Ignore or read, here are my thoughts (as always, a far cry from George’s deeply thoughtful replies):
Dear Questioner,
You’re deep into a work of your own creation. That is to be congratulated. I’m happy for you.
You say you are asking for a sign that you are on the right track. Well, since you asked, here’s your sign: YES. Every time you get that feeling in your gut that things are working, that’s great news. Trust that gut. That gut knows things.
You also say that you’ve been working on this far longer than you anticipated. How long did you anticipate? Maybe take that number and put it in a drawer or the garbage can. There is no “anticipated time frame” for completing a work of art. You know this already. Some books take decades to write.
You also say you worry you may be chasing an impossible dream of perfection. Yes, perfection is impossible! Give that one up. If an impossible goal is your goal, well then….you’ll never get there. You know this already. It’s embedded in your comment. So, toss that one in the garbage, too.
I’m with George here—ask your editor to take a look at the current version, now that you’ve made some changes. Or ask a trusted reader. You may be far closer to the end than you think.
Lastly, that sentence you sort of toss in at the end of your question—the one about having no worthy project to take up after this one, and so you almost dread finishing—that’s something to knock around a bit. Because that’s exactly what life is, a series of projects, relationships, time frames, jobs, life transitions, meals, books, etc. Everything comes to an end and then we’ve got to begin again. Holding onto something out of fear of what comes next is a ticket to standing in place. I hope you’ll complete this thing and get on the next train, the one that leads to you don’t know where until you climb aboard.
I just read this over and I think I sound like an asshole. Apologies. Who do I think I am, always giving advice? I don't know. But here I go, posting.
Hi Mary: I'm the questioner and you don't sound like an asshole! I really appreciate this and it's great to get your take on this along with George's—having both is very useful to me! I have second guessed myself a lot but the editing is helping me learn how to trust my gut—I'm paying attention to my body's sensation as I re-read aloud. THANK YOU!
The read-aloud thing is so powerful. What's revelatory is when you're giving a reading and you find yourself automatically editing or even skipping over a word or a sentence because, well, suddenly you hate the way it sounds! We all need to trust our guts more. We really do know on some level what's working and what isn't. I love that George said just grappling with this question makes you the real deal.
Angela! So glad you're trusting your gut. Other people will have wildly varying opinions on your work. In the end, it's how YOU feel that counts! And congrats again on creating a manuscript to work from. That's fantastic!
I don't find that I am ever done with the question that you raise. And I'm coming to realize that it is a goading question, an annoying but necessary constant for improvement. But you make me realize that a practical way to think about your question, as opposed to answering it directly, is to think about how writers calibrate themselves to become better judges of their own work.
And come to think of it, we talk about that quite a bit in Story Club.
Have you freakified your prose lately?
Reading aloud per Patti Wahlberg is powerful. Whether to oneself, a friend, a lover, or a receptive audience. I'm not sure I do that enough. I sometimes even have the computer read a work-in-progress back to me.
Cultivating a group of good critics helps to tease out passages you were trying to give yourself a pass on. I'm learning how to cultivate such critics better. I try hard to help out others with their writing so I know that they will be generous with me when the need arises. I go back to the ones that don't pull punches and have useful experience. This approach has started to pay off and when it does it is immensely gratifying.
The one short story class I attended at Chicago's Columbia College had us scan our written pages from the bottom up and, without permitting any sort of conscious analysis, just marked passages that seemed to "jump off the page" (RIP John Schultz).
When I was writing a travelogue, I kept a copy of John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charlie" close at hand. I'd read a paragraph or few at random out of his book and then challenge myself to be that good, rewriting while that golden standard still shone brightly in my mind. I heard Jennifer Haigh, the novelist, talk about it once. She said she always had a few "scripture" books in mind as she was writing her next novel.
So, what I am always urging myself to do is to calibrate, recalibrate, and other than that, just keep going.
Thank you, John, for the encouragement! I haven't freakified my writing lately and my version of this is to ask myself if a sentence, phrase, or example I've got is the most honest, direct, and true version I can offer. To ask, is this as far out on the edge I can imagine? I will do this with the next go-round.
I like the idea of working backwards and marking the passages that jump off the page.
And I like the calibrating approach—like we are tuning ourselves to the work at hand—being intentional and ever more sensitized to the ongoing dialogue we're having with the work.
Yep, I've had two writer/heroes in my ear lately with this project: essayist Melissa Febos and journalist Parul Sehgal. It's the directness and clarity of their writing that gets me—it cuts to the bone. They are very different from each other and it surprised me how helpful it's been to hear them in my mind's ear.
Thank you for pushing me further in thinking about all this!
Hi, Angela I was only too happy to nudge you. But then we return to the age-old question, who nudged who (or is that who nudged whom?)?
I find I often get clarity by thinking about how artists who are not writers go about their business. I ask myself questions like what is the writerly equivalent to practicing scales on a guitar or tuning it? What is the writerly equivalent to developing perfect pitch? I wonder how much more we might gain from methods of artists in other disciplines, the more exactly we model our practice on theirs.
Thanks, John, and I think about the writing/music connection all the time because I'm a music career coach (and a recovering cellist). Happy writing to you!
Oh, good to know! Do you know of the book "Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art"? If not, you must read it. Here's a link for a way to purchase it online while avoiding the Amazonopoly.
Thank you, Steve. It's hard to really know how others will read my "tone" in these threads. Electronic communication can really get a person in trouble at times. So I appreciate your words here!
Not an asshole at all, Mary! You sound smart, sensible, encouraging, and reassuring, as always. Both George's post and your comment really resonate with me! A story of mine that just made it into the semi-finals of a competitive short story contest, well...it's had so many incarnations it's kind of embarrassing. I first wrote it in the 90s, then decided to expanded it by about 200,000 words into a novel, working on it in fits and starts over the next twenty years or so, as I raised my kids and started a business with my husband, etc., until I hit a wall with the story arc and shelved it. In my MFA program I dusted off that first chapter (the original short story) and did some radical revision to make it a stand-alone story again, only better (I hope!), and I've been submitting it to pubs and contests. FINALLY got some validation for all my blood and sweat (and often, tears!). When I told my 29-year-old daughter it had gotten picked for the semi-finals, she said, "Congrats, Mom! That short story has been around seemingly my whole life!" YIKES. When you put it like that...
I'm still not sure it's done, but maybe it's almost ready to be abandoned? Thank you, Mary, for reminding me that achieving perfection truly is impossible. And thanks for reminding me that there WILL be more trains coming into the station, all we have to do is climb aboard and find out where they'll take us. Yes, I knew all of this already, and yes, I keep forgetting!
what a great story about your story! Congratulations on reaching the semi-finals--just fantastic news. Maybe there's more fruit to pluck from the rest of that manuscript....? Anyway, I'm full of advice around here, but really it's just me giving myself a pep talk. I hope I'm listening.
I know it wasn't intended for me, but I found this very encouraging and helpful. If my gut says good things are happening, then I'm the right track. Thanks for the reminder!
Hi Mary. You are so generous and you made me smile. Asshole is the last word I’d use to describe you, especially because I reserve it for myself, as do so many of us who care and empathize and worry and insult ourselves first. Oy vey, such harsh mirrors we gaze into. What crap that is. But anyway, this is akin to the need for perfection isn’t it? And isn’t that sort of what the questioner has shared with us, the terror of offering up our creations and ideas, then falling short of our fantasies?
