how will I know
So last weekend I went to the LA Times Festival of Books, which is always sweltering and exhausting and nonetheless very fun. One of the panels I attended was titled something about Disappearing Figures, and it featured four novelists whose books were about characters who had tried to escape themselves in some way. The writers were a good bunch. It was a good conversation. It was such a good conversation that I stuck around for the Q&A, which I don't always do, because Q&A's are, as a rule, the worst.
The first question was something like, how do you know that an idea should be a novel? Alexander Chee had an answer I liked: "I always say that you come down with a novel, like an illness."
The second question was, how do you know you shouldn't give up on an idea once you've started writing it? Edan Lepucki (hi Edan) this time: "It's not that you don't get annoyed with it. But it has to be something you keep daydreaming about."
The third question: how do you know when you're done with a draft?
How do you know? How do you know? How do you know?
As much as I appreciated the panelists' answers, I sort of wished one of them would have said what I was thinking, which was, "oh, honestly? Go ahed and give up on that. You are never actually going to know."
I mean, I’m only one person, and I’ve only written three books*—or, well, that’s the thing, I’ve written three books and one thing that got book-length but never became a book, and I’m still not entirely sure why the one that didn’t work didn’t work. I’m not sure why the ones I started and abandoned in between GRACE AND THE FEVER and Untitled Unsold Young Adult Novel #3 didn’t go. I’ve written whole essay drafts only to get to the end and discover that it was a useful exercise for me, but there really was no actual there, there.
The path to essays-- my path, anyway-- is littered with things that were only ever going to be blog posts. My novels are the products of pursuing things that turned out to be failed ideas and false starts until I found the ones that weren’t. I never know. I have developed instincts; I have learned to trust myself. I think that’s a lot of it, the learning to trust yourself-- which is separate from learning to listen to yourself, to not instinctively recoil at the sound of your own voice in your head and on the page, which is also a whole difficult and ultimately ongoing process, but that’s another Tinyletter.
This one Marge Piercy poem has been coming up a lot for me lately, an old beloved favorite, called For the Young Who Want To. It feels like cheating to quote only the last stanza here, but I’m going to do it anyway, because it’s so gut-punch perfect:
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.
Work is its own cure. You will never really know. There is no secret and there is no trick. There’s only figuring out what’s inside of you, and then being patient with yourself, and trying whatever you have to try to get it out.
*I haven’t sold Zance 3 yet (h/t Amanda Chicago Lewis and Chance for the working title), but like, whether or not anyone ever reads it, it is written.
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This week I wrote about the "softcore hagiography" that is the reason I hate most chef documentaries and why Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent is better than most for GQ. It's a piece I almost didn't pitch because I wasn't sure I had enough to say about the topic, just for the record.