on my Kanopy watch list along with many others about other writers (just in case the winter is long :-)).
There is something I wanted to ask you, actually. Something I've been struggling with, and still do. Perhaps this is even the real question I should have asked. Do you ever have a hard time writing about the hard parts, I mean, of course you do, but:
I often feel like I'm focussing to much on the other stuff, the outline and the structure, the rhythm of the sentences, getting a reader's approval, basically anything to keep me away from the chapters that are written about my past. I wrote them very long ago, in 2015, over four nights, I don't even recall how I did it. I never read them back afterwords, I'm to scared. My friends and publishers read it, obviously.
I did find a way, in the end, to write about the other girls in the clinic, by picturing them as little ghosts, or nymphs, dancing around my bed, like in a Bacchae ritual. They do, sometimes. They never got older.
My question is: how do you manage to write about the things that caused you so much pain, without the risk of drowning in them? I guess I'm scared because I don't want to back to that place, and very often I'm afraid that I will just hate book for what's inside it, because those are the things I hate about my past. Sometimes I think: why bother? But these chapters are the reason I once began this project. Perhaps I wrote 1200 pages in the end, just to avoid to go back to those 200 that I loath.
Oh my god, do I understand! I wasn't brave enough to write about my traumatic experiences for many years. You have done so and it is surely powerful, to have gotten the responses you have. You are braver than I! Later, as I began to write about those things, I found them difficult to get down on paper, and then on rereading - I was bored to death! The experiences didn't come alive. Slog, slog, slog, words dull words. So I wrote as if these things were occurring to someone else. Nope. Didn't work. i wrote others' traumas, not mine, and those were better. Now at last a month ago I wrote about my husband's death when our son was 18 months old and I hadn't finished college and was in a strange place, alone. As I would write a sentence, I thought, oh how BORING. But I didn't stop and I didn't erase, I drew a line through the boring parts and dug down into my memories. And after a bit, something real came up. then I wrote some more. BORING! Again I drew a line through the words, leaving them in place, and so on and then I made that process part of the story. How I got to the raw and the real through the cliches, through the patter. And I have at last written that day in a way that I can feel and reread. 1000 words. I've given it to one reader, without any warning. And she was shaken by it. She said she'd find herself falling into a thought or a description as she read, and then I'd cross out something and she'd go on to the next uncrossed out bit, and finally was not reading the cross-outs, but she understood them. Conventional responses, conventional "stories," would crop up for me to hide behind and I'd mark through them and get to the real meat. Until I had the first part of the experience, the day, my 22nd birthday, when my husband left the house and never came back. My waiting and watching, and my sudden knowledge, he's dead! And his friend's arrival and our search and what we found, and how I became violently ill. And how I managed at last to sleep with my arms around my little boy, and how days later a neighbor brought me a sweet custard that I could eat, and the realization that if I could eat, I could live. And I'd have to for the child. That reader is NOT a writer. But she got it. So at last I have managed to express some of the reality of myself and my child in the world we were thrown into by this shattering death. Now I am working on how at last, much much later, I also began to recover from the shock that had left me so numb. And how I ventured out into living again. I grew up in the South in the era before the Civil Rights Movement, which was harsher than any other part of our country than - a different harshness, one of the body alone - the Arctic Circle. People, my people, in the South cut themselves off from all real humanity and abused people, and they are doing it again. Women, Blacks, immigrants, the very poor, are treated like trash because in order not to admit what the white people have actually done to other human beings, they have to cease being human in the real sense. Coming out of my shock, trying to make a living, having the help of a dear friend, I had a cross burned on my lawn. I can smell it to this day. I was so afraid for my friend and my child that I left the South again and went back North. I've lived. But not until my 70s have I found myself in a community where with despite my differences, I am accepted. And at peace. But place marks us, and part of me longs for the rivers and fields I grew up in. I can never go back. I went back for visits while my friend was still alive. I helped her in her old age, and i loved her. I used to loathe those people, my people. I ached to write of them and i made them all villains. Now I am able to see them as humans like we all are. But it took a long time. The only thing I can do to honor our humanity is to write it until it is REAL. However often I have to cross-out the tritenesses, even the sorrows, that I hide behind. Thank you for your letter, Ansuya. I hope my answer is not painful to you.
How could it be painful? It's beautiful, although I wish you'd never had to go through this. My own experiences are bread crumbs in comparison. I hope I can read this book some day!
How could your experiences be bread crumbs in comparison with anything? We don't compare pain, it's not on a scale! We suffer, we struggle, and we must find acceptance in ourselves, really we must. We are mortal, we are animals, we are born, we live with suffering and joy and work, and we die! You are not a bread crumb! you are a full, delicious meal with hot sauce! Don't forget that. I have your email address. When I am satisfied momentarily with my chapter 1 of that life, I will email it to you. I can send it as an attached pdf. Someday, you will send me part of your work.
I've been poring over these replies and your answers for ages, what an amazing experience. This particular post really got me though, because I've often wondered the same thing often. Typically I think writers tend to focus on personal experiences which will drag their work out of the mediocre that makes up most of life, the defining, often traumatising moments that make us "us". But I've found more often than not, while we can draw on those moments to give our work depth, plunging in the deep end and trying to describe them realistically, naturally - i.e. without any conceptualising or fictional distance - never does those experiences much justice.
One example I have personally, has been trying to write about staying overnight in a hospice. My Mum was passing away, and I decided to stay in the chair by her bedside. There were six terminally ill patients in the same ward, which was so quiet and peaceful in the early hours after midnight. "Using" it as a scene per se, I always quickly feels cheapening, like I'm exploiting what's too obviously emotional, or like it's a set-piece without a story. But... thinking deeper about the experience, I know that in other work I'm happy with that deals with death in one form or another, that experience in the hospice has given those other - less direct, less obviously connected - scenes an emotional illumination they'd otherwise lack.
This reminds me also of a great lecture I heard the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader give (it's on YouTube), about how he gets students to start out by listing their pivotal experiences, then asks them to use find a metaphor for that experience, which will be the starting premise of their script. I.e Schrader's overwhelming loneliness became a taxi, becoming Taxi Driver. Schrader's feeling of not being able to express love, turned into American Gigolo! Essentially, his method is about finding a useful distance between the actual event/feeling/experience and the dramatic, fictionalised action. But having the emotional foundation gives the work its power, whether it's about taxi drivers, blue collar workers in a car factory, male escorts or... cat people (I'm not sure what the metaphor was for that one, yet.)
To have a character sitting in a chair in hospice would be a great starting point for a story, you could have a character sitting there, remembering things from childhood, for example.
I know you kind of answered this question down below already. I'm just wondering how you managed to do it, still. Since I'm really having a hard time pouring in those old 'wounds,' to say it somewhat dramatically.
As I briefly told you, I often feel insecure since I’ve never done any Creative Writing courses or something like that. Also I’d love to read anyone’s experiences and/ or advice on this matter. The funny thing is, when you ask about the real, blurt-out version, that would be the childhood story, aka the flashbacks ARE the main story here.
The novel is based on my own ( very traumatic) experiences being hospitalized in psychiatric hospitals for anorexia, since I was 14. But I didn’t want it to be a book ABOUT eating disorders. It’s about how something that happened to you in the past can shape your current life, I suppose. Also I didn’t want to write too much about that period, because I don’t want it to be sad or heavy, or to get frightened by my own book. I want to be able to be proud of it once it’s out there. But I initially started writing it out of a sort of anger, I suppose, I had to get it out of me but also I hope I could help other people, readers. Though this might sound very self confident, which I’m definitely not! I’ve been thinking about jumping between time periods in different chapters but as a reader I really enjoy books where flashbacks turn up in the middle of a scene.
Also, on the importance of stories, and remembering last week’s question about the current war in the Middle-East; Edgar Keret gave some wonderful interviews about the importance of stories, and why he is visiting war refugees and telling them stories right now.
Ansuya, thank you so much for sharing all of this. I wrote a longer comment elsewhere, but here, where I see you mentioning your trauma and anger, it makes sense to me that your story got so long. It needed to be long to address all of your feelings. That’s really valuable for your healing. Now it’s time to include the rest of the world, but readers don’t need to hear every detail. In fact it can work against you. Your audience might glaze over and lose track of your main story. If you took me on walk through the forest, a walk you knew well and loved, I would want to see the light shine through the trees or see where a giant tree fell. I would want an introduction to the beauty and drama. I probably would not want to know the shape and size of every leaf and pinecone on the forest floor, even though you, having walked the path many times, might know those things and hold them close to your heart. My heart just wouldn’t have the capacity on that first walk.
You're totally right, and I am planning on cutting a huge deal of the stuff that I wrote in 2015-2016. It's also a strange mix of memoir, fiction, essay, and so on. My publisher calls it 'eclectic,' but i'm not sure.
First, congrats on all you've already accomplished. Second, I think your publisher's onto something, with it being a kind of mixed genre work, with maybe a collage or quilt-like structure or pattern, rather than linear. I'm sure they'll be able to help you sort it all out. How great, in a sense, to have so much material to work with. To me, the childhood/adolescent trauma seems to be the core of the story, with everything else radiating from those experiences.
In my own challenges to figure out how to structure both a childhood memoir and a first novel (both still in-progress), I'm comforted by the thought that there's more than one way to write any particular book that can all be good. Trust which ever way you're leaning and go with it. And do take good care of yourself, that's most important.
this is super interesting. To me, a total outsider(!), it sounds as though the present day story is the "main" story, and the flashbacks tell us how the character got to where she is today. So while there is a ton of story to be told from the past, the REAL story is the character today, living in the aftermath of what they've gone through. Maybe (and I'm trying to say this gently but i'm not so good at that, sorry), you need to sort of re-think things. I mean, if the real story is the flashbacks, as you say, then why have the present day at all? It seems like the present day is the story....?
You’re right, that’s why I decided along the way to add a second timeline in which my main character is older, struggling with a lot of things in life, like relationships, anxiety issues. In this way, I could shatter this ‘block’ of unpleasant memories into smaller bits and pieces and let them come up whenever there’s a reason for it. For example, the character meets her former best friend from high school that dumped her right before she gets sick, and this meeting digs up the past which she is trying to escape in het adult life.
So your story is about a character (the older one, in the present-day) making their way through life, right? And to understand that character, we need to know about their past. (Right?) I guess you have to decide where the story really is. I mean, some books are entirely framed--start in the present, then go back in time for the bulk of the book, and end in the present again. Some books concentrate on the present--that's where the real story is--with snippets from the past appearing to reveal some truths. Is there a story in the present day with a struggle for your character? Or is it all in the past? Is the present day story merely a frame for the past? Or is there a real present day story that snippets from the past help us understand? It seems to me like perhaps you have to decide what the purpose of the book is. (If you haven't already.) I fear i'm not being of help. I'm just trying to figure out what you've got without seeing it.
I guess it would be the last one. At least, that's my goal. There is also a lot going on in the 'present' storyline. So these flashbacks are more like clues, or answers.
Following Lesley’s question/comment … I wonder … does anyone ever have an editor/publisher/friendly stranger do a kind of dumbed-down crashing through the underbrush sort of intuitive edit just to see what is left standing? For the writer to then see what definitely connects and what’s fragile?
I’m not sure I wouldn’t still want to keep what’s fragile and slash and burn the obvious stuff, but … would that method be instructive? Or just hurtful.
