I finished the first draft of my novel-in-progress this past Sunday, after doing pretty much nothing else since the tail end of my California trip around April 22. It’s been a race to the finish, since I threw out about 35,000 words that weren’t working and went back to the drawing board in March.
By the time I got back to the halfway point where I’d originally stopped, I had about 18 days left to to work with if I wanted a couple of weeks to tidy up before the MS is due to my editor on June 1. Not a lot of time for half a novel, even when you’re trying to keep it short.1 I’ve had at least one breakneck stretch like this with every book. So far so predictable, but that’s about where the prediction stuff stops.
When you’re in a regular publication cycle — about a book a year, or maybe two — you get a lot of questions about how you write and what your process looks like (more on that here). One reason is to satisfy our innate curiosity about how the sausage gets made, but the other reason writers get this question all the time is that they’re giving interviews for an audience of readers and a lot of readers want to be writers. They want to get published. They want to know what it takes from the people who have — against all odds! — pulled it off. We have practiced answers to these questions. But recently I got sick of my own and blurted out in an interview the secret to my success, such as it is, so I thought I’d share it with you:
I have no idea what I’m doing.
Yes, I’ve been writing for twenty years and publishing for ten and part of the point of being on Substack is to persuade people we have valuable insights about writing to share. Maybe I have a few of those, but I would be a liar if I said I haven’t been making this shit up as I go.
I don’t have an MFA. I didn’t cut my teeth in literary magazines. I’ve never done a reading series. I didn’t start going to conferences and retreats and residencies until after I had two books under my belt. I’ve spent a lot less time in workshops than most of the writers I know. I’ve never actually read Bird by Bird (though I do, of course, own a copy). This isn’t disdain for that kind of literary upbringing — au contraire, I’m envious of the writer friends who had it and still feel my share of imposter syndrome, like I’ll never be a “real” writer no matter how many books I write just because I’ve never been to Yaddo. Still, nothing makes me feel more like a neophyte than starting over with a first draft. New novel, page one.