It's amazing that we keep writing at all. It's a brave act, putting our words out into the world. I'm actually the person who wrote the question about mediocrity recently here in office hours, so that gives you a clue as to my own state of mind about falling far short of perfection. Sigh. And yet, we continue. Thanks for your kindness, as always.
Loved the Mediocrity office hours and I can so relate. We are such harsh judges of ourselves. And it’s not just writers. I’m an architect and we pick apart our own work and other people’s endlessly. It’s never good enough. And yet….if not us then who? If those of us who are actually pretty good don’t try, then the field is left open to the egotistical talent-less morons. And not just in the creative fields. Witness our politics….
Part of the problem is that these political hacks DO have talent. They know how to manipulate, they are driven by power and greed. It's all terrible and terribly sad. If not frightening. But yes when it comes to being our own worst judges. I say things to myself I would never say to anyone else! So harsh! Thankfully, I've got people in my life who talk me down and remind me of my better sides. Life! So beautiful and terrible!
I haven't been paying very close attention lately. We were in Northern Italy for two weeks, which was wonderful, and then this week I had a cardiac ablation, which wasn't. But I really couldn't let your comment pass by without commenting. I remember my first comment on Story Club. It was about Savitsky in 'My First Goose.' I compared him to a character in a movie and you took exception saying the character in the movie was a much more humane character than Savitsky. Once I thought about it, I realized you were right. And since then I've come to value and learn from what you have to say here. Don't Stop!
Thanks Mary. I'm doing fine three days after the ablation. Just amazed that they can run these tiny tools up a couple veins from your groin and fix things inside your heart, in this case heart tissue that's causing arrythmias. Sort of a miracle we just attribute to science and medicine.
I haven’t read all of the responses to this question, so perhaps someone has already said this; if so: sorry. But I think sometimes the simple mechanics come into play.
I’ve been at this for a very long time. My first book was published in 1977. I wrote it on the same Smith Corona typewriter that I had schlepped to Brown when I was a freshman there in 1954. The physical act of writing that book—and revising it— was torturous. Remember something called white-out? Remember carbon paper? Each time I re-read a chapter, its pages stacked there beside the typewriter, and decided to change something—a phrase, perhaps, or sometimes the placement of a paragraph—it meant rolling in a fresh sheet of paper (and the carbon paper, and the second sheet, etc.) and typing it again. If the slight revision threw off the formatting, which it almost invariably did, it meant re-typing the entire chapter. Sometimes it threw off the following chapters, which meant more re-typing, rolling in each fresh sheet. And god forbid, when I felt it was finished, but then re-read the entire 200 pages—and realized that because I had added that small bit of dialogue in chapter 7, it meant that I should have introduced that minor character in chapter 2 instead of 4…..I just said the hell with it, I can’t re-type all of this again. And so I sent it off (US mail in those days) to the waiting editor, putting my only other (carbon paper, remember?) copy in the vegetable drawer of my refrigerator because in case the house burned down…
That book is, amazingly, still in print. And I still, when called upon to reopen it and read a page, cringe because I should have re-worked it one more time. Or two, or three.
In contrast: I got a computer (okay, actually, at that point it was just a word-processor) in 1992. Later, a real computer. And then it was too easy. Change that word back in chapter 7. Re-think the pacing in chapter 4. Change it. Do it again. Print it out. No, wait: how about that one character‘s name? Will readers attach religious significance to it, which I didn’t intend? Search and replace. Now print it out again. Oh, look! That chapter ends with just two sentences on its last page; it looks weird. Let me add a few more lines. And while I’m at it…maybe that description in chapter eleven goes on a bit too long…
It is sometimes too damned hard to quit and click SAVE and then SEND.
Lois Lowry, wow-- Delighted to see you here (I'm not worthy)! Your books were favorites of my students in our classroom library when I taught high school English in the Bronx (I'm retired now). Thank you for your wonderful body of work, and for sharing your wisdom.
I know what you mean, about how computers changed things. I wrote my first papers at the U. of Michigan with a Smith Corona (how I rued those 1 x 2" strips of correction paper). My old Mac classic was a game changer. It's true, though, that it can be harder to get to "good enough" when editing is so accessible. I spent a whole summer once picking over the first chapter of a novel-in-progress. (I make myself write new material first now, when I do sit down to write, which I hope will be a lot more often in the coming years, before editing or "debugging," as my husband calls it, previous material.)
I remember the days of typing up submissions to mail out, and you've perfectly (and painfully) described the frustrations of that process! Fortunately I was mostly a poet in those days, so I wasn't retyping whole chapters.
I do remember! Arrgh -- how did we do it? The process of correction and revision you describe turned me into a slow, detail-driven writer. I couldn't bear to make a mistake then (one typo meant so much work!) and I can't shake that drive for precision and correctness even now. I try to "let go" and cover the page with whatever, but it doesn't work. I can't -- the minute I see a discrepancy or an error, I have to go back and fix it. Arrgh.
I laughed when I read your comment. I got a D in typing when I was in high school. In class, we learned on those huge beastly typewriters that must have dated back to 1930, but I had a little portable at home (my dad thought I should be a secretary). I didn't really start to write until much later, when the earliest computers came out. And now I often think, how could I do this without a computer? But, at the same time, I remember reading a novel (by a renowned author) that was published before the advent of computers and thinking that there were flaws in it which someone writing today with a computer would have fixed. You just verified my suspicions. Thanks. I'm still chuckling. We are now living in another era.
How lovely to have you here, Lois! And, yes, I remember carbon paper & white out & the clack of the keys & those finished pages stacking up, satisfyingly. More efficient though the process may be now, I miss the physicality, the touch of those tools once necessary for composition.
I just had a story published in an online journal, a story that I never thought would get published. It was a lengthy story (originally 15,000 words, now 12,000) that I initially wrote over a few months in 2017-18. Because I didn't know what to do with it at the time (very few journals accept submissions of fiction longer than 10,000 words), I submitted to the few places I could, which weren't really good matches for it, and put it away. But over the years I would take it out and edit it, sometimes trying to see if it could be cut down under 10K words, other times seeing if playing around with tense helped, noodling with the ending, etc. Well, I kept a lot of those edits, reversed others, and finally reworked the ending into something I thought really worked. I discovered the aforementioned online journal earlier this year, submitted the story over the summer, and got a response that was incredibly positive with the offer to publish it (as a novelette, which is to a novella what flash fiction is to a short story, I think). Anyway, it came out yesterday, and I immediately started reading it to see if it was as good as I remembered after I finished my last edit. Well, it is and it isn't. After six years, it still isn't perfect. But I am satisfied with it, proud of it even, and as George says (or Faulkner, I guess), I know the long process I've been through will help me in the next story I write, whether it's of conventional length or not.
Yep, exactly! And congrats!! I had a new story come out in print recently & the first thing I noticed was an error--not all the good stuff (which, like you, took me years), but the damn error. It's a minor one & I should have caught it in the page proofs, but, geez maneeze. There just ain't no perfect, though we like to think otherwise!
I had, and have still, a dear friend from college who wrote the most annoyingly perfect papers (and has now written an annoyingly almost perfect novel) but who could never get a perfect A+ grade from her professor. No matter what, he never gave her more than a 98. On anything she turned in. Ever. Finally she confronted him. This was at a Catholic university. His answer: because no one, by definition, is perfect, therefore, he automatically took two points off for original sin. Aarrgggh, so much for perfection!