I do find with my own stuff any ruthless edit has to be fast and unthinking and sort of arbitrary (take out 10,000 words, don’t ask why!)
It’s almost always helpful, but I of course make sure to save all the words I cut. Then some seem to creep back in when I’m not looking.
Probably not an unusual method.
I think here I agree with some others: if a publisher has already staked themselves to the 1200 pages, trust that. And just see what happens next.
Breaking the story into smaller bits and pieces also could make it be a mystery, as well as psychological drama. And readers love trying to figure out a puzzle!
I was thinking about this essay in the New Yorker, ‘ A case against the trauma plot,’ did you read that? Ever since I read it, I’ve noticed that there are indeed a lot a trauma plots in backstories. I just wonder if this has to be a bad thing. I don’t think so. Although I agree with the author that A Little Life was a bit too much to handle.
I remember that essay. I don't think it's a bad thing--back stories of trauma that are there to help explain a character's current situation. (That's the crux of that essay, right? All of the traumatic back stories to be found in modern novels?) I don't think that's a bad thing at all. The only "bad" thing is bad writing. (I never read A Little Life and probably won't.)
May your writing, and what it carries, bring healing to other young women and girls around the world. A great deal of damage is done to human beings by the culture, its expectations for what the profit-takers may take, or want us to take, from an early age, to be beauty. None of us, I suspect, has escaped the printing on mind, soul, and body.
It’s important not to spend too much time, perhaps, in the trauma, which may only perpetuate the pain . . . (There is the story of how, once the concept of anorexia and its diagnosis through the adoption of the main Western medical manual entered Hong Kong, the condition took off among girls there.)
Also important to consider are the motives of the publisher.
In my MFA, one instructor emphasized ‘truth,’ and ‘facts’. As a consequence, we read quite a lot of, well, dark and demoralizing storytelling, often with a mix of condemnation (passed off as humor) and ridicule. It’s one thing to expose the evils or injustices of the world, another to provide, through one’s work and life, healing.
Maybe forgiveness finds a place at some point in the narratives or essays. This often comes from a quiet, or quieter, place.
It sounds brilliant, recognition, then healing, are so needed at this time. (Een lezer in Leiden, ook op een helingsreis.)
i've got more questions than answers--mostly because George already gave you all the answers. The only thing I might add (which is tangential to George, not something new) is that laying your story out physically may help. (Do you have enough printer ink?) If you lay out your printed story in two long columns (or horizontally instead)--one the present day and one the past--you may find ways to braid the two together that you haven't seen before. Sometimes, a visual really helps. Also, you can lay out the pages and make "waves" with them--physically placing the sections where the action increases things above the line of sections where nothing much happens. Sort of like physically representing rising action. That way, you may be able to cut away the parts that aren't moving things forward. My biggest question is: how in the world did you sell a 1200 page novel, unfinished? That's a feat! (Feel free not to answer to that question. I just can't help but ask it.) I think it's really, really hard to get anyone to read a 200 page novel, much less a 1200 page one. But you've sold it already, so maybe my point is moot (my point being, that perhaps cutting would be helpful if you are hoping for a large audience of readers).
I wish you the best of luck with this one. Right now, I'm working on a 200 page elephant myself, and that's hard enough! When your book is published, i hope you'll let us all know!
I don’t know how I sold it, to be honest. I was totally surprised myself. My publisher even offered me a contract for a second book to come after this one, can you imagine! I can’t even see myself writing a second one after the first one, since I have doubts I will ever be able to finish it. So I don’t know, they just read it and offered me two contracts for two books, amazing right?!
yeah, that's amazing!!! Congratulations. Please ignore this advice, but when my first book sold, i was offered a two-book deal. Like you, I had big doubts about writing a second one. I ended up NOT taking the deal. In retrospect, that was a huge mistake. I did write a second book and selling it was harder, though it did sell. And I realized that if i'd signed a two-book contract, my publisher would have been much more invested in me. Oh, well. Live and learn. And don't listen to me! Do what feels right to you!
Well, in addition to this: we don’t have literary agents in Holland, you just send your manuscript to a publisher and cross your fingers. I just started writing things down when I got stuck in life, suffering from panic attacks and so on. Not even with the idea in mind of publishing. But in my case, I was fortunate enough to meet a successful author and chatted with him at the time about my ‘thing’ of 900 pages back then, I didn’t know if it could ever become an actual book or that it was rubbish, drooling. So he offered to read some of it and then came back to me that same day and kind of forced me to send it straight away. So I did and... well it worked! We’ve been discussing the possibility of making a trilogy but in the end agreed it was better in the ‘large stone version’ as my publisher calls it.
Intriguing...and amazing! Sounds like your elephant is being guided by angels. I would really love to hear more about your creative process and where your story rose up from. From here, it sounds like there's a powerful message coming through you and that your writing has been unfettered by a lot of expectation, market driven motivations, and the like.
Wishing you all the best in recovering that passion that was there for blasting out 1200 pages (!!!), may it fill you again for the rewrite. Anticipate magic!
i know how dumb this sounds, but i don't talk about them here. If you want to post your email address here, I'll write to you. Believe me when I say i know how stupid this is.
No, not at all. I would feel terrified to post my work here, with such excellent readers. But I’m curious, so please email me if you’d like to. Ansuyaspreksel@gmail.com.
Would the book work as two books? Like, you end the first book on a cliffhanger,of sorts, and then comes the second book? Or three books? Just another idea to throw in there!
Hi Ansuya: First of all your writing must be good or you ould not have received a acceptance. Great. I once used large index cards like a move script and then was able to get the book to a reasonable story. Also you may have two books. Gook Luck.
We’ve been playing with that idea at the publishing house, yes. It’s still a possibility, but then the storyline would almost have to be chronological, like Deborah Levy’s autobiographical novel series,it, or Tove Ditlevsen.
a quick addition: Though i said in my post that it's helpful to visualize the parts that aren't moving the story forward, I'm not saying that all of those sections need to be cut. Not everything must move a story forward. Some sections deepen a character for us, or provide nuance necessary for the story to continue. Just wanted to make that clear.
Posts like this are exactly why this Substack is so good. First of all, fascinating to hear from a writer on the complete opposite side of the spectrum from me (a first draft is like a mile-long barefoot walk over Legos, but I can tinker with a draft indefinitely). And yet, still some awesome and helpful advice.
FWIW, one of my favorite writing professors used to talk about the mind as a “meaning-making machine,” which as a sound bite isn’t super helpful, but in my experience digging into drafts, I’ve been shocked at the sort of subconscious scaffolding my brain has put in place. Characters I had no reason to include became pivotal, sequences that were kind of just... there... took on new dimensions of meaning. When the drafting-you has laid a little treat on the table for editing-you, it’s a rush.
I’m sure the questioner has a mammoth task on their hands with 1,200 pages to revise, but I’ll bet there is lots of gold in there. And as stressful as this recontextualizing/reenvisioning/rewriting might be, there are real joys to be found in the mess. Best of luck!
I love this line: "Find the line through it that feels most mythic and human and elemental" . It's the kind of advice that ceases to be merely mechanical ("craft") and asks the writer to consider what in a story is the magic magnet that'll pull the reader in. I guess the more we write, the better we get at sensing "the mythic, human and elemental."
1. I was writing my first book (picked up writing during Covid) and there were so many flashbacks that I had to back reference. Finally, I decided after I finished writing the book this summer that the book I had written should be Book 2. I had to go back 1 generation and write the actual Book 1!
2. So George, thank you for saying delete all the flashbacks! I decided to do it (almost all) and write pretty much a prequel. It happened that I read Pachiko earlier this year and on the end note Min Jin Lee said that she went not one but two generations back and rewrote her whole book! It was painful as she wrote it, but her words provided a certain assurance on my own decision
3. I was fascinated by none-linear narrative and even managed to learn the two fancy Russian words “fabula” and “syuzhet.” Three really neat tricks that I am emulating now with a plan to master with my own prose/flow are:
1. In Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, I remembered the protagonist slid into a bath and the sensual experiences, the smell of the soap, the water, etc. triggered her memory of her lost daughter and then Ms. Atwood went on a nice paragraph down the memory lane. It was such a nice and natural way to flashback by a sensual trigger!
2. In Cloud Atlas, (speaking of none-linear narrative, this is like the Memento of novels!) how each story linked to the other from old diaries, books, correspondence, movies etc…
3. Different characters in different chapters, with different time frames. Yet each having an invisible thread, a mystic parallel. I am taking about Michael Cunningham's The Hours and this third one, I am yet to emulate and learn the nuances of this technique…
I wrote a novel about six years ago that was over 115,000 words, with several flashbacks. This year I went back to it and took the flashbacks and expanded them into another novel... now I have a 75K-word novel, and it's sequel, 90K-words..
That is awesome! And just like if I had a chance to write to Ms. Min Jin Lee, I am writing here my gratitude for you sharing this! I'm happy that someone is having similar experience and it's working! It might not work for me, but the probabilities of it working (at least in my mind) increases per hearing your story!
Hi. Thank you for sharing your story and I wish you all the best for your book. I was going to recommend Cloud Cuckoo Land too. Another book which I enjoyed is ‘The Secret Scripture’ by Sebastian Barry. Roseanne has been in an asylum for decades and is being reassessed. She doesn’t want to reveal much about her past to the psychiatrist but decides to write a secret manuscript (to herself and the reader) telling her life story. Just an idea. Worked well in Barry’s story. Hope this is helpful.
I love Cloud Cuckoo Land by Doerr, in par with his All the Light We Cannot See if not better! As much as I love and admire Doerr's books, the only criticisms I have for him (if I dare hahaha) are: 1) his prose is too beautiful, too polished --> a little bit overwritten imo. 2) I agree with George (was it George who wrote the critique or someone else?) about the little caricature nature of the bad guy in All the Light We Cannot See --> though villains are villains, they don't see themselves as bad guys doing bad things but ones that are simply doing the necessary things for themselves
The Scecret Scripture sounds interesting! I will put it on my list, thank you for the recommendation. And I love the secret manuscript idea! In fact, there are two books I've read this year that I could recall that were framed as someone writing letters and confession to recount the bulk of the (flashback) stories.
I’ve read two of Sebastian Barry books and am looking forward to the others — all about members of the same family but there’s no need to know the backstories to be fully present on the current page. Though I might, in the end, re-read them all with, I suppose, greater knowledge. It’s like how you get to know more and more about everything (people, world) as time goes by. The unfolding of a map, just that. The routes are held by it, but you don’t have to trace them exactly.
Salter moves back and forth in time with such ease. Some of the readers here had trouble with his initial leap. But I think most got it and then sped on. Pinpointing POV through this story is an education. He gets away with great leaps through the subtleties of his language. I've found that many, maybe even all, of the stories George gives us to analyze teach me skills, some of which I didn't know before that I needed! I read Salter's book, Dusk, in which this story appears. All were finely done. this is the only one that I didn't find terribly bleak.
Thanks for sharing! I have always wanted to read The Corrections but never had the chance to bump it up to the top of my list! Will do it in 2024! As for Salter, there's another story of his called Last Night that I admired so much! What a great master he was!
