I thought after finishing the first draft of a novel that I had been planning for more than ten years and writing for more than one year that I would feel relieved. I thought I would only feel a sense of accomplishment. Actually, I thought I would feel a huge sense of accomplishment, as though I had just finished something I’d been working towards in some way for most of my adult life.
That first night, I did, at least a little bit.
But ever since then, all the nights and afternoons and early mornings I haven’t been working on it? I’ve felt...lonely.
It took me a few days to figure it out. This new lonliness wasn’t about being around actual physical people or conversation or getting out of the house.
It was about the fact that for some amount of time--sometimes hours at a time--for the past 165 days, I’ve been spending part of my time in a different world entirely. I’ve been with Rachel and John and Sarah and Brandon (and even now, just typing their names feels comforting), and I don’t talk about what happens in that world with anyone else, but I know exactly what those characters are feeling and why they’re doing what they’re doing. When I was falling asleep at night, I would plot out what they would do next. When I was in the shower I would (very occasionally) try out the dialogue I thought they might use. In some way, I almost felt I had a duty to them, to get them out of the tangle they were in (since I had put them there after all) and get them to a better place. (Around the holidays, I told my brother I had been promising my main character I would get her home for the past week and he dryly quipped, “Doesn’t she have a car?” I didn’t even know how to respond.)
I have absolutely no idea if this is how aspiring other authors deal with their writing or not. I was listening to Jonathan Franzen talk about how frustrating it is when people talk about characters showing the author where they want to go. Certainly, I knew before I started writing what was going to happen in the end, in a very broad sense, but it was only when I mentally entered the world of my characters and played around with different scenarios, different conversations, different twists that some of it felt authentic to the story, to their world. So in a small sense, it seemed they were showing me where to go and what to do.
And then, last week, I cut myself off from all of this. I promised myself thirty days away from it. Partly because I wanted a break, but mostly because I still have a duty to Rachel, my narrator, and all the people who orbit around her in this story. These characters had, unintentionally, become (in a completely mentally stable way) like friends. And to be absolutely real, there huge chunks of this story that is absolute crap. That has be cut away. As good as it was for me to discipline myself to write everyday, there are entire days that can be utterly stripped away because I wrote to get it done, not because what I typed did anything for the story.
More importantly, an entire chunk of the novel, what some might mistakenly see at first as the major driving plot line (by some, read me, when I started out), needs to be ripped to shreds and stitched back together into something far more relevant and important (luckily, I already know what that is). And to tear it apart the way it needs to be torn, I can’t carry sentimental attachment into the revision, but only the cool-minded skill a surgeon would bring. If there’s any hope of anyone else ever reading this story, I need to make several portions far, far harder on characters I’ve lovingly crafted.
I needed to set aside so I could gain some distance and approach it, not as a Mama Bird who desperately wants her baby to fly, but as a critic, willing to slice away the fat slowing the whole lumbering dodo down. (I have no idea if dodo lumbered. Imagine a really super fat one.)
Thirty days was what I said I’d take. That’s May 15th if you’re keeping track. I hope I’ve stopped missing them by then. I hope I feel annoyed that’s it’s time to go back to Rachel and her story. I want to live up to the obligation I feel, and I hope by May 15th I feel it not to Rachel or John or even myself, but to the story that’s buried deep down in the midst of all the extra words, waiting to be told.