Milton, I think you may have missed the point. It's unlikely that the professor I mentioned was docked. He was much revered, now long gone & still years later much respected & a legend on campus. His 98 remark about my friend didn't have to do with her ability, which was unchallenged, but with her acceptance of our naturally occurring & inescapable flaws. I was in a different department, headed by a Jew & a Holocaust survivor, this, mind you, at a Catholic university. My mentor's standards were just as exacting, though his expressions of any disappointment regarding me were more fluid, more deserved, much louder, & certainly his own! Owing to a beating he endured by some Nazis, my dear old professor was nearly blind. But that did not stop him. Ever. He never graduated high school but somehow earned a PhD from Berkeley. Imperfect student though I was, when my husband & I married, my dear old professor drove through three states and several hundred miles to be there when we exchanged vows. How, I still can't imagine! But what my friend's professor & mine were conveying to each of us was the power of love, love for the student, imperfect, imperfect, imperfect.
Every project is its own learning experience! Sometimes those experiences take years of your life. Sometimes they take only a few months. But always try to get something from them.
Wow & hooray & congrats about the opera, George! I'd been wondering about it & wish you all great success in Cincinnati & beyond. Please keep us posted! As for the question, I'm wondering if the questioner has ever considered putting the project away for a while. I mean completely out of sight, buried somewhere where you can't lay hands on it. And leaving it alone for a while, a good long while, like six months or so. And then taking it out & reading it again. In my experience, leaving the thing alone like this & then coming back to it with fresh eyes reveals all the strengths & all the project's weaknesses. And often any problems that come up will also appear, almost magically, with solutions, or at least suggestions of fixes. I've found this approach to be very helpful---it sometimes seems as if I hadn't even authored the thing in the first place, and yet this period of rest not only allows for easy identification of strengths & weaknesses, but helps me better grasp & acknowledge my own writerly powers. I really believe that the back of the brain continues to reconfigure, to realign and make improvements even when the work is not consciously before us (no matter what that work may be). And I don't think I'm alone in this.
Ah, yes, i meant to write this in my comment as well. I find this is the best way to really "see" what you've written: put it away long enough that you may not even remember having written it. Then take a look with fresh eyes. It's really the best advice.
I think I am too attached and feeling like the baby's in the birth canal trying to get born to wait put her away for 6 months but I will see how the next few weeks go. I was hoping to be done by the new year. My agent isn't in a hurry so this is just my own anxiety and clearly I need to calm down.
Oh, Angela, it's you???!!!! Lovely to hear from you! Well, I have to say that you asked an excellent question, one that all of us have asked, struggled with, torn hair over, screamed, at one point or another. But I also have to say that you already know what to do, you experienced as you are. You already know what to do!!! Wait. Wait. Wait some more. It'll come what to do next. And, by the way, yes, I did see your piece in which you quoted me & it's fine--you did a great job, no surprise. Wishing you well!---and lovely to hear from you.
Oh, thank you so much, Rosanne, and if you're ever in Boston, I'd love to meet up! Wouldn't it be great to have a Story Club reunion or writing retreat sometime with George? Hhhmm, maybe there's an idea in there—maybe in conjunction with some of his travel for book tours or for the opera performance?
Great advice. Coming back to something fresh... Also I find it's easier to eliminate the chaff of the piece once it's been out of my head several weeks (or several years) When it's still alive in my mind, cutting a scene is like cutting off a finger, but after leaving it for some time, I can be more critical of it.
Done, for me an intuitive feeling, almost like the hairs going up at back of my neck. The more I learn to trust my gut, the better I am at recognizing done. Of course, I have also lied to myself a number of times by sending something out before I had that feeling and knowing it's not really done, but that never works out well.
I had a similar feeling as the questioner when I was done with my novel and ready to start something new.... it was very intimidating to be in the big unknowns of imagination, when I'd been spending so much time with people and situations, and while things were not perfect, I at least knew them really well. Writing a new things is different.
Just a note to the writer to say I feel this whole question, and especially this: "Lately, I've really just been tracking the energy of the writing itself. So I'm paying attention to wherever there are "sags" in the energy. And I've become much more sensitive to where there are even slight hiccups in this energy flow. I am much more attuned to my intuition about where something is needing attention."
Mine's a novel, and I love my story and I'm proud of it, but it's 118K and there are moments of energy and sagging, and I feel like it does need likely need a few healthy chops here and there and some structural work but at the same time is in decent shape overall. But it's huge, I'm a poky and erratic reader, and the hardest thing for me is I can't seem to see the whole thing at once. With a short story, I can do a full run-through in one session. But a 400 page novel? It's impossible? My thesis adviser/committee read the second draft and liked it (with enthusiasm!) but liked it as a draft. I've revised again with their comments in mind. When I couldn't get much traction with my queries, I set it aside. I don't want to give up on it, but I don't know seem to know how to work on it in a way that really moves it forward or helps it become the best version of itself.
I don't know. I wish I knew what to say that would be helpful and productive, but mostly I just want to say that I hear you, and you're not alone on this one. And thank you for asking, because it makes me feel less on an island about this, too.
Oh, but you will TOTALLY have more ideas. Do not worry about that! You will find the next project, and it may come from an unexpected place or memory. Seriously, I tripped over mine via a throwaway paragraph in a New York Times article. As humans we contain multitudes of stories. This one book is not it for you at all, not one bit!
If you are poky as a reader, have you tried running through text to speech and listening to it?
I hate doing this personally, but I find it really helpful to go scene by scene and try to summarize what happens in a sentence or two. The process of doing that is illuminating, and it's sometimes a bit easier to see the whole thing in skeleton form.
Hi Sonal: I've done text to speech—I use Speechify and it's still clunky but helps. Of the many many voices and accents they offer I found only ONE that I could listen to and I alternate between having it read to me and me reading aloud.
Thank you, Carolyn, I am the questioner and I appreciate this! Good luck with your novel! Maybe a break from it will help? And, in case this helps, I found reading new writers got me excited in some of my worst slumps lately.
Other voices who were doing something brave and finding ways to connect ideas—that's felt like a gift from the gods. Not that I could do what they are doing in their voices, but even just seeing and "getting" what they were doing inspired me!
Do you have some writers you've read lately who've done that in long-form fiction—who've handled big plots and many characters in ways you admire?
A really important question (thanks, Angela!) and a great response from George. I'm working on a novel (historical, eighteenth-century, no kings and queens involved) that should pan out at 120,000 - 140,000 words. It's been once-finished, then picked up again. Everything in it has been rethought and rewritten, often according to impulses coming from who-knows-where in the mind (characters sometimes appear to me, almost as visions, and do something that is absolutely right and results in change, even major, in the story). But one thing (among others) I've learned here from George and SC is to work and rework and revise the beginning and to plug away at it until it feels dead right. My beginning is a first-person non-omniscient and possibly flaky POV, one of three POVs in the novel. The hardest thing I've been struggling with is finding this character's voice. As long as I don't have it, the narrative feels baggy and fake. And once I have it, I know what to tell and what not to tell. Things slot into place, or jump out, no need for them.
Lately I feel I'm getting there. What a burst of energy that feeling gives! I've got the beginning nailed!
Well, almost:
"...this feeling usually comes before it should. So this is something we want to try to learn to recognize, with practice: the difference between the premature version of this feeling and the “true” one."