The advice to go back to the beginning seems exactly right. Not just to what drew an agent or editor to the novel, but what made you want to write it. I was once on the set of Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick, after the movie had shut down and then resumed production, and he said, "Everything that happens once you start making the movie can take you away from the movie you want to make. So you always have to go back to why you wanted to make it. Why did you love it?" Remind yourself why you love this story. What it means to you. The how of telling it should express the why of wanting to tell it.
Apologies: but I desperately want to hear more of your Kubrick story. I literally have that quote of his around my writing desk and go back to it every time I work on my projects...."why did you love it?"
Well, I can set the scene a little. Bassingbourn, England, summer of 1986. An hour of heavy rain, crammed into a trailer with Kubrick, Matthew Modine, Vince D'Onofrio, Arliss Howard (my brother), and Leon Vitali. (Side note: there's a good documentary on the late great Leon called "Filmworker" on a streaming service or two). Kubrick's longtime cinematographer had died earlier that year (or maybe the year before?) and the movie was taking a year+ longer to make than planned, with the whole production shutting down when Lee Ermey got injured. By this time, Kubrick was no longer looking at the script. He had the movie in his mind, although (back to the original question here) he wasn't always 100% sure how to make it. He'd spend the morning talking with the principal actors and his camera operator while the crew, say, built long dolly tracks up to an obstacle on the basic training course. Then he'd rehearse running the camera up to the obstacle, timing it with the action, over and over, and then...nope, that's not how he wanted to do it. The crew would tear out the tracks and he'd go back to talking to the actors, waiting for the light to change, waiting for a new idea. His patience was astonishing.
So, we're waiting for the rain to stop and I ask Kubrick about that dolly shot—how do you know whether it's right or not? What are you looking for? And he says this thing that has always stuck with me, about how so much in the production process of a movie conspires against you holding onto your original reason for wanting to make it. You have to keep reminding yourself why this is the story you wanted to tell. If you do that, you're more likely to find the right way to tell it, and when it doesn't seem quite right, you can trust that it's probably not.
I'll also mention, because you're interested, that Kubrick seemed as fascinated by me as I was by him—mostly because I'm Arliss's brother and they were close, but he was also intensely curious about my job. At the time, I was a writer at Hallmark Cards, working on the first e-cards of the pre-internet era (sent from TV to TV via local cable systems). He must have asked me 50 questions about the job—what the offices looked like, how cards were produced, the mechanics of buying and sending e-cards via television, all of it. At some point he said, "A card writer could be an interesting character—you're writing these things for other people to send, as though they're saying them, and then someone else gets the message, reading it as though it's coming from that person, when it's actually from you..." Just smiling and shaking his head, like, how did human beings ever come up with this?
Thanks for sending me down memory lane. I've now read through a lot of the responses to the original question and answer here, and I have to say, this is a beautiful community of people. It figures that such generous hearts and minds would gather around George Saunders. I feel lucky to be here.
A greeting card writer could make an interesting character. It made me think of the main character in Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts who writes an advice column. And the way most poets would probably look down at a greeting card writer, even though it probably pays much better than publishing poetry through other means.
First off, having lived in den Nederland for 3 years and having many Dutch friends during my life, I can only say that when a Dutch person apologizes for their English, they will shortly thereafter display depth and nuance that few of us have in our own native language. Second, I doubt there is a culture that prizes books more than they, with an astounding number of publishers sprinkled about. My advice, since our Ansuya is bedeviled by a myriad of structural possibilities, that she hire a Developmental Editor. This should be someone that comes with a reference from her publisher, a writer friend, etc. This editor could act as a serious, evaluative sounding board for the implications, opportunities, and consequences of each possible shape. If you're John Fowles or Jennifer Egan, you probably have access to someone like this in one of the big houses, but the rest of us have to find our own advisors.
One thing we haven’t touched on is the question: “which novels with multiple time lines are very well written?” An excellent question. I actually just finished (today!) Emily St John Mandel’s “Station Eleven”, which jumps between multiple times constantly. I must say that at first I was a little annoyed by the way she did it. Some of the jumps felt jarring--I wasn’t ready to move on because I wasn’t done with the first time. But in the end I think it worked, in that she introduces information in the order that I wanted to know about it. Some flashback material is explanatory, and if you explain too early it loses suspense, and if you explain too late the reader has forgotten about it. Others are more emotional; current feelings being echoed or complemented by past feelings, and I think she did that particularly well.
At first I found Station Eleven's jumps too jumpy, but the work grew on me, and I fell into the deftness and pull of the transitions. I experienced the same thing in Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land, which makes giant jumps in time, but the threaded coherency of the time periods was well done, and moved me a good deal.
You to lead? Three choral rounds of "Hippy Bathday to George!" rounded out by three resounding chairs of "Hip-hop Hurrah! Hip-hop Hurrah! Hip-hop Hurrah!! Hip-hop Hurrah!!!"
One of two things I have long since learned, from way back in my time with with Story Club is that there's always likely going to be need for revisiting first thots with keen 👀 open to reviisions to theirr dafting. Second of two thungs is to expect the unexpected. Always makes me thunk reading comments in Story Club.
When the screw of time turns you're own next bathday Portia . . . have a good one! 😅
In situations like these as an editor, I deploy the strategy that Peter Jackson used when adapting "The Lord of the Rings" for the screen: "If it doesn't get the ring to Mordor, it doesn't go in the film." Determine your Mordor, decide on your ring, then cut and reorganize as necessary.
And yet, when it comes to Tolkien's books, much of them (including some of the most powerful and magical moments) is NOT getting the ring to Mordor. I think the Lord of the Rings would be harder to publish today, with publishers wanting to streamline and cut out a lot of that non-plot stuff. And I wonder what would be lost. Wish I could ask Tolkien his thoughts on all of it!
True. The difference between the books and the movies is that in the books the characters, besides the hobbits (including Gollum), are all legendary archetypes, their characters largely fixed, whereas in the movies the characters had doubts and desires they get past. This is particularly true of Aragorn. In the books he's akin to Marlowe's Tamburlaine, striding the world. In the movies, he's got a whiff of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Prince Hal about him, doubting himself and worried about his destiny.
I disagree that LOTR would be streamlined today; thanks to Tolkien epic fantasies have become incredibly bloated. (I really want to read The Priory of the Orange Tree, for example, but it's sooooo long). That said, I do wonder if LOTR could get published today at all because, thanks to decades of their publishing Tolkien pretenders, publishers are moving away from Western European-based worlds (which is good; The Poppy War series is on my list for next year). If they did, though, the Aragorn-Arwen story, mostly consigned to the appendices, would have to be moved front and center, with Eowyn as more of a complication, to give LOTR a Betty and Veronica romantasy hook (this trend, in my opinion, is less good).
All excellent points. That's an interesting observation about the archetypal characters of the book vs. the angsty versions in the film. I hadn't really thought about that before.
I'm also thinking now about what really makes a book feel "bloated" vs. "rich." You're absolutely right about fantasy today. In fact, despite it being my favorite genre as a kid, I barely read it anymore because I find much of it so tedious. I find the level of detail somewhat excruciating in many cases. And yet I love the Lord of the Rings (even all those pages about party preparations and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins). I'm sure a lot of it simply comes down to personal preference. But I think there may also be something about dedication to realism vs. the archetypes you previously mentioned. Perhaps a book can move toward one or the other, but not both at the same time.
As usual, a lovely answer from George to a heart felt question revealing vulnerability and a desire to learn more. I’m not a writer of novels, though of course I’m a reader of them. So maybe my advice should not be taken too seriously. But I have a hunch that 1200 words is too much and that alone calls for some introspection and editing - editing with emotional detachment. How much of this book is a story for others and how much is self therapy, which is hugely valuable but not a story for others? As a reader I really appreciate distillation, restraint, insightful moments and discoveries - sentences that are like pictures worth a thousand words. To my ear, that’s mastery and I think many of us here are seeking to understand and emulate mastery, including the questioner. So I guess my advice is: 1) congratulations for getting it all out. Sounds therapeutic and like a great and sprawling first draft, or maybe 10th but still early; and 2) kill your darlings. Cut, cut, cut. Cry for them as they fall but soar higher with the ones that make the cut; 3) the elephant probably needs to lose 75% of its body weight. Maybe it really wants to be a tiger- thinner but still awesome in its power?
The question was pitch perfect and created a space for answers that are well honed and helpful. I thought I had it nailed after publication of my debut novel 'The Seasonwife' here in Aotearoa New Zealand.
I was even a little smug, sure that I wouldn't have a loose garment to play with this time. No the body under the garments would be there right from the start.
But now I'm into my next novels, a trilogy, and I realise uh-oh, not so smart. Here I am again, just like the questioner. It is lovely though, falling in love with different aspects of stories in stories, falling in love with numerous characters, falling in love with writing.
I am so keenly aware now that the structure is challenging but vital. Perhaps it is the curse of awareness.
So I have printed out the question and the answers and I'm going to nail these to my heart - metaphorically.
And as a writer suffering financial hardship I am going to keep going knowing that there is hope in this hardship, that the hard graft is like the grinding of a stone. I am writing my way towards revising and restructuring, yes. But the grinding will eventually lead to polish and the true colours will glow.
This is also a reminder that - poor as I am - I can never afford to give up your sub stack George!
Saige, forgive me if this is overstepping but I believe there are gift subscriptions to SC for those with financial hardship. Maybe when it's time to re-up, you could inquire.
I want to thank you all again for this incredible ‘journey at home’ as I could call it. I have always longed for the opportunity to talk to writers about the act of writing, since I don’t have any friends who write and since I’m always inside the people who do are hard to reach.
I’ve always been too shy to post any comment out here, but the past days really cracked something open, if that’s the way to say it. At the same time I had contact with my mother again, since a long time, and she said some very hurtful things; mainly that I shouldn’t count on her for safety, which is the same old song since childhood but it still makes me very sad and insecure about myself. But it did make me realize that the story in the present is an important part of the past, they are untangled with each other on many levels. I should look into it despite of the pain it still causes, which also counts for childhood parts. Avoiding that pain doesn’t get the book finished.
Just like I can see now, as an adult, how unfree she must have felt, as a housewife and mother. She was very angry and unhappy.
But talking to some people here ( and in the emails! 🩶) made me start to believe that perhaps this is not my fault. Yes, I was an anxious child but this was also because she shut the door for us. A snake bites its own tail.
So I’d rather think about the strength I’ve felt out here while I felt safe enough to tell my story, all of a sudden. Which was a wonderful and unexpected gift from all of you.
And how extraordinary, this feeling that George saw right through me, and noticed a question hidden in the main question. So I’ve got both questions answered and then got loads of answers out here too; I think I know what I’m about to do, apart from pinning my ass on a chair.
Anyone who wants to email for whatever reason, about their project or anything else, please do. I’d like that very much. 🩶
You are on the right track. When your memories move from being traumatic to sad, you are healing. I’m sorry your mother was, and is so abusive.
I'm old enough to be a grandmother. My father (deceased) and I had a love-hate relationship—he was a navigator in World War II, flying bombing runs over Germany and had PTSD. He was a troubled man. His only emotion was anger. My mother was negligent (she may have been schizoid and on the autistic spectrum) and my grandmother (probably covert narcissist), who lived with us, was abusive. Our lovely middle-class home was a hellhole. The only way I could write about my relationship with my father was to move it backward in time by 1400 years. I needed that much distance. As I wrote the story, it became increasingly fantastical. I believe I have healed that love-hate relationship through my writing. Now my deceased mother keeps appearing in my dreams, and I think I might write about her. As for my grandmother, I am afraid of even approaching that viper pit (although one of my characters does collect vipers. Maybe I can learn from her). (Even writing this comment is giving me ideas on how I might write about them.)
