SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A NOVEL ...

A number of years ago I stumbled upon an online conversation on something like a message board. It was an ongoing thread about the joys and perils of love. Just so happened that the initiator of the thread was a young woman in her twenties who was knee deep in an affair with a man in his fifties. This young woman declared serious love for him and he (according to her) declared love in return. What was intriguing to me was the nature of the affair and the man's age: fifty. Knowing this to be a magic button age for many men, I began to toss around in my mind what this man might look like, what his wife might be like, and what the man was actually in search of that led him to having the affair. And because I know that affairs are rarely, if ever, solely about sex, I wanted to know more about this fellow and what kind of life he'd planned for himself and how those plans had or had not panned out. And so I set out writing about this charachter and discovered that, just as I'd thought, the affair was just the tiny little kernel, like an acorn, of a much larger, denser tree. I would discover the many branches of this man's life -- his heartaches, his pains, the unmet things in his childhood, his deepest and darkest fears all coming to a head one the eve of his fiftieth birthday. I became intrigued about mid-life and what it means to know that you have lived more life than you have left to live. I wanted to explore what that feels like; I wanted to get inside that tension of mid-life. I wanted to examine what it means to live fully; what it means to be a full human being. And so over time, after a whole lot of skimming, sketching, cogitating, and reading of course, I discovered that it boils down to having courage. Being a full human being comes with a hefty price and a whole lot of pain.

I've been working on this novel for a number of years, partly because--and this I truly believe--I had to get a little older to understand the passing of time, the meaning of time and what it means to age and look back on one's life. In order to write intelligently and empathetically and artfully and truthfully about a charachter or a place, I as an artist, must know it on the inside at a deeper level than the surface read of a psychology textbook or an atlas describing the local bridge. In order for these charachters to fully show themselves to me, I believe I had to show myself to them. I had to show them that I meant business, that I was serious about my inquiry and, moreover, I was trying to be that full human being that some of them could not be. I had to do a whole lot of reading to learn the mind of man at fifty. Lots has been written about it, beyond the surface joke of the "leather pants and red corvette" kind of crisis. I'm thankful for all of the psychologists who've made it real for me.

Alice Walker once likened her written work as one big garden. The poems like roses, the essays like tulips, but the novels -- oh, the novels -- they are the rutabagas.....tough, hard, thick, unruly. Novels (good ones, that is) take time. Time to establish story, pace, plot, climax, syntax, and most of all, that one key element that leaves us breathless: verisimilitude. Good writing takes time and a whole lot of skill, some of it learned but more of it, I believe, the fruit of being completely open and mindful and the willingness to walk into unchartered territory. Alone. A willingness to live in silence and solitude. A willingness to dig as deep as the shovel will allow. A willingness to spend a whole day on ten pages and come away with only two really useful paragraphs. A willingness to be absolutely honest about what stays and what goes. An understanding of the weaving of threads, much like any kind of sewing or knitting, so that in the end not one thread is left flying in the wind, not one seam is showing. That takes skill.

So, on this page I'll be providing some intermittent notes about the status of my little rutabaga. Maybe a quote or two that pertains to novel writing. Maybe a link to someone else's blog about novels. When will she be done? Well, when she's done.

Without further ado, here's some advice every young writer should tape above her desk:

Writing Advice

Enjoy,

A.