Ambitious projects, long roads
FREE 05/18/21
🚛 Ambitious projects, long roads
Keeping the faith when your project is measured in years, not months
Hello, friends!
One of the many newsletters I subscribe to is 1000 Words of Summer, by Jami Attenberg. (If you’re trying to pick your way through a project, this is a great one to subscribe to.) In a recent issue, called “Loving the Long Haul,” Attenberg writes in response to a fellow author’s plea:
If you’ve ever worked on a project over a long period of time, maybe you can relate to this writer’s request for help the way I did.
I’m not a fast writer. That is, I put words on the page quickly—I’m a reasonably fast typist, and I can throw a couple thousand words down in a short period of time—but it takes me much longer to shape those words into a serviceable draft. And every draft needs its own revisions to produce a second, a third, a twelfth. No book is the same. Just after high school, I wrote my first novel in three months; the two books which followed took less than a year each. But Eleanor took close to a decade and a half. Awake in the World took about two years, give or take. Another unpublished novel has occupied me for the last three.
And I’m around a year into the writing of The Dark Age.
Attenberg turned to Rebecca Makkai for her thoughts about long-term work:
I’ve been teaching an advanced novel-writing workshop in Chicago for nine years now, twelve writers in each one. … One of the first things I tell them is that my first novel took me ten years to complete—not because I was working full time (I was) or because I had two babies in that time (I did) but because I would occasionally lose faith in the project. And because ten years is such a long time that I, and my interests and my tastes and my skill level, changed many times, and the book had to keep up.
I’m going to snip out the part there that really hit home for me:
…ten years is such a long time that I, and my interests and my tastes and my skill level, changed many times, and the book had to keep up.
This was so true for me with Eleanor. When I began writing that novel in November, 2001, I was twenty-three. When it was published in January, 2016, I was thirty-seven. For the entirety of that project, I rocked back and forth on a sea of doubt. But I chalked it up to having started the project as a young writer, unsteady on his feet; the book, I thought, was only finishable when I was sufficiently skilled enough to write it. A process like that just takes time.
What I didn’t know then is that I never feel sufficiently skilled to write the thing I’m writing now.
In those early years of Eleanor, I kept a steady blog called Deeplyshallow. (Doesn’t it just sound like a twenty-year-old’s blog?) Some of you have followed my work since those days, so…you’ve seen me at some of my most unskilled. In any case, as I wrote my novel, I put the blog to work for me. I took my characters for test drives, gauged the sturdiness of plot ideas. These little fiction sketches had no rules: I could drop Eleanor into any scene, any setting, and learn something from how she might respond. And the results were all over the place. I wrote scenes in which Eleanor flees Oregon, and winds up marrying a small-town drunk in Nebraska; I took her to Africa, where she heard voices on the midnight breeze; I gave her dreams of climbing ropes of lightning. I made her a child, a spurned wife, a teenager. Had my novel followed any of those threads, it would have been a very different book. One of the reasons it didn’t, I think, is that I just didn’t have the chops to write those things very well back then.
Makkai went on:
The following are not reasons to give up on it: You’re mad at it, it needs tearing apart and putting back together, you get scared of failure, you get scared of success, you can’t stand your own voice, the whole thing is ridiculous, someone didn’t like the part they read, you’re supposed to have a real job, you can’t remember what you’re doing, this thing is a mess. Here is the only reason to give up on it: For a sustained period of time (several months) you have absolutely no feeling toward it whatsoever. Even then, don’t delete the file. You never know.
I don’t think I’ve ever deleted a file. There are plenty of abandoned novels or short stories tucked away in various hard drives, many from two or more decades ago, that I will likely never resurrect. They’re the bones of half-formed adventurers who never took their first real step. They’ll never rise up and walk again, but boy, they’re great for plundering. I’ve found some unexpectedly good ideas among their loot.
Ira Glass, the longtime creator and host of This American Life, talked about creativity once, and had this to say:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
There’s a lot more—you can listen to the whole thing—but he closes with this:
It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.
That gap he’s talking about…I’m not sure it ever goes away. I think that’s the thing that keeps us going, those of us who keep writing even though the words we put down each day leave us grumbling about how much we suck.
I haven’t read Eleanor in years now. But I think if I were to pick it up and read any page, I’d have two conflicting reactions. I’d read a sentence that I’d be surprised to have written—was my younger self that good?—and then I’d read the next, which would make me wince.
The self-doubt never quite goes away. At least, it hasn’t for me. Every few days I’ll look over the previous day’s work and think: This is atrocious. I’ve forgotten how to write. I don’t know what I’m doing. These words are bad. I’m bad. Why would anyone ever read this?
But when you stick with it long enough, this just becomes an acknowledged part of the process. It stops derailing you, and just becomes a seam in the concrete that you step over. Because the next thought is always: Knock it off. Finish the draft. It’s supposed to be crappy right now. You won’t know what you’re trying to do until you’ve done it badly at least once.
Do I ever lose faith in a project? Sure. Makkai isn’t wrong about that. It’s good to hear that some projects just won’t ever breathe on their own. We can take the parts that work and carry them forward into new things. There’s a difference, though, in losing faith in the project, and recognizing your gaps. Sometimes you just aren’t ready to write the big idea yet. So you keep it around, and work on other things, and one day, maybe, you’ll come back to it, a little stronger, and realize you know exactly how to finish it.
Attenberg has more to say about that long haul, and I wholeheartedly recommend reading the whole newsletter.
Meanwhile:
🧹 Some housekeeping
- I’ve just been informed that by my UK publisher that the Awake in the World ebook is just 99p for the remainder of May. Not a bad deal!
- A reminder that, if you haven’t already, you can still sign up to receive The Dark Age letters in addition to this free newsletter you already receive. Learn how to sign up, and what you’ll get. In the last edition, I wrote about the process of writing an epistolary novel—a book assembled from a collection of letters, transcripts, and other ephemera—and took a tour through some of my favorite epistolary books.
That’s all for this week! I hope that you all are vaccinated or on the road to vaccination, that you’re remaining safe and healthy, and that your loved ones are safe, too.
✏️ Until next time,
Jg