If you are interested in an email conversation: jmmikk@gmail.com
I often tell myself that John Grisham said writing is the hardest job he’s ever had, and he was both a state legislator and a lawyer. Keep revising that final draft, and soon you will see your book in print.
My mother also was my worst enemy, which seemed so insane that I was unable to process it. Now that I am finally a parent myself I can understand it, a little bit: my being born “ruined her life.” But she was also suffering from the never-processed duress imposed on her by her own parents and grandparents…it goes back a long ways…
(I now understand also that my self-hatred originated with hers. It’s a long, heavy process, unlocking and un-linking those internalized malfunctions…my father’s sense of futility is also mixed-up with hers. Ugh, to be free of all that!! Step-by step….)
I think Mr. Saunders has given you a superb answer. And I feel your pain. I know what it is to have a big huge manuscript that leaves the writer feeling overwhelmed and baffled. There's a certain fatigue that sets in just from dragging it around. It's like working on a huge quilt--the damned thing is so unwieldy and drags on the floor; the octopus is so muscular, refusing absolutely to be put to bed.
The one thing I know is that when you're trying to make sense of it all, you should handle it it physically. If you have a typed summary, cut it into sections with scissors, and tape the parts that you know fit together. Or cover your dining room table with graph paper, and use colored post-it notes for different themes or characters or plot points. Don't try to think with the computer. Draw maps of the story with crayons or charcoal. I don't know why chopping up the story and manhandling it helps, but it does. Computers can be damned deceptive at a time like this. They make everything look too much the same. You need tape and color and torn paper. Maybe even a stapler.
@Laura Brilliant advice! I love ink, acrylics and charcoal :)
I use a 3D mindmap application, work onscreen whenever I'm up to threading out new edits on any ms on the block. But at a certain point in time, I need to see the big picture in space. I always add images to my elements in the mindmap, and when I "go physical" I printout those same images. Rather than having text to look at, I feel familiar enough with my images that in the physical realm they unreel the scenes in my head.
I've worked as an animator, sound designer/editor for film, and musician, all of which inform my creative process. Cutting my narratives comes back to the same ideas that informed my soundwork/film edits.
For me there's a music at play in every story–dynamics, tension, themes, turning points, and passion–all give shape and direction to the work. In re-writing I go out of my left brain (typing abstract symbols on a flat screen), and feel the story come alive on the screen between my ears. My decisions come as clear and uncluttered as a river pouring off a cliff's edge. This is alchemy, where I recognize the point where my creation takes on a life of its own. To me, this is my creative focus throughout drafting and re-writes. It's knowing when my drafts are becoming works of art.
Ooh, I love the idea of assigning images to story points and making a visual map, entirely text-free. I used to do a lot of multimedia art with my grandmother, but when it comes to story for some reason I'm often too "lazy" to get physical with it (beyond simply writing by hand). I'm realizing how much of a shame that is. It's so fun and freeing to play in a physical/visual space, and probably gets far more of the brain and body involved than are available while staring exclusively at glowing text, or even writing with a pen. I'm going to take inspiration from your post and try getting out some art supplies.
@Harirai Yay multimedia :) Loved reading that you shared this with your grandmother! My grandmother was also my first collaborator in art when I was but a fledgling artist.
I slam dunked my original post just before the café was about to close. It was a happy surprise to see that it inspired a bit. Then I decided to dig out an old handout that I gave to a few clients who wanted to know how I worked on my own personal, and gargantuan, speculative fiction octopod. I cut a segment from it, I hope this is an OK place for sharing it–
...Most importantly, getting the benefit of playing in natural media works best by staying uncomplicated.
Here's one simple low tech approach I like. Use large sheets of heavy weight 250-300 lb. paper suitable for brushing with water, as in prep for watercolors or acrylic inks. I like “real time” natural media, that demands a fast, not over-thought out, and effortless hand before it dries. I cut the big sheets down to a usable size and start with with applying a water wash to a tile before going at it with the watercolor, acrylic ink, Aquarelle pencil (colored pencils made for wet media), and even ground pigment shaved from a set of sticks, like the super vivid kind that come in a box in high intensity colors. For each tile that you prepare, use hues that reflect certain points in your story. I go after mood, tone, something that resonates with the drafted words.
Over time, I’ll get inspired to draw onto these tiles, or stick photos, hand drawn, or photocopied elements onto them. I hang these on the lines strung around my studio. If I find myself overworking, or being overcritical of a draft, I find that making these tiles pulls me out of the part of my brain that is weighing the sheer volume of the work, the weight of having carried this story around in one form or another (for much too long to admit here).
Clothesline grade twine, strung around in lengths of your choosing, can represent in each line any of the dynamics of story. Character arcs and timelines, the arcs of developing themes, environments/change of seasons, loose ideas that are still floating just above the “cutting floor”, and streams of ephemera for building speculative worlds, to name a few. Having a place to put all that’s swirling around in your head offers a good feeling in itself.
Fast, low-tech, simple, visual. It all works to put down those weights tied to the belief that rewriting is something really hard and sometimes a bit airless. All that's in our heads. The key is to connect with arts that will loosen things up, to open up to a sensed spaciousness with our stories.
Getting juiced to keep going with the process, seeing how our drafts literally grow and evolve before our eyes, gaining insights into new levels of what’s written, seeing the resolution, the closure, or the place for cutting to the next in series–if you find any of this happening for you in your visual experiments, then hooray!
Wow, thank you for sharing this! Fast smears of watercolor are my favorite medium, so this is great. It will take some strategizing to figure out where I can put up these strings, but I very much love the tile idea, even if I don't manage to get them hanging.
I went through a phase of experimenting with outlining using post-it notes on one of those tri-fold cardboard displays that are made for things like school science fairs. It was nice because I could move the post-its around at will but I could also fold up the whole board and put it away. Turns out moving post-it notes around a board isn't much creative use to me anyway, but I can imagine a revamped version with small art tiles as a portable alternative to the method you described.
In any case, I'm thinking I might spend tomorrow's writing slot downstairs with the art supplies and see what I learn.
This makes me jealous, haha
Have fun getting "crafty" with your rewrites! Hope we get to hear about it ;-)
Yes, I was actually planning on doing this as an experiment, to get an overview as well! Thank you!!
And some tippex
I know that product as "White-out."
That is such a better name
My debut novel was originally going to have flashback sections that then later turned out to be memories from a whole different character. It was all fun and games, but I noticed while writing that I felt I ‘needed’ those sections to make the book interesting, when in reality they caused mostly confusion for the reader. It’s this idea we often have, don’t we, this imposter syndrome, that makes us think we need the glitter and the pink paint and the feather dresses to somehow upscale a simple human story, which in it’s simplicity can feel almost too vulnerable to share. I ended up only telling the main story, and while I do sometimes regret cutting those things cause they would have made the book more unique maybe, I’m happy that I let the bare essentials shine and didn’t try to rely on tricks and twists.
Oh, I want to remember your lovely advice: ."... let the bare essentials shine." Lovely.
I have a question, Ansuya. Your story of surviving a painful illness that prevented you from participating at your fullest in your young life - how did this end? At what time were you freed? What did you do? Indeed, what changes did your trauma make that arc through your present life.
I was surrounded by family suicides before I was 30, and they took all the life out of me. I had one child, whose father was dead, and a second, whose father was dangerous. My parents both died by suicide. At the end of a couple of decades of struggle, what did I have? What can I give a character if that character is not me? I have to decide - or invent - what I was left with, or there is not book. Is your story similar, or do you know what you were left with? What from your illness has fed the successes in your life? I'm having trouble finding successes. I survived - that seems lame! What are you doing, I think is what I'm asking, with the events of your past that were so traumatic?
Hi Sallie,
first of all, I'm so sorry to hear this. Thank you so much, for sharing this.It means more to me then I can say, to be honest. I can answer your question but it's not a cheerful story of success -anything but. If you want to hear my story, which -and this is no surprise- is a very long one, & I don't know if this is the appropriate place to write about that stuff here, but, well, I was a very very anxious child to begin with. I didn't get the attention from my parents, or what my therapist calls 'save environment' that was needed, got bullied a lot at school. In high school I finally made friends, but I had a tendency to depression and yes, suicidal thoughts. That's why my friends didn't want to 'hang' with me anymore. This was when I decided to improve myself, by starving myself. Then, from my 14th till my 17th year I've been hospitalized, at the worst kind of places, where there is a lot of 'forced eating', you know, ehm, with a tube.
So my trauma really has to do with this experience of being held by grown-ups, against my will, being forced and punished, etc etc.
Afterwords I never told anyone about this, for years. But at some point, in college, I got severe panic attacks, got very depressed, started to lose weight again. At some point I wasn't able to go outside anymore. This is still the case today. The last time I've been outside, was in 2015.
Since then I lived inside, and so I started to write things down. Also, I got addicted to oxazepam, a sort of valium. I'm getting off those right now, which is the hardest thing I've ever done. Well, almost the hardest thing. My mother and I are no longer in touch, she's always seen me as 'someone who attracts evil spirits,' she's very spiritual and to her view my illness as a teenager and problems later on, are things I created myself, under the influence of evil ghosts and so on (you can imagine tis scared the shit out of me when I was a kid) but my father supports me, and I have some amazing friends left.
I also got diagnosed with ADHD recently, which kind of explains the trouble with my book as well. I also worry a lot about when it gets published, I mean, I want to be there, right at that moment, physically. And I'm sad and afraid that I'll never be in a relationship or have any children of my own. So that's my story. So no, there's happy ending so far. But lately, I've started taking very small steps. I don't know where they will lead. I started seeing old friends. I wrote this letter. Some achievements for me. I'm writing this, here, right now. It sounds like nothing but its a huge achievement for me.
I wish I could help you. If you just want to talk about your experiences and your writing, please email me at ansuyaspreksel@gmail.com
I am a great listener. And I find great comfort as well in talking to people who struggle, like me.
In addition to this, Sallie: my book means everything to me. It's the reason I'm still around. I know this sounds mad, but it's true. This book kept me going, hoping for a better future. And, well, having a very enthusiastic publisher and encouraging publishing team and supportive friends helps a lot. So, at least I can say this: I'm left here, with my book. It's all I have to offer atm. I don't know if it will be enough, but it's enough right now. I really hope this counts for you too. Writing, and reading as well, gives me so much joy. I'm not sure if this is the answer you where looking for, though.
Of course, it is a beautiful answer.
If, with 'what am I left with', you meant, 'what have I gained by going through all this?' Then my answer would be: a story. A story of survival. A very personal story. Write it down. I'd love to read it. It's not for everyone, but I have found great comfort in reading memoirs and non-fiction, as well as fiction, poetry, listening to music and so on, and at some point, when I was very depressed, anything I could relate to, that told me I was not alone, comforted me, gave me hope. So you could write about a character that is you. I did it. I wrote about a character and she's me. I'm only having a hard time in feeling any kindness or forgiveness towards her.