So we plod on, astride our broken-winded Rosinantes, searching for the Holy Graal of Truth...
Oh, thank you, George, for this—I REALLY REALLY appreciate it. Just seeing that you'd answered my question felt like winning the lottery and your suggestions are SO helpful and grounding! I'd had a bad couple of days of editing this week but earlier today came around the bend (what an emotional roller coaster this has been!) so things are looking up.
Yes, I can see that chapters and sections are definitely "cohering/congealing" (and I'm even finding new connecting threads that are happening)—so this shot in the arm has been enormously helpful and I'm taking heart.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU!
PS: I can't wait to get to hear the opera—have a great time with the workshop and performance!
Have an amazing time in Cincinnati (my hometown, I've sent you postcards)! When I heard about the Opera Fusion workshop I texted everyone I know to tell them to attend. George, Missy Mazzoli, and my favorite opera company in the same room... I wish I could teleport! Looking forward to hearing Lincoln in the Bardo myself some day, hopefully in Cincinnati's beautiful Music Hall.
Yes! I'm sure it will be an amazing time and I would love to hear the presentation on Sunday- quite envious. As someone who has been involved with opera (as a non-singing extra) for decades when I read about this project my reaction was a slap to my own forehead and say "of course Lincoln in the Bardo should be an opera!" It's perfect for this story. Any roles for non-singing extras??
I worked on my last story for over a year and after about 60 drafts and countless revisions it felt like I was finally done and I submitted it to some journals. But the subconscious kept throwing out suggestions for improvements at random times. So I ended up withdrawing and re-submitting at some of the journals – too late at others because they have already started reviewing what I had originally submitted. Now I feel bad that I submitted my non-best effort. And I am still updating that story for any future submissions, even as I have started on the next one.
Several of you have commented here, and I am learning the hard way, to let the story rest and go work on something else, then come back to review it with fresh eyes. I find that really helps, but still need to develop the discipline to do it consistently.
Strange that I just joined substack and found you here this evening, and the first post leads with a photo here in my hometown of Oxford! When you came to Square Books for CivilWarLand, I worked at Sq Bks and went to dinner at Taylor Catfish with you and the other booksellers. Been a fan ever since. AND you wrote me the most lovely letter after you read my piece “What Happened To Me” in the Oxford American. It meant the world to me.
Kristen - welcome to the group. Sounds like serendipity. And...I read your piece. What a horror. I'm so sorry that happened. I'm humbled by the awful experience and by your courage to write about it.
Cristen: I just now read your piece, and I am truly shaken and shaking. I wish I could write you a lovely letter like George did. I wish I could say something appropriate. But honestly, I'm left without words right now. Except, of course, I'm so sorry this happened to you--words that feel so incredibly inadequate. Glad you are here with us in Story Club. I hope you enjoy the community here as much as I do.
"(Here, we’re guarding against the possibility that you are just endlessly changing things and nothing is congealing/cohering). (Is the Rubik’s Cube getting closer to having all of its color’s lined up, or is it just in different states of randomness?)"
I've spent so long in that loop, it's not even funny.
I guess there are many reasons why 'the end' takes longer to get to than we think / expect / hope. One might be unrealistic expectations ('I'll write this twelve-volume novel in a month'), which just needs a reality check; but that doesn't sound like the issue in your case.
A slightly different version of this is the unrealistic dream of the outcome if we do a really good job. No matter how good the individual finished piece work is, it's not going to make us a foot taller, and it's unlikely to win us the Nobel Prize, or make us rich beyond our wildest dreams.
Worse, the longer we work on something, the more unreasonable the desired effect can become.
Finishing then might be an issue because we'll have to accept the fact that - no matter how good the work - it simply can't achieve those things. It's not so much fear of failure, but fear of the reality check a reasonable success might bring. On some level, we know this, no matter how deep the denial; hence the reluctance to finish and know it for sure.
Another issue might be the fact that we're aiming at a moving target. Are you writing about a subject that's evolving fast? Makes it tricky to formulate a 'definitive' work; I'd imagine you'd need to aim for some sort of 'snapshot' of the current situation, perhaps with some closing thoughts on what the future may hold.
The flip-side of this: the longer the work takes, the more we will have evolved by the time it's finished (or at least we will have evolved if we're still engaging with life). It's a bit like the calculations needed for space flight: you know the mass of the rocket, and work out how much fuel it would take to get that rocket into orbit. But you'll also need to get that fuel off the ground, so more fuel is needed to lift the weight of that fuel; then more fuel needed to lift THAT fuel; etc.
If you keep getting to what WOULD have been the end, but now find it dissatisfying, it can be healthy to remind yourself of what the original brief was, or the exact nature of the initial impulse or inspiration. If you can re-embrace that perspective, this can be a decent antidote to perfectionism.
Of course. So much work. I have two boards now, one for inside, like Dahls, for the chair, and a smaller one , just a tray really, for ouside as now under the apple tree dapple. Full bloom of spring here in the South Pacific. So I type in the shade of a tree of the usefulness of this question. Oh God, to be sucked in by your own work, bliss! Who wrote this, you ask. Then you read Faulkner, just a graf and you realise , oh stone-drunk fool, You're not as good as you'd like to think you are. hah aha.
After 4 years on a novel, and feeling tired of working on it (I know it could be better), I’m dragging out another book I abandoned at least 10 years ago to see if it comes alive for me. Maybe? And if it does, I hope the same thing happens to my second book. Maybe there’s something to be said for letting the dough test so it can rise.
Ignore or read, here are my thoughts (as always, a far cry from George’s deeply thoughtful replies):
Dear Questioner,
You’re deep into a work of your own creation. That is to be congratulated. I’m happy for you.
You say you are asking for a sign that you are on the right track. Well, since you asked, here’s your sign: YES. Every time you get that feeling in your gut that things are working, that’s great news. Trust that gut. That gut knows things.
You also say that you’ve been working on this far longer than you anticipated. How long did you anticipate? Maybe take that number and put it in a drawer or the garbage can. There is no “anticipated time frame” for completing a work of art. You know this already. Some books take decades to write.
You also say you worry you may be chasing an impossible dream of perfection. Yes, perfection is impossible! Give that one up. If an impossible goal is your goal, well then….you’ll never get there. You know this already. It’s embedded in your comment. So, toss that one in the garbage, too.
I’m with George here—ask your editor to take a look at the current version, now that you’ve made some changes. Or ask a trusted reader. You may be far closer to the end than you think.
Lastly, that sentence you sort of toss in at the end of your question—the one about having no worthy project to take up after this one, and so you almost dread finishing—that’s something to knock around a bit. Because that’s exactly what life is, a series of projects, relationships, time frames, jobs, life transitions, meals, books, etc. Everything comes to an end and then we’ve got to begin again. Holding onto something out of fear of what comes next is a ticket to standing in place. I hope you’ll complete this thing and get on the next train, the one that leads to you don’t know where until you climb aboard.
I just read this over and I think I sound like an asshole. Apologies. Who do I think I am, always giving advice? I don't know. But here I go, posting.
Hi Mary: I'm the questioner and you don't sound like an asshole! I really appreciate this and it's great to get your take on this along with George's—having both is very useful to me! I have second guessed myself a lot but the editing is helping me learn how to trust my gut—I'm paying attention to my body's sensation as I re-read aloud. THANK YOU!
