National Not Writing Enough Month
5 o'clock, November 2, 2005
Thoughts spurred by Meghan’s thoughts on National Novel Writing Month:
I had a small epiphany this weekend. I wrote about three-fourths of a story in one sitting, over a couple of hours, and could have finished it then and there if I hadn’t been heading off to see Good Night and Good Luck. Contrast with yesterday night when I spent forty-five minutes on two sentences in my novel and ended up scratching them out.
The epiphany was realizing that it’s not that I can’t write quickly —
— it’s that I can’t quickly write anything I actually care about.
And it’s not that the stuff I don’t care about is bad. Maybe a third, maybe half of my small body of published work falls into that category — stories that have been well received and that I’m now rather fond of. They just don’t mean as much to me as the other stories, the ones that took months to write after bubbling up from the broth of ideas that had been simmering for years on the mental back burner.
Okay, I’ll ’fess up. I know I’m supposed to love all my children equally, but I don’t. Here’s the list:
- Easy stories:
- In-between stories:
- Hard stories:
*The Irrational Histories are a special case. They’re easy enough to plot, but insanely research-intensive. So on a minutes/word basis they’re probably somewhere in the middle.
So what’s the pattern?
The easy stories are mostly shorter than the hard stories — “The Memory of Water” is novelette-length, and “On the Night” is a short, but otherwise the easies are all shorts and the hards are all novelettes. The easy stories all have more or less realistic, contemporary settings — some of them are more historical and some of them are more fantastic, but still, familiar enough that I didn’t have to worry about what things looked like or whether the worldbuilding made sense. Meanwhile the hard stories are set, two of them, in a late-medieval, early-modern fantasy world that might pass for alternate history if you squint but is mostly made up out of whole cloth, and the other two each on their own far-distant worlds in their own far-distant futures. Lots of worldbuilding, lots of thought about exactly how things look and feel and smell, lots of careful description to make sure it all gets across to the reader. The protagonists in the easy stories are everypeople: Blue-collar utility worker, primate researcher, German army officer, failed writer. The characters in the hard stories have complex back stories, arcs that don’t necessarily start or end within the framework of the story: actor turned rebel, diffident scholar turned government official, disillusioned career soldier far from home, economics professor and undercover revolutionary cadre in love with aristocratic mathematical genius, Russian Muslim ballet dancer and causality researcher. The plots in the easy stories are intimate and almost entirely personal; the plots in the hard stories are personal to the characters but also political, moral, philosophical.
So is it really novels I’m having trouble with, or is it the novels I want to write?
And is there a point in writing a novel, even a good novel, just to have written a novel?
For what it's worth, some readers will prefer the easy stuff. Conan Doyle thought Sherlock Holmes was his easy stuff; the readers may even be right. Is that useful to a writer? I dunno. But I do know that it's legit to do easy stuff, as long as you're invested in it. I've been working on a hard novel for much too long, so I'm now trying to decide if I can turn it into an easy novel midway without hurting the book.