Ansuya, I have no right to barge into your life as if I were Dr Klutz the psychoanalyst, but – in terms of your writing and the difficulties of assembling the patchwork of past and present – I was wondering where the heart of your subject was, since that is key to your editorial decisions (I won't try to do better than GS's marvellous advice above). I've noted two things you've said, that seem to me to be close to the heart of why you're telling this story: "This was when I decided to improve myself, by starving myself, *" and "I'm only having a hard time in feeling any kindness or forgiveness towards her." That's very stark, very hard. You probably have your own ideas about how it came about that you feel so harshly towards yourself. Or perhaps you'd rather, as you say, avoid looking into it. But I can't help thinking you should try.
Forgive me if I've rushed in where angels fear to tread ;)
* as an opening line, that would make me want to read on! But you'd be opening up new fields – we'd want to know what happened next, but also what happened before...
No, this is actually very helpful, and you are definitely right. I Am afraid to dive back into the ‘dark matter’ and moving in circles around it.
That you feel hostility toward the character that is you -you will, I feel sure, outgrow! You didn't do this to yourself, develop these painful ways of coping with being alone. And the view that you are to "blame," you have already outgrown it. You have already forgiven yourself, as it were, by writing the book. And you have a great support team. Sometimes when who we are in our hearts is "the abandoned one," it takes time to recognize that we are no longer in that position, that there is a path out. And we are on it. No guarantees, of course! But we are on that path!
I'm not so sure, I really despise the character and the book, and myself, most of the time. I often feel a certain aversion to go on with it. With the book and life in general. But then I think about those girls and also feel a certain obligation, as weird as that may sound, to write about it.
Ansuya, i am sitting here, taking in your words, and in awe of you. You haven't been outside since 2015. I think I am dumbstruck at the moment, for once almost completely silenced. That you have been through what you've been through; that you continue to struggle with your existence--and yet you have created this book full of you and your life and feelings--it's pretty much a miracle, really. Of course, i wish i could take you by the hand and walk next to you outside, but I also know that you will step out when you are ready, however long that takes. I will go to sleep tonight thinking about you and your willingness to share these parts of yourself with all of us here. I hope you can see the pulses that i'm sending from my heart to yours at this moment. I can't wait to read your book.
Wow, I don’t know what to say, but thank you. It’s really strange to hear. But really kind and lovely.
Perhaps a few times in 2016, but I don’t really recall the last time I went outside. But I hope I will get better and able to go out again.
Yes, I hope so, too.
Ansuya, what remarkable strengths you have. It sounds like writing your novel has been therapeutic in many ways. Thank you for putting yourself out here in such a vulnerable way. I'm a mental health provider and I can understand what a big deal all of this is. Keep going. So trite, but true, that you climb a mountain one step at a time.
I've been curious how I fit here with regard to being a novel writer, and not a short story writer (yet) so I really appreciate your question. I thought my novel would involve three character points of view, alternating chapters. I decided to write the story first in the pov of one character, and he took over. Now I have a first draft with just his point of view. I think the other characters may each get their own novel, instead of trying to bring it all into one.
I think it makes sense to consider that you really have two novels. What an accomplishment. And I'm over the moon that you have a contract.
Lastly, using the program Scrivener was a game changer for me. I'd never envisioned an entire novel before this. With the program, I can see all my scenes lined up on the left side of the screen as I write. I can move them around or categorize them into chapters. I admit I haven't taken the time to learn all I can do with it so I'm sure there's a lot more. Thanks again and best of luck with everything.
This is so kind, thank you. I was really doubting myself when I just blurted the story out here.
Yes, I was using Scrivener before I had a book deal and an editor, and he prefers to work with word, but since the trouble keeping sight of all the chapters and where they went all started there for me, I guess the better option would be to write the final draft in Scrivener again. There are too many options there for my brain to explore or understand so I just used the most basic program back then.
Yes, I think that's a good idea. I've been compiling into word, then returning to the original on scrivener to make revisions. I love some of the ideas here about creating tangible visuals, as well, like notecards or symbols. We need to not feel stuck to the computer, even though it's a great tool.
Just want to make sure you see Rebecca Makkai’s recent Substack pieces (2 of them) about writing with ADHD! :-)
Yes, I have! It’s funny: after reading her first piece about ADHD I’ve asked my psychiatrist if I could take a test. Because it felt so relatable, like I could have written that about myself. I never thought about that possibility before. And he replied: ‘yes, I suspect you’re right, because of you’re associative writing in emails.’ So we took the test, and the results were kind of obvious 🫣
Yes--I’m there with you--late (and casual) diagnosis following my kids’ diagnoses. But I believe my parents’ neurodivergences and various successes encouraged me to find and support my own way of doing things...though that’s not the whole story, of course. You sound like you’re doing great work. I hope this conversation helps you move forward. One of the favorite pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten, and need again and again, is the reminder that the answer, the structure, the way to revise the book is not out there to be discovered, but is a decision we get to make.
True, but that makes it even harder, I think. You have to decide what works best. For writing, ADHD might have positive aspects as well. For life, it’s harder. I mean, a lot of pieces of the puzzle of my past fell into place: why I was such a dreamy kid, always wanted to do things differently, follow my own endless imagination. But now I wonder how this relates to all my fears as well. Like there are always tons of things to consider that could go wrong. So sending George a question or writing a comment out here was a huge deal for me, actually.
I did convince myself to send the question because I could do it anonymously, so if people would find it dumb I could just hideout. And then there I was all of a sudden writing all of this personal stuff, panicking again, afterwards. Like hell, what have I just done?
But thank you anyway; if I hadn’t read it it would have been so useful!
Your survival is not lame. I already want to know how you did it.
Thank you, Andrew.
Oh, Sally, how heartbreaking. So many terrible losses. I can only imagine what you’ve been through. Survival is a success. You are resilient. And I’ve followed you within this group; you always make thoughtful and generous comments. That’s also a success. You have a great heart, and real wisdom.
Sallie: Your words "i survived" hold such power! And give others such hope! The very words "I survived" are a balm to so many others. Do you think you must decide in advance what you were left with? Or is it possible to just start writing about a woman, like you, who survived such tragedies? And through the writing, perhaps discovering "what is left." In the meantime, I'm so glad you are here.
Thank you, Mary. I'm glad I'm here too. and most of my writing is like your description. I write and then, sometimes long afterward, see where it is going and then tighten the threads. This is a little scarier, though. I wake up one day, feeling that yes, there's a connection, just do it. And the next I wake up in a hayfield.
It also scares the hell out of me to write about some of my bad experiences, I often feel the tendency to throw it all out. I hate to write about it and hate to read it back afterwords. I even try to find excuses not to work on the book. Or that part of it, at least. Still I wrote it all down. I guess, and this is very doubtful, I did that because I have a silly hope that my book could change things, for the girls who suffer now, I want them to get a better treatment than I did back then.
not a silly hope at all. This is exactly why people read--to know the lives of others; to find strength in their stories.
Hi, Ansuya. Credit yourself for being brave. A lot of great writers return to deep dark realms to write about them and part of what makes them great is the bravery to do so. The first canto of Dante's Inferno highlights this point so vividly in metaphor: the dark forest, the determination to find the straight and narrow path, the rebuttals by fearsome creatures, the providential arrival of Virgil, a mentor, to give him the courage to pass through the gates of hell... So, Dante had Virgil and you have George. What is amazing is that Dante wrote this with you in mind seven centuries ago. It was the ultimate pay-it-forward gesture, I think!
I also think of Kurt Vonnegut’s willingness to keep trying to find a way to write about the fire-bombing of Dresden.
That's interesting. It sounds like it was something that gnawed at him. And how could it have done otherwise? God bless, Kurt Vonnegut. I just queued up a documentary about him on my Kanopy watch list along with many others about other writers (just in case the winter is long :-)).
Every step forward is an incoming tide that lifts all boats, even if we don’t notice it.
here's to more days of making those connections. And if you wake up in a hayfield, here's to hacking your way out.
There is something I wanted to ask you, actually. Something I've been struggling with, and still do. Perhaps this is even the real question I should have asked. Do you ever have a hard time writing about the hard parts, I mean, of course you do, but:
I often feel like I'm focussing to much on the other stuff, the outline and the structure, the rhythm of the sentences, getting a reader's approval, basically anything to keep me away from the chapters that are written about my past. I wrote them very long ago, in 2015, over four nights, I don't even recall how I did it. I never read them back afterwords, I'm to scared. My friends and publishers read it, obviously.
I did find a way, in the end, to write about the other girls in the clinic, by picturing them as little ghosts, or nymphs, dancing around my bed, like in a Bacchae ritual. They do, sometimes. They never got older.
My question is: how do you manage to write about the things that caused you so much pain, without the risk of drowning in them? I guess I'm scared because I don't want to back to that place, and very often I'm afraid that I will just hate book for what's inside it, because those are the things I hate about my past. Sometimes I think: why bother? But these chapters are the reason I once began this project. Perhaps I wrote 1200 pages in the end, just to avoid to go back to those 200 that I loath.
Oh my god, do I understand! I wasn't brave enough to write about my traumatic experiences for many years. You have done so and it is surely powerful, to have gotten the responses you have. You are braver than I! Later, as I began to write about those things, I found them difficult to get down on paper, and then on rereading - I was bored to death! The experiences didn't come alive. Slog, slog, slog, words dull words. So I wrote as if these things were occurring to someone else. Nope. Didn't work. i wrote others' traumas, not mine, and those were better. Now at last a month ago I wrote about my husband's death when our son was 18 months old and I hadn't finished college and was in a strange place, alone. As I would write a sentence, I thought, oh how BORING. But I didn't stop and I didn't erase, I drew a line through the boring parts and dug down into my memories. And after a bit, something real came up. then I wrote some more. BORING! Again I drew a line through the words, leaving them in place, and so on and then I made that process part of the story. How I got to the raw and the real through the cliches, through the patter. And I have at last written that day in a way that I can feel and reread. 1000 words. I've given it to one reader, without any warning. And she was shaken by it. She said she'd find herself falling into a thought or a description as she read, and then I'd cross out something and she'd go on to the next uncrossed out bit, and finally was not reading the cross-outs, but she understood them. Conventional responses, conventional "stories," would crop up for me to hide behind and I'd mark through them and get to the real meat. Until I had the first part of the experience, the day, my 22nd birthday, when my husband left the house and never came back. My waiting and watching, and my sudden knowledge, he's dead! And his friend's arrival and our search and what we found, and how I became violently ill. And how I managed at last to sleep with my arms around my little boy, and how days later a neighbor brought me a sweet custard that I could eat, and the realization that if I could eat, I could live. And I'd have to for the child. That reader is NOT a writer. But she got it. So at last I have managed to express some of the reality of myself and my child in the world we were thrown into by this shattering death. Now I am working on how at last, much much later, I also began to recover from the shock that had left me so numb. And how I ventured out into living again. I grew up in the South in the era before the Civil Rights Movement, which was harsher than any other part of our country than - a different harshness, one of the body alone - the Arctic Circle. People, my people, in the South cut themselves off from all real humanity and abused people, and they are doing it again. Women, Blacks, immigrants, the very poor, are treated like trash because in order not to admit what the white people have actually done to other human beings, they have to cease being human in the real sense. Coming out of my shock, trying to make a living, having the help of a dear friend, I had a cross burned on my lawn. I can smell it to this day. I was so afraid for my friend and my child that I left the South again and went back North. I've lived. But not until my 70s have I found myself in a community where with despite my differences, I am accepted. And at peace. But place marks us, and part of me longs for the rivers and fields I grew up in. I can never go back. I went back for visits while my friend was still alive. I helped her in her old age, and i loved her. I used to loathe those people, my people. I ached to write of them and i made them all villains. Now I am able to see them as humans like we all are. But it took a long time. The only thing I can do to honor our humanity is to write it until it is REAL. However often I have to cross-out the tritenesses, even the sorrows, that I hide behind. Thank you for your letter, Ansuya. I hope my answer is not painful to you.