The read-aloud thing is so powerful. What's revelatory is when you're giving a reading and you find yourself automatically editing or even skipping over a word or a sentence because, well, suddenly you hate the way it sounds! We all need to trust our guts more. We really do know on some level what's working and what isn't. I love that George said just grappling with this question makes you the real deal.
Thank you, Patti, I appreciate all the encouragement and support that is Story Club!
Angela, what a great question. Everything you wrote was super helpful to me. Thank you.
Angela! So glad you're trusting your gut. Other people will have wildly varying opinions on your work. In the end, it's how YOU feel that counts! And congrats again on creating a manuscript to work from. That's fantastic!
Hi, Angela.
I don't find that I am ever done with the question that you raise. And I'm coming to realize that it is a goading question, an annoying but necessary constant for improvement. But you make me realize that a practical way to think about your question, as opposed to answering it directly, is to think about how writers calibrate themselves to become better judges of their own work.
And come to think of it, we talk about that quite a bit in Story Club.
Have you freakified your prose lately?
Reading aloud per Patti Wahlberg is powerful. Whether to oneself, a friend, a lover, or a receptive audience. I'm not sure I do that enough. I sometimes even have the computer read a work-in-progress back to me.
Cultivating a group of good critics helps to tease out passages you were trying to give yourself a pass on. I'm learning how to cultivate such critics better. I try hard to help out others with their writing so I know that they will be generous with me when the need arises. I go back to the ones that don't pull punches and have useful experience. This approach has started to pay off and when it does it is immensely gratifying.
The one short story class I attended at Chicago's Columbia College had us scan our written pages from the bottom up and, without permitting any sort of conscious analysis, just marked passages that seemed to "jump off the page" (RIP John Schultz).
When I was writing a travelogue, I kept a copy of John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charlie" close at hand. I'd read a paragraph or few at random out of his book and then challenge myself to be that good, rewriting while that golden standard still shone brightly in my mind. I heard Jennifer Haigh, the novelist, talk about it once. She said she always had a few "scripture" books in mind as she was writing her next novel.
So, what I am always urging myself to do is to calibrate, recalibrate, and other than that, just keep going.
Thanks for your question. You lifted the bar!
John
Thank you, John, for the encouragement! I haven't freakified my writing lately and my version of this is to ask myself if a sentence, phrase, or example I've got is the most honest, direct, and true version I can offer. To ask, is this as far out on the edge I can imagine? I will do this with the next go-round.
I like the idea of working backwards and marking the passages that jump off the page.
And I like the calibrating approach—like we are tuning ourselves to the work at hand—being intentional and ever more sensitized to the ongoing dialogue we're having with the work.
Yep, I've had two writer/heroes in my ear lately with this project: essayist Melissa Febos and journalist Parul Sehgal. It's the directness and clarity of their writing that gets me—it cuts to the bone. They are very different from each other and it surprised me how helpful it's been to hear them in my mind's ear.
Thank you for pushing me further in thinking about all this!
Hi, Angela I was only too happy to nudge you. But then we return to the age-old question, who nudged who (or is that who nudged whom?)?
I find I often get clarity by thinking about how artists who are not writers go about their business. I ask myself questions like what is the writerly equivalent to practicing scales on a guitar or tuning it? What is the writerly equivalent to developing perfect pitch? I wonder how much more we might gain from methods of artists in other disciplines, the more exactly we model our practice on theirs.
I am excited to think about your next result.
John
Thanks, John, and I think about the writing/music connection all the time because I'm a music career coach (and a recovering cellist). Happy writing to you!
Oh, good to know! Do you know of the book "Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art"? If not, you must read it. Here's a link for a way to purchase it online while avoiding the Amazonopoly.
Dear Mary g, you don't sound like an asshole.
Thank you, Steve. It's hard to really know how others will read my "tone" in these threads. Electronic communication can really get a person in trouble at times. So I appreciate your words here!
Not an asshole at all, Mary! You sound smart, sensible, encouraging, and reassuring, as always. Both George's post and your comment really resonate with me! A story of mine that just made it into the semi-finals of a competitive short story contest, well...it's had so many incarnations it's kind of embarrassing. I first wrote it in the 90s, then decided to expanded it by about 200,000 words into a novel, working on it in fits and starts over the next twenty years or so, as I raised my kids and started a business with my husband, etc., until I hit a wall with the story arc and shelved it. In my MFA program I dusted off that first chapter (the original short story) and did some radical revision to make it a stand-alone story again, only better (I hope!), and I've been submitting it to pubs and contests. FINALLY got some validation for all my blood and sweat (and often, tears!). When I told my 29-year-old daughter it had gotten picked for the semi-finals, she said, "Congrats, Mom! That short story has been around seemingly my whole life!" YIKES. When you put it like that...
I'm still not sure it's done, but maybe it's almost ready to be abandoned? Thank you, Mary, for reminding me that achieving perfection truly is impossible. And thanks for reminding me that there WILL be more trains coming into the station, all we have to do is climb aboard and find out where they'll take us. Yes, I knew all of this already, and yes, I keep forgetting!
what a great story about your story! Congratulations on reaching the semi-finals--just fantastic news. Maybe there's more fruit to pluck from the rest of that manuscript....? Anyway, I'm full of advice around here, but really it's just me giving myself a pep talk. I hope I'm listening.
Wow, Patti! I thought I had stamina.
Maybe I have too much.
Ha.
Definitely not an asshole- actually rather quotable.
Agreed.
that's so nice, Emma! Thank you.
I know it wasn't intended for me, but I found this very encouraging and helpful. If my gut says good things are happening, then I'm the right track. Thanks for the reminder!
Thank you, Aaron!
Hi Mary. You are so generous and you made me smile. Asshole is the last word I’d use to describe you, especially because I reserve it for myself, as do so many of us who care and empathize and worry and insult ourselves first. Oy vey, such harsh mirrors we gaze into. What crap that is. But anyway, this is akin to the need for perfection isn’t it? And isn’t that sort of what the questioner has shared with us, the terror of offering up our creations and ideas, then falling short of our fantasies?
It's amazing that we keep writing at all. It's a brave act, putting our words out into the world. I'm actually the person who wrote the question about mediocrity recently here in office hours, so that gives you a clue as to my own state of mind about falling far short of perfection. Sigh. And yet, we continue. Thanks for your kindness, as always.
Loved the Mediocrity office hours and I can so relate. We are such harsh judges of ourselves. And it’s not just writers. I’m an architect and we pick apart our own work and other people’s endlessly. It’s never good enough. And yet….if not us then who? If those of us who are actually pretty good don’t try, then the field is left open to the egotistical talent-less morons. And not just in the creative fields. Witness our politics….
Part of the problem is that these political hacks DO have talent. They know how to manipulate, they are driven by power and greed. It's all terrible and terribly sad. If not frightening. But yes when it comes to being our own worst judges. I say things to myself I would never say to anyone else! So harsh! Thankfully, I've got people in my life who talk me down and remind me of my better sides. Life! So beautiful and terrible!
the politics now remind me of the line in the Yeats poem The Second Coming:
"....The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Wow. True words, Kurt!
I focus more on the meals lately...
haha! If i told you how many hint of lime doritos i've eaten in the last week.... Time for me to move on!
You are what you eat.
You should get good square meals.
(Advice from A.N. Asshole)
give up my lime-y triangles? Next thing you'll be telling me to stop smoking! Sheesh!
OK, as long as you don't smoke the triangles.
