On Two Steps Forward, Then A Third

I promised last week that I’d write about how I am approaching this novel differently than how I have written in the past. It’s simple, but it is new to me. I have been writing 3 to 7 pages a day since early May, moving forward in the book. That’s it. There is more to say about it, though.

I began writing as a poet and also wrote this way. A poem came into my mind and I wrote it down. I didn’t struggle with it or boss it around. That taught me something about what inspiration can be—simply waiting. The poem was putting itself together as I did my days. When it was ready, I got a feeling in my arm, and my fingers rubbed against my thumb. I got paper and a pen and recorded what I’d already written, subconsciously.

In the film With Her Back to the World, about Agnes Martin in old age, she describes this manner of waiting until she knows what a painting will be, then executing it swiftly. My results were not Agnes Martin level, but I enjoyed that process, it felt magical, as if the universe were pouring through my hand as I wrote and I was the witness rather than the maker.

Prose was so different. I pieced together and prodded, labored, crossed out, second guessed, tried. I abandoned so many pieces. A big part of the problem was not having the time for a story or a novel to come out in one sitting. I got lost and doubted myself, and that was the end. I developed a lot of writing problems, especially perfectionism, that took a long time to undo. It was plain sad, and painful. Writing was no longer a joy.

I have been doing a lot of interviews for Fellowship Point and attempting to answer how I put the book together. It really was a puzzle—forays into the unknown, experiments, sudden revelations about how plot lines intersected, and so on. I could not see ahead and barely to the side. It was a work of learning, above all. How do you write a big novel with lots of chewy texture, characters, subplots? If I had to say what it was, I’d say I trusted.

With this book I am being far more workpersonlike. I figured out the characters, the structure, and early on I saw the end and wrote it. I spent from last summer to May writing and rewriting the first 50 pages, which was all I could do during the school year. When I got to Yaddo I decided I’d move forward in a linear manner, writing one section after the next, not jumping around or doing too much going back. This has been a revelation. For one thing, I can do this, and I can postpone wondering whether or not it’s any good. For another, it’s inventive in a way I have never before experienced. I thought my way of writing poems was a line to the Muses. What I am doing now is a line to my own imagination.

I realize this depends on being able to keep the book in my mind. I try not to think about it unless I am sitting at my desk, but I am able to return almost everyday and to have it be the central thinking that I am doing right now. I’d like to get better at this. I recently read Jeffrey Archer’s writing schedule and thought—goals. He has four two hour writing sessions a day with two hour breaks in between. He lives in Mallorca and his view would take up a lot of my hours, but I guess you can become used to anything. I love how the rug pattern reflects the rock pattern.

Anyway the point is that I am doing something simple and obvious and it is working the way many simple and obvious things do. It works! I get it now. I understand how people write a book a year. I have a job so I can’t, but the other day during a Zoom book club there was a request for me to write the Franklin Square series that appears in Fellowship Point. That would be seven novels, and I am already seventy. But I am thinking about it, and like the idea.