How could it be painful? It's beautiful, although I wish you'd never had to go through this. My own experiences are bread crumbs in comparison. I hope I can read this book some day!
How could your experiences be bread crumbs in comparison with anything? We don't compare pain, it's not on a scale! We suffer, we struggle, and we must find acceptance in ourselves, really we must. We are mortal, we are animals, we are born, we live with suffering and joy and work, and we die! You are not a bread crumb! you are a full, delicious meal with hot sauce! Don't forget that. I have your email address. When I am satisfied momentarily with my chapter 1 of that life, I will email it to you. I can send it as an attached pdf. Someday, you will send me part of your work.
Yes, please do!
Thank you for this!!!
I've been poring over these replies and your answers for ages, what an amazing experience. This particular post really got me though, because I've often wondered the same thing often. Typically I think writers tend to focus on personal experiences which will drag their work out of the mediocre that makes up most of life, the defining, often traumatising moments that make us "us". But I've found more often than not, while we can draw on those moments to give our work depth, plunging in the deep end and trying to describe them realistically, naturally - i.e. without any conceptualising or fictional distance - never does those experiences much justice.
One example I have personally, has been trying to write about staying overnight in a hospice. My Mum was passing away, and I decided to stay in the chair by her bedside. There were six terminally ill patients in the same ward, which was so quiet and peaceful in the early hours after midnight. "Using" it as a scene per se, I always quickly feels cheapening, like I'm exploiting what's too obviously emotional, or like it's a set-piece without a story. But... thinking deeper about the experience, I know that in other work I'm happy with that deals with death in one form or another, that experience in the hospice has given those other - less direct, less obviously connected - scenes an emotional illumination they'd otherwise lack.
This reminds me also of a great lecture I heard the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader give (it's on YouTube), about how he gets students to start out by listing their pivotal experiences, then asks them to use find a metaphor for that experience, which will be the starting premise of their script. I.e Schrader's overwhelming loneliness became a taxi, becoming Taxi Driver. Schrader's feeling of not being able to express love, turned into American Gigolo! Essentially, his method is about finding a useful distance between the actual event/feeling/experience and the dramatic, fictionalised action. But having the emotional foundation gives the work its power, whether it's about taxi drivers, blue collar workers in a car factory, male escorts or... cat people (I'm not sure what the metaphor was for that one, yet.)
To have a character sitting in a chair in hospice would be a great starting point for a story, you could have a character sitting there, remembering things from childhood, for example.
I know you kind of answered this question down below already. I'm just wondering how you managed to do it, still. Since I'm really having a hard time pouring in those old 'wounds,' to say it somewhat dramatically.
Our answers crossed each other! Bless you, dear Ansuya. I hold you in my heart and mind.
One line at a time. Remember to keep breathing the air that sustains you.
Thank you so much for this wonderful answer!
As I briefly told you, I often feel insecure since I’ve never done any Creative Writing courses or something like that. Also I’d love to read anyone’s experiences and/ or advice on this matter. The funny thing is, when you ask about the real, blurt-out version, that would be the childhood story, aka the flashbacks ARE the main story here.
The novel is based on my own ( very traumatic) experiences being hospitalized in psychiatric hospitals for anorexia, since I was 14. But I didn’t want it to be a book ABOUT eating disorders. It’s about how something that happened to you in the past can shape your current life, I suppose. Also I didn’t want to write too much about that period, because I don’t want it to be sad or heavy, or to get frightened by my own book. I want to be able to be proud of it once it’s out there. But I initially started writing it out of a sort of anger, I suppose, I had to get it out of me but also I hope I could help other people, readers. Though this might sound very self confident, which I’m definitely not! I’ve been thinking about jumping between time periods in different chapters but as a reader I really enjoy books where flashbacks turn up in the middle of a scene.
Also, on the importance of stories, and remembering last week’s question about the current war in the Middle-East; Edgar Keret gave some wonderful interviews about the importance of stories, and why he is visiting war refugees and telling them stories right now.
Ansuya, thank you so much for sharing all of this. I wrote a longer comment elsewhere, but here, where I see you mentioning your trauma and anger, it makes sense to me that your story got so long. It needed to be long to address all of your feelings. That’s really valuable for your healing. Now it’s time to include the rest of the world, but readers don’t need to hear every detail. In fact it can work against you. Your audience might glaze over and lose track of your main story. If you took me on walk through the forest, a walk you knew well and loved, I would want to see the light shine through the trees or see where a giant tree fell. I would want an introduction to the beauty and drama. I probably would not want to know the shape and size of every leaf and pinecone on the forest floor, even though you, having walked the path many times, might know those things and hold them close to your heart. My heart just wouldn’t have the capacity on that first walk.
You're totally right, and I am planning on cutting a huge deal of the stuff that I wrote in 2015-2016. It's also a strange mix of memoir, fiction, essay, and so on. My publisher calls it 'eclectic,' but i'm not sure.
First, congrats on all you've already accomplished. Second, I think your publisher's onto something, with it being a kind of mixed genre work, with maybe a collage or quilt-like structure or pattern, rather than linear. I'm sure they'll be able to help you sort it all out. How great, in a sense, to have so much material to work with. To me, the childhood/adolescent trauma seems to be the core of the story, with everything else radiating from those experiences.
In my own challenges to figure out how to structure both a childhood memoir and a first novel (both still in-progress), I'm comforted by the thought that there's more than one way to write any particular book that can all be good. Trust which ever way you're leaning and go with it. And do take good care of yourself, that's most important.
this is super interesting. To me, a total outsider(!), it sounds as though the present day story is the "main" story, and the flashbacks tell us how the character got to where she is today. So while there is a ton of story to be told from the past, the REAL story is the character today, living in the aftermath of what they've gone through. Maybe (and I'm trying to say this gently but i'm not so good at that, sorry), you need to sort of re-think things. I mean, if the real story is the flashbacks, as you say, then why have the present day at all? It seems like the present day is the story....?
You’re right, that’s why I decided along the way to add a second timeline in which my main character is older, struggling with a lot of things in life, like relationships, anxiety issues. In this way, I could shatter this ‘block’ of unpleasant memories into smaller bits and pieces and let them come up whenever there’s a reason for it. For example, the character meets her former best friend from high school that dumped her right before she gets sick, and this meeting digs up the past which she is trying to escape in het adult life.
So your story is about a character (the older one, in the present-day) making their way through life, right? And to understand that character, we need to know about their past. (Right?) I guess you have to decide where the story really is. I mean, some books are entirely framed--start in the present, then go back in time for the bulk of the book, and end in the present again. Some books concentrate on the present--that's where the real story is--with snippets from the past appearing to reveal some truths. Is there a story in the present day with a struggle for your character? Or is it all in the past? Is the present day story merely a frame for the past? Or is there a real present day story that snippets from the past help us understand? It seems to me like perhaps you have to decide what the purpose of the book is. (If you haven't already.) I fear i'm not being of help. I'm just trying to figure out what you've got without seeing it.
I guess it would be the last one. At least, that's my goal. There is also a lot going on in the 'present' storyline. So these flashbacks are more like clues, or answers.
Yes, that sounds right from what I'm gathering. I'm guessing it's going to be a great book!
What does your publisher/editor suggest in terms of revision? And congrats! You must be a terrific writer to have landed a two-book deal.
Following Lesley’s question/comment … I wonder … does anyone ever have an editor/publisher/friendly stranger do a kind of dumbed-down crashing through the underbrush sort of intuitive edit just to see what is left standing? For the writer to then see what definitely connects and what’s fragile?
I’m not sure I wouldn’t still want to keep what’s fragile and slash and burn the obvious stuff, but … would that method be instructive? Or just hurtful.
I do find with my own stuff any ruthless edit has to be fast and unthinking and sort of arbitrary (take out 10,000 words, don’t ask why!)
It’s almost always helpful, but I of course make sure to save all the words I cut. Then some seem to creep back in when I’m not looking.
Probably not an unusual method.
I think here I agree with some others: if a publisher has already staked themselves to the 1200 pages, trust that. And just see what happens next.
This is exciting. I’m excited for this book.
Wow haha, that really wonderful to hear!!
Breaking the story into smaller bits and pieces also could make it be a mystery, as well as psychological drama. And readers love trying to figure out a puzzle!
I was thinking about this essay in the New Yorker, ‘ A case against the trauma plot,’ did you read that? Ever since I read it, I’ve noticed that there are indeed a lot a trauma plots in backstories. I just wonder if this has to be a bad thing. I don’t think so. Although I agree with the author that A Little Life was a bit too much to handle.
I remember that essay. I don't think it's a bad thing--back stories of trauma that are there to help explain a character's current situation. (That's the crux of that essay, right? All of the traumatic back stories to be found in modern novels?) I don't think that's a bad thing at all. The only "bad" thing is bad writing. (I never read A Little Life and probably won't.)
Yes, but the author wasn’t fond of it, hence the ‘case against it.’ Don’t read Yanigihara, every chapter feels like losing a finger.
Yeah, i've been warned. Staying away.
May your writing, and what it carries, bring healing to other young women and girls around the world. A great deal of damage is done to human beings by the culture, its expectations for what the profit-takers may take, or want us to take, from an early age, to be beauty. None of us, I suspect, has escaped the printing on mind, soul, and body.
It’s important not to spend too much time, perhaps, in the trauma, which may only perpetuate the pain . . . (There is the story of how, once the concept of anorexia and its diagnosis through the adoption of the main Western medical manual entered Hong Kong, the condition took off among girls there.)
Also important to consider are the motives of the publisher.
In my MFA, one instructor emphasized ‘truth,’ and ‘facts’. As a consequence, we read quite a lot of, well, dark and demoralizing storytelling, often with a mix of condemnation (passed off as humor) and ridicule. It’s one thing to expose the evils or injustices of the world, another to provide, through one’s work and life, healing.
Maybe forgiveness finds a place at some point in the narratives or essays. This often comes from a quiet, or quieter, place.
It sounds brilliant, recognition, then healing, are so needed at this time. (Een lezer in Leiden, ook op een helingsreis.)
(The note is not exactly, or at all, about craft, but it’s good to note nevertheless.)
i've got more questions than answers--mostly because George already gave you all the answers. The only thing I might add (which is tangential to George, not something new) is that laying your story out physically may help. (Do you have enough printer ink?) If you lay out your printed story in two long columns (or horizontally instead)--one the present day and one the past--you may find ways to braid the two together that you haven't seen before. Sometimes, a visual really helps. Also, you can lay out the pages and make "waves" with them--physically placing the sections where the action increases things above the line of sections where nothing much happens. Sort of like physically representing rising action. That way, you may be able to cut away the parts that aren't moving things forward. My biggest question is: how in the world did you sell a 1200 page novel, unfinished? That's a feat! (Feel free not to answer to that question. I just can't help but ask it.) I think it's really, really hard to get anyone to read a 200 page novel, much less a 1200 page one. But you've sold it already, so maybe my point is moot (my point being, that perhaps cutting would be helpful if you are hoping for a large audience of readers).