See, I can't stop giving A.N. Asshole advice...
I haven't been paying very close attention lately. We were in Northern Italy for two weeks, which was wonderful, and then this week I had a cardiac ablation, which wasn't. But I really couldn't let your comment pass by without commenting. I remember my first comment on Story Club. It was about Savitsky in 'My First Goose.' I compared him to a character in a movie and you took exception saying the character in the movie was a much more humane character than Savitsky. Once I thought about it, I realized you were right. And since then I've come to value and learn from what you have to say here. Don't Stop!
Big hugs to you, Charlie. Thank you for this. (Sorry about the ablation--i so hope all is well now.)
Thanks Mary. I'm doing fine three days after the ablation. Just amazed that they can run these tiny tools up a couple veins from your groin and fix things inside your heart, in this case heart tissue that's causing arrythmias. Sort of a miracle we just attribute to science and medicine.
Glad to hear it went well, Charlie.
Absolutely amazing. My husband had stents placed in his heart in the same manner. I was stunned by all of it. (He is fine now, as well, thank God.)
Well, when that gut feeling is well brewed then out comes some good shit, from your arsehole!
Iam! Bringing the immaturity standard down another notch!
ha! yes entering second childhood.
best time of life!
HA!
Dreading finishing, good one, Mary. Fears are the piranhas troubling the waters writers like to swim in. Just keep going I think is the usual mantra.
Why even compare?^^
I haven’t read all of the responses to this question, so perhaps someone has already said this; if so: sorry. But I think sometimes the simple mechanics come into play.
I’ve been at this for a very long time. My first book was published in 1977. I wrote it on the same Smith Corona typewriter that I had schlepped to Brown when I was a freshman there in 1954. The physical act of writing that book—and revising it— was torturous. Remember something called white-out? Remember carbon paper? Each time I re-read a chapter, its pages stacked there beside the typewriter, and decided to change something—a phrase, perhaps, or sometimes the placement of a paragraph—it meant rolling in a fresh sheet of paper (and the carbon paper, and the second sheet, etc.) and typing it again. If the slight revision threw off the formatting, which it almost invariably did, it meant re-typing the entire chapter. Sometimes it threw off the following chapters, which meant more re-typing, rolling in each fresh sheet. And god forbid, when I felt it was finished, but then re-read the entire 200 pages—and realized that because I had added that small bit of dialogue in chapter 7, it meant that I should have introduced that minor character in chapter 2 instead of 4…..I just said the hell with it, I can’t re-type all of this again. And so I sent it off (US mail in those days) to the waiting editor, putting my only other (carbon paper, remember?) copy in the vegetable drawer of my refrigerator because in case the house burned down…
That book is, amazingly, still in print. And I still, when called upon to reopen it and read a page, cringe because I should have re-worked it one more time. Or two, or three.
In contrast: I got a computer (okay, actually, at that point it was just a word-processor) in 1992. Later, a real computer. And then it was too easy. Change that word back in chapter 7. Re-think the pacing in chapter 4. Change it. Do it again. Print it out. No, wait: how about that one character‘s name? Will readers attach religious significance to it, which I didn’t intend? Search and replace. Now print it out again. Oh, look! That chapter ends with just two sentences on its last page; it looks weird. Let me add a few more lines. And while I’m at it…maybe that description in chapter eleven goes on a bit too long…
It is sometimes too damned hard to quit and click SAVE and then SEND.
Lois, so pleased to have you here!
Lois Lowry, wow-- Delighted to see you here (I'm not worthy)! Your books were favorites of my students in our classroom library when I taught high school English in the Bronx (I'm retired now). Thank you for your wonderful body of work, and for sharing your wisdom.
I know what you mean, about how computers changed things. I wrote my first papers at the U. of Michigan with a Smith Corona (how I rued those 1 x 2" strips of correction paper). My old Mac classic was a game changer. It's true, though, that it can be harder to get to "good enough" when editing is so accessible. I spent a whole summer once picking over the first chapter of a novel-in-progress. (I make myself write new material first now, when I do sit down to write, which I hope will be a lot more often in the coming years, before editing or "debugging," as my husband calls it, previous material.)
Lois Lowry! I bow to you and thank you deeply for your books. What a thrill to find you here in Story Club! So happy to know you are among us!
I remember the days of typing up submissions to mail out, and you've perfectly (and painfully) described the frustrations of that process! Fortunately I was mostly a poet in those days, so I wasn't retyping whole chapters.
I do remember! Arrgh -- how did we do it? The process of correction and revision you describe turned me into a slow, detail-driven writer. I couldn't bear to make a mistake then (one typo meant so much work!) and I can't shake that drive for precision and correctness even now. I try to "let go" and cover the page with whatever, but it doesn't work. I can't -- the minute I see a discrepancy or an error, I have to go back and fix it. Arrgh.
Thank you for sharing your vivid response, the image of your draft in the vegetable drawer!
I laughed when I read your comment. I got a D in typing when I was in high school. In class, we learned on those huge beastly typewriters that must have dated back to 1930, but I had a little portable at home (my dad thought I should be a secretary). I didn't really start to write until much later, when the earliest computers came out. And now I often think, how could I do this without a computer? But, at the same time, I remember reading a novel (by a renowned author) that was published before the advent of computers and thinking that there were flaws in it which someone writing today with a computer would have fixed. You just verified my suspicions. Thanks. I'm still chuckling. We are now living in another era.
How lovely to have you here, Lois! And, yes, I remember carbon paper & white out & the clack of the keys & those finished pages stacking up, satisfyingly. More efficient though the process may be now, I miss the physicality, the touch of those tools once necessary for composition.
I just had a story published in an online journal, a story that I never thought would get published. It was a lengthy story (originally 15,000 words, now 12,000) that I initially wrote over a few months in 2017-18. Because I didn't know what to do with it at the time (very few journals accept submissions of fiction longer than 10,000 words), I submitted to the few places I could, which weren't really good matches for it, and put it away. But over the years I would take it out and edit it, sometimes trying to see if it could be cut down under 10K words, other times seeing if playing around with tense helped, noodling with the ending, etc. Well, I kept a lot of those edits, reversed others, and finally reworked the ending into something I thought really worked. I discovered the aforementioned online journal earlier this year, submitted the story over the summer, and got a response that was incredibly positive with the offer to publish it (as a novelette, which is to a novella what flash fiction is to a short story, I think). Anyway, it came out yesterday, and I immediately started reading it to see if it was as good as I remembered after I finished my last edit. Well, it is and it isn't. After six years, it still isn't perfect. But I am satisfied with it, proud of it even, and as George says (or Faulkner, I guess), I know the long process I've been through will help me in the next story I write, whether it's of conventional length or not.
Yep, exactly! And congrats!! I had a new story come out in print recently & the first thing I noticed was an error--not all the good stuff (which, like you, took me years), but the damn error. It's a minor one & I should have caught it in the page proofs, but, geez maneeze. There just ain't no perfect, though we like to think otherwise!
Chekhov wrote that in a letter, after someone wrote to praise him for a story. "Yes, but it has errors in it."
I had, and have still, a dear friend from college who wrote the most annoyingly perfect papers (and has now written an annoyingly almost perfect novel) but who could never get a perfect A+ grade from her professor. No matter what, he never gave her more than a 98. On anything she turned in. Ever. Finally she confronted him. This was at a Catholic university. His answer: because no one, by definition, is perfect, therefore, he automatically took two points off for original sin. Aarrgggh, so much for perfection!
I hope the Catholic University deducted 2% from his checks every week for the same reason.
Milton, I think you may have missed the point. It's unlikely that the professor I mentioned was docked. He was much revered, now long gone & still years later much respected & a legend on campus. His 98 remark about my friend didn't have to do with her ability, which was unchallenged, but with her acceptance of our naturally occurring & inescapable flaws. I was in a different department, headed by a Jew & a Holocaust survivor, this, mind you, at a Catholic university. My mentor's standards were just as exacting, though his expressions of any disappointment regarding me were more fluid, more deserved, much louder, & certainly his own! Owing to a beating he endured by some Nazis, my dear old professor was nearly blind. But that did not stop him. Ever. He never graduated high school but somehow earned a PhD from Berkeley. Imperfect student though I was, when my husband & I married, my dear old professor drove through three states and several hundred miles to be there when we exchanged vows. How, I still can't imagine! But what my friend's professor & mine were conveying to each of us was the power of love, love for the student, imperfect, imperfect, imperfect.
I certainly did misunderstand your point - my apologies.
Professors like that need to be argued with, preferably in a philosophers dive bar, and then forced to pick up the check.
Ha! I think they argued thus & he did pick up the check!
Hahahaha! Love it.
I'm tempted...but I'll listen to the one with wings on my good shoulder^^
Hi Rosanne—just wanted to see if you got the email I sent you with the post where I quoted you? Hope I got it right. Let me know and thanks again!
Alex, would you be willing to share a link to the online journal so that we may read your work? Thank you.
Yes, and thank you for asking. My story, "Kana," can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/sundial-magazine/novelettes/kana
Thanks, Alex---looking forward! And will keep any errors I notice to myself! Just kidding!!!!
Thank you! I look forward to reading!
Congrats, Alex! The work never end.
Congratulations Alex! Very nicely done. I specially liked the "story within the story."
At one point I had cut that story out but later put it back in. So I’m especially glad to hear you say that!
Thanks!
Every project is its own learning experience! Sometimes those experiences take years of your life. Sometimes they take only a few months. But always try to get something from them.
Put perfectly, Miles.
Wow & hooray & congrats about the opera, George! I'd been wondering about it & wish you all great success in Cincinnati & beyond. Please keep us posted! As for the question, I'm wondering if the questioner has ever considered putting the project away for a while. I mean completely out of sight, buried somewhere where you can't lay hands on it. And leaving it alone for a while, a good long while, like six months or so. And then taking it out & reading it again. In my experience, leaving the thing alone like this & then coming back to it with fresh eyes reveals all the strengths & all the project's weaknesses. And often any problems that come up will also appear, almost magically, with solutions, or at least suggestions of fixes. I've found this approach to be very helpful---it sometimes seems as if I hadn't even authored the thing in the first place, and yet this period of rest not only allows for easy identification of strengths & weaknesses, but helps me better grasp & acknowledge my own writerly powers. I really believe that the back of the brain continues to reconfigure, to realign and make improvements even when the work is not consciously before us (no matter what that work may be). And I don't think I'm alone in this.
Ah, yes, i meant to write this in my comment as well. I find this is the best way to really "see" what you've written: put it away long enough that you may not even remember having written it. Then take a look with fresh eyes. It's really the best advice.
Hi Rosanne:
I'm the questioner and thanks, I appreciate this!
I think I am too attached and feeling like the baby's in the birth canal trying to get born to wait put her away for 6 months but I will see how the next few weeks go. I was hoping to be done by the new year. My agent isn't in a hurry so this is just my own anxiety and clearly I need to calm down.
THANKS!
Oh, Angela, it's you???!!!! Lovely to hear from you! Well, I have to say that you asked an excellent question, one that all of us have asked, struggled with, torn hair over, screamed, at one point or another. But I also have to say that you already know what to do, you experienced as you are. You already know what to do!!! Wait. Wait. Wait some more. It'll come what to do next. And, by the way, yes, I did see your piece in which you quoted me & it's fine--you did a great job, no surprise. Wishing you well!---and lovely to hear from you.
Oh, thank you so much, Rosanne, and if you're ever in Boston, I'd love to meet up! Wouldn't it be great to have a Story Club reunion or writing retreat sometime with George? Hhhmm, maybe there's an idea in there—maybe in conjunction with some of his travel for book tours or for the opera performance?
Great advice. Coming back to something fresh... Also I find it's easier to eliminate the chaff of the piece once it's been out of my head several weeks (or several years) When it's still alive in my mind, cutting a scene is like cutting off a finger, but after leaving it for some time, I can be more critical of it.
Time also has the additional benefit of reducing the preciousness factor.
Done, for me an intuitive feeling, almost like the hairs going up at back of my neck. The more I learn to trust my gut, the better I am at recognizing done. Of course, I have also lied to myself a number of times by sending something out before I had that feeling and knowing it's not really done, but that never works out well.
I had a similar feeling as the questioner when I was done with my novel and ready to start something new.... it was very intimidating to be in the big unknowns of imagination, when I'd been spending so much time with people and situations, and while things were not perfect, I at least knew them really well. Writing a new things is different.
When I'm in a certain mood, all my writing strikes me as a few errors surrounded by extensive commentary.
Just a note to the writer to say I feel this whole question, and especially this: "Lately, I've really just been tracking the energy of the writing itself. So I'm paying attention to wherever there are "sags" in the energy. And I've become much more sensitive to where there are even slight hiccups in this energy flow. I am much more attuned to my intuition about where something is needing attention."
Mine's a novel, and I love my story and I'm proud of it, but it's 118K and there are moments of energy and sagging, and I feel like it does need likely need a few healthy chops here and there and some structural work but at the same time is in decent shape overall. But it's huge, I'm a poky and erratic reader, and the hardest thing for me is I can't seem to see the whole thing at once. With a short story, I can do a full run-through in one session. But a 400 page novel? It's impossible? My thesis adviser/committee read the second draft and liked it (with enthusiasm!) but liked it as a draft. I've revised again with their comments in mind. When I couldn't get much traction with my queries, I set it aside. I don't want to give up on it, but I don't know seem to know how to work on it in a way that really moves it forward or helps it become the best version of itself.
I don't know. I wish I knew what to say that would be helpful and productive, but mostly I just want to say that I hear you, and you're not alone on this one. And thank you for asking, because it makes me feel less on an island about this, too.
Oh, but you will TOTALLY have more ideas. Do not worry about that! You will find the next project, and it may come from an unexpected place or memory. Seriously, I tripped over mine via a throwaway paragraph in a New York Times article. As humans we contain multitudes of stories. This one book is not it for you at all, not one bit!
If you are poky as a reader, have you tried running through text to speech and listening to it?
I hate doing this personally, but I find it really helpful to go scene by scene and try to summarize what happens in a sentence or two. The process of doing that is illuminating, and it's sometimes a bit easier to see the whole thing in skeleton form.
Hi Sonal: I've done text to speech—I use Speechify and it's still clunky but helps. Of the many many voices and accents they offer I found only ONE that I could listen to and I alternate between having it read to me and me reading aloud.
‘ I can’t seem to see the whole thing at once’
I have exactly the same problem with my novel ( it’s 1200 pages 🫣)
Thank you, Carolyn, I am the questioner and I appreciate this! Good luck with your novel! Maybe a break from it will help? And, in case this helps, I found reading new writers got me excited in some of my worst slumps lately.