I wish you the best of luck with this one. Right now, I'm working on a 200 page elephant myself, and that's hard enough! When your book is published, i hope you'll let us all know!
I don’t know how I sold it, to be honest. I was totally surprised myself. My publisher even offered me a contract for a second book to come after this one, can you imagine! I can’t even see myself writing a second one after the first one, since I have doubts I will ever be able to finish it. So I don’t know, they just read it and offered me two contracts for two books, amazing right?!
yeah, that's amazing!!! Congratulations. Please ignore this advice, but when my first book sold, i was offered a two-book deal. Like you, I had big doubts about writing a second one. I ended up NOT taking the deal. In retrospect, that was a huge mistake. I did write a second book and selling it was harder, though it did sell. And I realized that if i'd signed a two-book contract, my publisher would have been much more invested in me. Oh, well. Live and learn. And don't listen to me! Do what feels right to you!
Well, in addition to this: we don’t have literary agents in Holland, you just send your manuscript to a publisher and cross your fingers. I just started writing things down when I got stuck in life, suffering from panic attacks and so on. Not even with the idea in mind of publishing. But in my case, I was fortunate enough to meet a successful author and chatted with him at the time about my ‘thing’ of 900 pages back then, I didn’t know if it could ever become an actual book or that it was rubbish, drooling. So he offered to read some of it and then came back to me that same day and kind of forced me to send it straight away. So I did and... well it worked! We’ve been discussing the possibility of making a trilogy but in the end agreed it was better in the ‘large stone version’ as my publisher calls it.
Intriguing...and amazing! Sounds like your elephant is being guided by angels. I would really love to hear more about your creative process and where your story rose up from. From here, it sounds like there's a powerful message coming through you and that your writing has been unfettered by a lot of expectation, market driven motivations, and the like.
Wishing you all the best in recovering that passion that was there for blasting out 1200 pages (!!!), may it fill you again for the rewrite. Anticipate magic!
amazing!
I’d like to read your books. What’s the title, if I may ask?
i know how dumb this sounds, but i don't talk about them here. If you want to post your email address here, I'll write to you. Believe me when I say i know how stupid this is.
Will you please tell me also? nancygage@aol.com
No, not at all. I would feel terrified to post my work here, with such excellent readers. But I’m curious, so please email me if you’d like to. Ansuyaspreksel@gmail.com.
wrote you.
Me also please, Mary (pips123@gmail.com). I'm already a fan of your writing. Thanks!
Me too Mary jesunder7@me.com
I would love to know the titles as well. kcgrier72@gmail.com
Ansuya,
Would the book work as two books? Like, you end the first book on a cliffhanger,of sorts, and then comes the second book? Or three books? Just another idea to throw in there!
Oh, sorry, I'm just seeing below that you discussed this with your publisher...
If they liked the version you sent, why the long rewrite?
Hi Ansuya: First of all your writing must be good or you ould not have received a acceptance. Great. I once used large index cards like a move script and then was able to get the book to a reasonable story. Also you may have two books. Gook Luck.
We’ve been playing with that idea at the publishing house, yes. It’s still a possibility, but then the storyline would almost have to be chronological, like Deborah Levy’s autobiographical novel series,it, or Tove Ditlevsen.
a quick addition: Though i said in my post that it's helpful to visualize the parts that aren't moving the story forward, I'm not saying that all of those sections need to be cut. Not everything must move a story forward. Some sections deepen a character for us, or provide nuance necessary for the story to continue. Just wanted to make that clear.
Posts like this are exactly why this Substack is so good. First of all, fascinating to hear from a writer on the complete opposite side of the spectrum from me (a first draft is like a mile-long barefoot walk over Legos, but I can tinker with a draft indefinitely). And yet, still some awesome and helpful advice.
FWIW, one of my favorite writing professors used to talk about the mind as a “meaning-making machine,” which as a sound bite isn’t super helpful, but in my experience digging into drafts, I’ve been shocked at the sort of subconscious scaffolding my brain has put in place. Characters I had no reason to include became pivotal, sequences that were kind of just... there... took on new dimensions of meaning. When the drafting-you has laid a little treat on the table for editing-you, it’s a rush.
I’m sure the questioner has a mammoth task on their hands with 1,200 pages to revise, but I’ll bet there is lots of gold in there. And as stressful as this recontextualizing/reenvisioning/rewriting might be, there are real joys to be found in the mess. Best of luck!
I love this line: "Find the line through it that feels most mythic and human and elemental" . It's the kind of advice that ceases to be merely mechanical ("craft") and asks the writer to consider what in a story is the magic magnet that'll pull the reader in. I guess the more we write, the better we get at sensing "the mythic, human and elemental."
Dear Question and George:
Thank you. This one hit me hard!
1. I was writing my first book (picked up writing during Covid) and there were so many flashbacks that I had to back reference. Finally, I decided after I finished writing the book this summer that the book I had written should be Book 2. I had to go back 1 generation and write the actual Book 1!
2. So George, thank you for saying delete all the flashbacks! I decided to do it (almost all) and write pretty much a prequel. It happened that I read Pachiko earlier this year and on the end note Min Jin Lee said that she went not one but two generations back and rewrote her whole book! It was painful as she wrote it, but her words provided a certain assurance on my own decision
3. I was fascinated by none-linear narrative and even managed to learn the two fancy Russian words “fabula” and “syuzhet.” Three really neat tricks that I am emulating now with a plan to master with my own prose/flow are:
1. In Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, I remembered the protagonist slid into a bath and the sensual experiences, the smell of the soap, the water, etc. triggered her memory of her lost daughter and then Ms. Atwood went on a nice paragraph down the memory lane. It was such a nice and natural way to flashback by a sensual trigger!
2. In Cloud Atlas, (speaking of none-linear narrative, this is like the Memento of novels!) how each story linked to the other from old diaries, books, correspondence, movies etc…
3. Different characters in different chapters, with different time frames. Yet each having an invisible thread, a mystic parallel. I am taking about Michael Cunningham's The Hours and this third one, I am yet to emulate and learn the nuances of this technique…
I wrote a novel about six years ago that was over 115,000 words, with several flashbacks. This year I went back to it and took the flashbacks and expanded them into another novel... now I have a 75K-word novel, and it's sequel, 90K-words..
That is awesome! And just like if I had a chance to write to Ms. Min Jin Lee, I am writing here my gratitude for you sharing this! I'm happy that someone is having similar experience and it's working! It might not work for me, but the probabilities of it working (at least in my mind) increases per hearing your story!
Yes, I also like how Franzen does it, and I just read ‘Hope’ by Andrew Ridker. The flashbacks are very well done there too
And Salter, in the story we’ve been reading, and I really enjoyed looking at the mechanisms at work there, behind the curtain
Hi. Thank you for sharing your story and I wish you all the best for your book. I was going to recommend Cloud Cuckoo Land too. Another book which I enjoyed is ‘The Secret Scripture’ by Sebastian Barry. Roseanne has been in an asylum for decades and is being reassessed. She doesn’t want to reveal much about her past to the psychiatrist but decides to write a secret manuscript (to herself and the reader) telling her life story. Just an idea. Worked well in Barry’s story. Hope this is helpful.
I love Cloud Cuckoo Land by Doerr, in par with his All the Light We Cannot See if not better! As much as I love and admire Doerr's books, the only criticisms I have for him (if I dare hahaha) are: 1) his prose is too beautiful, too polished --> a little bit overwritten imo. 2) I agree with George (was it George who wrote the critique or someone else?) about the little caricature nature of the bad guy in All the Light We Cannot See --> though villains are villains, they don't see themselves as bad guys doing bad things but ones that are simply doing the necessary things for themselves
The Scecret Scripture sounds interesting! I will put it on my list, thank you for the recommendation. And I love the secret manuscript idea! In fact, there are two books I've read this year that I could recall that were framed as someone writing letters and confession to recount the bulk of the (flashback) stories.
Letters: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Confession: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
I’ve read two of Sebastian Barry books and am looking forward to the others — all about members of the same family but there’s no need to know the backstories to be fully present on the current page. Though I might, in the end, re-read them all with, I suppose, greater knowledge. It’s like how you get to know more and more about everything (people, world) as time goes by. The unfolding of a map, just that. The routes are held by it, but you don’t have to trace them exactly.
I've read Barry. But I havent read Cloud Cuckoo Land, I'll look it up.
Salter moves back and forth in time with such ease. Some of the readers here had trouble with his initial leap. But I think most got it and then sped on. Pinpointing POV through this story is an education. He gets away with great leaps through the subtleties of his language. I've found that many, maybe even all, of the stories George gives us to analyze teach me skills, some of which I didn't know before that I needed! I read Salter's book, Dusk, in which this story appears. All were finely done. this is the only one that I didn't find terribly bleak.
Thanks for sharing! I have always wanted to read The Corrections but never had the chance to bump it up to the top of my list! Will do it in 2024! As for Salter, there's another story of his called Last Night that I admired so much! What a great master he was!
The advice to go back to the beginning seems exactly right. Not just to what drew an agent or editor to the novel, but what made you want to write it. I was once on the set of Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick, after the movie had shut down and then resumed production, and he said, "Everything that happens once you start making the movie can take you away from the movie you want to make. So you always have to go back to why you wanted to make it. Why did you love it?" Remind yourself why you love this story. What it means to you. The how of telling it should express the why of wanting to tell it.
Apologies: but I desperately want to hear more of your Kubrick story. I literally have that quote of his around my writing desk and go back to it every time I work on my projects...."why did you love it?"
Indeed.
Well, I can set the scene a little. Bassingbourn, England, summer of 1986. An hour of heavy rain, crammed into a trailer with Kubrick, Matthew Modine, Vince D'Onofrio, Arliss Howard (my brother), and Leon Vitali. (Side note: there's a good documentary on the late great Leon called "Filmworker" on a streaming service or two). Kubrick's longtime cinematographer had died earlier that year (or maybe the year before?) and the movie was taking a year+ longer to make than planned, with the whole production shutting down when Lee Ermey got injured. By this time, Kubrick was no longer looking at the script. He had the movie in his mind, although (back to the original question here) he wasn't always 100% sure how to make it. He'd spend the morning talking with the principal actors and his camera operator while the crew, say, built long dolly tracks up to an obstacle on the basic training course. Then he'd rehearse running the camera up to the obstacle, timing it with the action, over and over, and then...nope, that's not how he wanted to do it. The crew would tear out the tracks and he'd go back to talking to the actors, waiting for the light to change, waiting for a new idea. His patience was astonishing.
So, we're waiting for the rain to stop and I ask Kubrick about that dolly shot—how do you know whether it's right or not? What are you looking for? And he says this thing that has always stuck with me, about how so much in the production process of a movie conspires against you holding onto your original reason for wanting to make it. You have to keep reminding yourself why this is the story you wanted to tell. If you do that, you're more likely to find the right way to tell it, and when it doesn't seem quite right, you can trust that it's probably not.
I'll also mention, because you're interested, that Kubrick seemed as fascinated by me as I was by him—mostly because I'm Arliss's brother and they were close, but he was also intensely curious about my job. At the time, I was a writer at Hallmark Cards, working on the first e-cards of the pre-internet era (sent from TV to TV via local cable systems). He must have asked me 50 questions about the job—what the offices looked like, how cards were produced, the mechanics of buying and sending e-cards via television, all of it. At some point he said, "A card writer could be an interesting character—you're writing these things for other people to send, as though they're saying them, and then someone else gets the message, reading it as though it's coming from that person, when it's actually from you..." Just smiling and shaking his head, like, how did human beings ever come up with this?
Thanks for sending me down memory lane. I've now read through a lot of the responses to the original question and answer here, and I have to say, this is a beautiful community of people. It figures that such generous hearts and minds would gather around George Saunders. I feel lucky to be here.
A greeting card writer could make an interesting character. It made me think of the main character in Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts who writes an advice column. And the way most poets would probably look down at a greeting card writer, even though it probably pays much better than publishing poetry through other means.
This is amazing, thank you for sharing. And I echo your sentiments in the final few sentences.
And now that I think of it, Spike Jonze's HER is exactly about the card-writer character Kubrick describes. Mind=Blown.
yes, I thought of that, too.
I love this! Thanks for recounting all of this for us, Jim.
First off, having lived in den Nederland for 3 years and having many Dutch friends during my life, I can only say that when a Dutch person apologizes for their English, they will shortly thereafter display depth and nuance that few of us have in our own native language. Second, I doubt there is a culture that prizes books more than they, with an astounding number of publishers sprinkled about. My advice, since our Ansuya is bedeviled by a myriad of structural possibilities, that she hire a Developmental Editor. This should be someone that comes with a reference from her publisher, a writer friend, etc. This editor could act as a serious, evaluative sounding board for the implications, opportunities, and consequences of each possible shape. If you're John Fowles or Jennifer Egan, you probably have access to someone like this in one of the big houses, but the rest of us have to find our own advisors.
One thing we haven’t touched on is the question: “which novels with multiple time lines are very well written?” An excellent question. I actually just finished (today!) Emily St John Mandel’s “Station Eleven”, which jumps between multiple times constantly. I must say that at first I was a little annoyed by the way she did it. Some of the jumps felt jarring--I wasn’t ready to move on because I wasn’t done with the first time. But in the end I think it worked, in that she introduces information in the order that I wanted to know about it. Some flashback material is explanatory, and if you explain too early it loses suspense, and if you explain too late the reader has forgotten about it. Others are more emotional; current feelings being echoed or complemented by past feelings, and I think she did that particularly well.
At first I found Station Eleven's jumps too jumpy, but the work grew on me, and I fell into the deftness and pull of the transitions. I experienced the same thing in Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land, which makes giant jumps in time, but the threaded coherency of the time periods was well done, and moved me a good deal.
Love "Cloud Cuckoo Land"!
Titles that elegantly blend time frames, this would be a great list to add to Story Club's dashboard. We could all contribute our favorites.
At this moment, my brain is mashing up on so many stories...I'm going to have to take time to get my list going for myself.
Completely OT, but I wanted to wish you a very Happy Birthday, George!
Thank you! Spending it up in the shed, writing like a dervish. Or fool.
But...happily.
Not OT at all, Portia! Happy Birthday, George! And all best for many more.
👍 Portia.
You to lead? Three choral rounds of "Hippy Bathday to George!" rounded out by three resounding chairs of "Hip-hop Hurrah! Hip-hop Hurrah! Hip-hop Hurrah!! Hip-hop Hurrah!!!"
One of two things I have long since learned, from way back in my time with with Story Club is that there's always likely going to be need for revisiting first thots with keen 👀 open to reviisions to theirr dafting. Second of two thungs is to expect the unexpected. Always makes me thunk reading comments in Story Club.
When the screw of time turns you're own next bathday Portia . . . have a good one! 😅
In situations like these as an editor, I deploy the strategy that Peter Jackson used when adapting "The Lord of the Rings" for the screen: "If it doesn't get the ring to Mordor, it doesn't go in the film." Determine your Mordor, decide on your ring, then cut and reorganize as necessary.
And yet, when it comes to Tolkien's books, much of them (including some of the most powerful and magical moments) is NOT getting the ring to Mordor. I think the Lord of the Rings would be harder to publish today, with publishers wanting to streamline and cut out a lot of that non-plot stuff. And I wonder what would be lost. Wish I could ask Tolkien his thoughts on all of it!
True. The difference between the books and the movies is that in the books the characters, besides the hobbits (including Gollum), are all legendary archetypes, their characters largely fixed, whereas in the movies the characters had doubts and desires they get past. This is particularly true of Aragorn. In the books he's akin to Marlowe's Tamburlaine, striding the world. In the movies, he's got a whiff of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Prince Hal about him, doubting himself and worried about his destiny.
I disagree that LOTR would be streamlined today; thanks to Tolkien epic fantasies have become incredibly bloated. (I really want to read The Priory of the Orange Tree, for example, but it's sooooo long). That said, I do wonder if LOTR could get published today at all because, thanks to decades of their publishing Tolkien pretenders, publishers are moving away from Western European-based worlds (which is good; The Poppy War series is on my list for next year). If they did, though, the Aragorn-Arwen story, mostly consigned to the appendices, would have to be moved front and center, with Eowyn as more of a complication, to give LOTR a Betty and Veronica romantasy hook (this trend, in my opinion, is less good).
All excellent points. That's an interesting observation about the archetypal characters of the book vs. the angsty versions in the film. I hadn't really thought about that before.
I'm also thinking now about what really makes a book feel "bloated" vs. "rich." You're absolutely right about fantasy today. In fact, despite it being my favorite genre as a kid, I barely read it anymore because I find much of it so tedious. I find the level of detail somewhat excruciating in many cases. And yet I love the Lord of the Rings (even all those pages about party preparations and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins). I'm sure a lot of it simply comes down to personal preference. But I think there may also be something about dedication to realism vs. the archetypes you previously mentioned. Perhaps a book can move toward one or the other, but not both at the same time.
As in Dickens and Steinbeck, Tolkien’s digressions shine.
Haha, love this!
As usual, a lovely answer from George to a heart felt question revealing vulnerability and a desire to learn more. I’m not a writer of novels, though of course I’m a reader of them. So maybe my advice should not be taken too seriously. But I have a hunch that 1200 words is too much and that alone calls for some introspection and editing - editing with emotional detachment. How much of this book is a story for others and how much is self therapy, which is hugely valuable but not a story for others? As a reader I really appreciate distillation, restraint, insightful moments and discoveries - sentences that are like pictures worth a thousand words. To my ear, that’s mastery and I think many of us here are seeking to understand and emulate mastery, including the questioner. So I guess my advice is: 1) congratulations for getting it all out. Sounds therapeutic and like a great and sprawling first draft, or maybe 10th but still early; and 2) kill your darlings. Cut, cut, cut. Cry for them as they fall but soar higher with the ones that make the cut; 3) the elephant probably needs to lose 75% of its body weight. Maybe it really wants to be a tiger- thinner but still awesome in its power?
The question was pitch perfect and created a space for answers that are well honed and helpful. I thought I had it nailed after publication of my debut novel 'The Seasonwife' here in Aotearoa New Zealand.
I was even a little smug, sure that I wouldn't have a loose garment to play with this time. No the body under the garments would be there right from the start.
But now I'm into my next novels, a trilogy, and I realise uh-oh, not so smart. Here I am again, just like the questioner. It is lovely though, falling in love with different aspects of stories in stories, falling in love with numerous characters, falling in love with writing.
I am so keenly aware now that the structure is challenging but vital. Perhaps it is the curse of awareness.
So I have printed out the question and the answers and I'm going to nail these to my heart - metaphorically.
And as a writer suffering financial hardship I am going to keep going knowing that there is hope in this hardship, that the hard graft is like the grinding of a stone. I am writing my way towards revising and restructuring, yes. But the grinding will eventually lead to polish and the true colours will glow.
This is also a reminder that - poor as I am - I can never afford to give up your sub stack George!
Saige, forgive me if this is overstepping but I believe there are gift subscriptions to SC for those with financial hardship. Maybe when it's time to re-up, you could inquire.
Not overstepping at all. Dancing a nice step. Thank you Mary, I will.
I want to thank you all again for this incredible ‘journey at home’ as I could call it. I have always longed for the opportunity to talk to writers about the act of writing, since I don’t have any friends who write and since I’m always inside the people who do are hard to reach.
I’ve always been too shy to post any comment out here, but the past days really cracked something open, if that’s the way to say it. At the same time I had contact with my mother again, since a long time, and she said some very hurtful things; mainly that I shouldn’t count on her for safety, which is the same old song since childhood but it still makes me very sad and insecure about myself. But it did make me realize that the story in the present is an important part of the past, they are untangled with each other on many levels. I should look into it despite of the pain it still causes, which also counts for childhood parts. Avoiding that pain doesn’t get the book finished.
Just like I can see now, as an adult, how unfree she must have felt, as a housewife and mother. She was very angry and unhappy.
But talking to some people here ( and in the emails! 🩶) made me start to believe that perhaps this is not my fault. Yes, I was an anxious child but this was also because she shut the door for us. A snake bites its own tail.
So I’d rather think about the strength I’ve felt out here while I felt safe enough to tell my story, all of a sudden. Which was a wonderful and unexpected gift from all of you.
And how extraordinary, this feeling that George saw right through me, and noticed a question hidden in the main question. So I’ve got both questions answered and then got loads of answers out here too; I think I know what I’m about to do, apart from pinning my ass on a chair.
Anyone who wants to email for whatever reason, about their project or anything else, please do. I’d like that very much. 🩶
You are on the right track. When your memories move from being traumatic to sad, you are healing. I’m sorry your mother was, and is so abusive.
I'm old enough to be a grandmother. My father (deceased) and I had a love-hate relationship—he was a navigator in World War II, flying bombing runs over Germany and had PTSD. He was a troubled man. His only emotion was anger. My mother was negligent (she may have been schizoid and on the autistic spectrum) and my grandmother (probably covert narcissist), who lived with us, was abusive. Our lovely middle-class home was a hellhole. The only way I could write about my relationship with my father was to move it backward in time by 1400 years. I needed that much distance. As I wrote the story, it became increasingly fantastical. I believe I have healed that love-hate relationship through my writing. Now my deceased mother keeps appearing in my dreams, and I think I might write about her. As for my grandmother, I am afraid of even approaching that viper pit (although one of my characters does collect vipers. Maybe I can learn from her). (Even writing this comment is giving me ideas on how I might write about them.)
If you are interested in an email conversation: jmmikk@gmail.com
I often tell myself that John Grisham said writing is the hardest job he’s ever had, and he was both a state legislator and a lawyer. Keep revising that final draft, and soon you will see your book in print.
My mother also was my worst enemy, which seemed so insane that I was unable to process it. Now that I am finally a parent myself I can understand it, a little bit: my being born “ruined her life.” But she was also suffering from the never-processed duress imposed on her by her own parents and grandparents…it goes back a long ways…
(I now understand also that my self-hatred originated with hers. It’s a long, heavy process, unlocking and un-linking those internalized malfunctions…my father’s sense of futility is also mixed-up with hers. Ugh, to be free of all that!! Step-by step….)