Other voices who were doing something brave and finding ways to connect ideas—that's felt like a gift from the gods. Not that I could do what they are doing in their voices, but even just seeing and "getting" what they were doing inspired me!
Do you have some writers you've read lately who've done that in long-form fiction—who've handled big plots and many characters in ways you admire?
A really important question (thanks, Angela!) and a great response from George. I'm working on a novel (historical, eighteenth-century, no kings and queens involved) that should pan out at 120,000 - 140,000 words. It's been once-finished, then picked up again. Everything in it has been rethought and rewritten, often according to impulses coming from who-knows-where in the mind (characters sometimes appear to me, almost as visions, and do something that is absolutely right and results in change, even major, in the story). But one thing (among others) I've learned here from George and SC is to work and rework and revise the beginning and to plug away at it until it feels dead right. My beginning is a first-person non-omniscient and possibly flaky POV, one of three POVs in the novel. The hardest thing I've been struggling with is finding this character's voice. As long as I don't have it, the narrative feels baggy and fake. And once I have it, I know what to tell and what not to tell. Things slot into place, or jump out, no need for them.
Lately I feel I'm getting there. What a burst of energy that feeling gives! I've got the beginning nailed!
Well, almost:
"...this feeling usually comes before it should. So this is something we want to try to learn to recognize, with practice: the difference between the premature version of this feeling and the “true” one."
So we plod on, astride our broken-winded Rosinantes, searching for the Holy Graal of Truth...
Oh, thank you, George, for this—I REALLY REALLY appreciate it. Just seeing that you'd answered my question felt like winning the lottery and your suggestions are SO helpful and grounding! I'd had a bad couple of days of editing this week but earlier today came around the bend (what an emotional roller coaster this has been!) so things are looking up.
Yes, I can see that chapters and sections are definitely "cohering/congealing" (and I'm even finding new connecting threads that are happening)—so this shot in the arm has been enormously helpful and I'm taking heart.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU!
PS: I can't wait to get to hear the opera—have a great time with the workshop and performance!
Have an amazing time in Cincinnati (my hometown, I've sent you postcards)! When I heard about the Opera Fusion workshop I texted everyone I know to tell them to attend. George, Missy Mazzoli, and my favorite opera company in the same room... I wish I could teleport! Looking forward to hearing Lincoln in the Bardo myself some day, hopefully in Cincinnati's beautiful Music Hall.
Yes! I'm sure it will be an amazing time and I would love to hear the presentation on Sunday- quite envious. As someone who has been involved with opera (as a non-singing extra) for decades when I read about this project my reaction was a slap to my own forehead and say "of course Lincoln in the Bardo should be an opera!" It's perfect for this story. Any roles for non-singing extras??
I worked on my last story for over a year and after about 60 drafts and countless revisions it felt like I was finally done and I submitted it to some journals. But the subconscious kept throwing out suggestions for improvements at random times. So I ended up withdrawing and re-submitting at some of the journals – too late at others because they have already started reviewing what I had originally submitted. Now I feel bad that I submitted my non-best effort. And I am still updating that story for any future submissions, even as I have started on the next one.
Several of you have commented here, and I am learning the hard way, to let the story rest and go work on something else, then come back to review it with fresh eyes. I find that really helps, but still need to develop the discipline to do it consistently.
Fresh eyes. Best editor I've ever had.
So true.
Strange that I just joined substack and found you here this evening, and the first post leads with a photo here in my hometown of Oxford! When you came to Square Books for CivilWarLand, I worked at Sq Bks and went to dinner at Taylor Catfish with you and the other booksellers. Been a fan ever since. AND you wrote me the most lovely letter after you read my piece “What Happened To Me” in the Oxford American. It meant the world to me.
I remember all of that, Cristen, as well as that powerful piece you wrote.
I also still have that railroad spike Richard gave me from the old railroad. And wasn't Barry Hannah at that dinner? Maybe I am conflating trips. :)
George, I think Barry WAS there. Thanks for your kind words, again.
Kristen - welcome to the group. Sounds like serendipity. And...I read your piece. What a horror. I'm so sorry that happened. I'm humbled by the awful experience and by your courage to write about it.
Cristen: I just now read your piece, and I am truly shaken and shaking. I wish I could write you a lovely letter like George did. I wish I could say something appropriate. But honestly, I'm left without words right now. Except, of course, I'm so sorry this happened to you--words that feel so incredibly inadequate. Glad you are here with us in Story Club. I hope you enjoy the community here as much as I do.
"(Here, we’re guarding against the possibility that you are just endlessly changing things and nothing is congealing/cohering). (Is the Rubik’s Cube getting closer to having all of its color’s lined up, or is it just in different states of randomness?)"
I've spent so long in that loop, it's not even funny.
I guess there are many reasons why 'the end' takes longer to get to than we think / expect / hope. One might be unrealistic expectations ('I'll write this twelve-volume novel in a month'), which just needs a reality check; but that doesn't sound like the issue in your case.
A slightly different version of this is the unrealistic dream of the outcome if we do a really good job. No matter how good the individual finished piece work is, it's not going to make us a foot taller, and it's unlikely to win us the Nobel Prize, or make us rich beyond our wildest dreams.
Worse, the longer we work on something, the more unreasonable the desired effect can become.
Finishing then might be an issue because we'll have to accept the fact that - no matter how good the work - it simply can't achieve those things. It's not so much fear of failure, but fear of the reality check a reasonable success might bring. On some level, we know this, no matter how deep the denial; hence the reluctance to finish and know it for sure.
Another issue might be the fact that we're aiming at a moving target. Are you writing about a subject that's evolving fast? Makes it tricky to formulate a 'definitive' work; I'd imagine you'd need to aim for some sort of 'snapshot' of the current situation, perhaps with some closing thoughts on what the future may hold.
The flip-side of this: the longer the work takes, the more we will have evolved by the time it's finished (or at least we will have evolved if we're still engaging with life). It's a bit like the calculations needed for space flight: you know the mass of the rocket, and work out how much fuel it would take to get that rocket into orbit. But you'll also need to get that fuel off the ground, so more fuel is needed to lift the weight of that fuel; then more fuel needed to lift THAT fuel; etc.
If you keep getting to what WOULD have been the end, but now find it dissatisfying, it can be healthy to remind yourself of what the original brief was, or the exact nature of the initial impulse or inspiration. If you can re-embrace that perspective, this can be a decent antidote to perfectionism.
Of course. So much work. I have two boards now, one for inside, like Dahls, for the chair, and a smaller one , just a tray really, for ouside as now under the apple tree dapple. Full bloom of spring here in the South Pacific. So I type in the shade of a tree of the usefulness of this question. Oh God, to be sucked in by your own work, bliss! Who wrote this, you ask. Then you read Faulkner, just a graf and you realise , oh stone-drunk fool, You're not as good as you'd like to think you are. hah aha.
After 4 years on a novel, and feeling tired of working on it (I know it could be better), I’m dragging out another book I abandoned at least 10 years ago to see if it comes alive for me. Maybe? And if it does, I hope the same thing happens to my second book. Maybe there’s something to be said for letting the dough test so it can rise.
Sandy be careful..you will become a beach of worry^^
Not sure what you mean, Graeme.
Stop worrying so much you and your books are fine....you are alive your writing is alive..push ahead^^
I see now. Thanks for the encouragement.