Amy Gentry's Blog

Review: Rachel Aaron's "2K to 10K"

2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This just shot past Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel and Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence to the top of my list of craft book recommendations for novelists. It is not as punitive, aggressive, or gimmicky as its cover suggests, but is in fact a surprisingly joyful and holistic take on writing as well as a practical one. The author's goal was to jack up her word count, and in this short, conversational book, she explains how she attained that goal. But in doing so, she comes up with a system that reflects many truths I've observed in my writing but rarely seen discussed elsewhere.

Aaron's simplest and most radical idea is that you should enjoy writing every scene. If you do, you'll just naturally pick up speed, and the writing will improve significantly. If you're not, that's a flag for a problem. You should stop and solve the problem in your notes before you start writing again. THAT'S IT. There are tips for outlining, plotting in advance, and editing what you've written, but at its core, this is a book about loving to write and writing what you love.

I've written and published three novels, and have noticed (with some despair) that the parts I "binge-wrote" in 10K-12K binges are always my favorite scenes in the finished book. They just sing. The parts that felt like a slog when I was writing them required more editing afterward--like, tearing-your-hair-out editing--and the finished product, no matter how polished, doesn't sing.

There's a lot of woo-woo advice out there for how to get to that singing place, and some of it has worked for me. But Aaron's direct, pragmatic approach claims to work faster, offering a practical solution to writer's block that is neither "tough it out" nor "go chase butterflies and meditate." This is the holy grail of novel-writing books that manage to demystify the process without dumbing it down.



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I Found the Anti-Anita Brookner and She's Great

During the pandemic, I noticed a new question popping up during author interviews and Zoom panels: "What are your favorite comfort reads?"

I always dread this question. I read horror novels for comfort. When stressed, I need the stakes in a novel to be higher than those of real life. I find it cozy.

My two favorite genres are lady horror and spinster lit. They overlap more than you would think. Three million British men were killed, wounded, or lost in World War I; that left a lot of single women to tough out years of economic hardship alone. I'd argue that spinster lit is itself a kind of war literature. (See Molly Keane's Good Behaviour.)

Lately, my favorite spinster lit author has been Anita Brookner, who goes further than the prior generation (and anticipates the Sad Millennial Sex genre) by suggesting that freedom and money and plentiful menfolk aren't actually enough to liberate the lonely woman. I could drink a case of this, and for the past month, I've been working my way through her oeuvre, drawing inspiration from her crushingly grim Jamesian plots and almost psychedelically interiorized prose.

But, having recently exhausted the Brookner supply at my library, I found myself feeling--well--exhausted. I don't mean to say that I fell asleep multiple times while reading Strangers, although obviously I did. (I have a great armchair and no objection to an afternoon nap.) I mean that after a while, watching a lonely person get pushed around by relatives, friends, and random acquaintances for two hundred pages--after which she briefly conceives of an exit plan, then gives up, sliding back into the tepid bath of the familiar--it all begins to make you feel a bit trapped.

After all, where are all my adventures lately? In books. And if those books are all about people whose adventures are also in books--books that are, themselves, full of unrealized dreams!--then it's spinsters all the way down, folks.

So, imagine my surprise when I sat down to devour what I supposed would be another grim, lonely classic (albeit with a cheerfully embossed floral cover) and found, instead, a thrilling treatise on liberation. The spinster in Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father wins her freedom on page one, not page 300. The book is all about where it will take her, and who it will make her, and how she'll become the kind of person who can defend it--and defend others from similar tyrannies.

When plump, plain, 33-year-old Jennifer Dodge's monstrous father unexpectedly takes a second wife, freeing her of the promise she made on her mother's deathbed to take care of him forever, she doesn't waste a millisecond wondering what to do with her freedom. On her first day in the wild, she takes a train, walks 20 miles, rents a cottage, stays up all night talking to an eligible bachelor on a mattress she's dragged under an apple tree, and sleeps under the stars. Until the halfway mark, it's just nonstop eating, gardening, looking at birds, and marveling that life can be so freaking pleasant.

Of course, there are obstacles in the second half; there's that looming shadow of a bully, as well as the more lighthearted struggles of Jennifer's new friend, a hapless clergyman, to get away from his domineering sister. But, except for a few tense pages here and there, we always know that things are going to work out, just as we know that, come what may, a Jane Austen novel will end in marriage.

In fact, only one macabre detail prevents Von Arnim (who also wrote the much-beloved book The Enchanted April ) from being something of a twentieth-century Austen. The happy ending of this blithe fantasy isn't a marriage. It's a <spoiler>death</spoiler>. In other words, it's the perfect comfort read.

tl;dr: For a comfort read that doesn't involve gore, or even mild disappointment, try Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father.

I Have Exactly One Thing on a Dead Author

Reading the fiction of dead people is a wonderful way to feel good about one's own books. They make you feel so full of potential.

Anita Brookner passed away in 2016, the year my first novel was published. I don't have to compare myself to her, or, for that matter, James or Proust or Eliot or Spark or Highsmith. I don't have to see their book deals on Instagram, still less lie awake at night wondering whether I'll ever have to ask them for a blurb. I read them to feed the beast and the beast makes a book and the system works for everyone.

Whereas, when I read Mrs. March recently, and Vladimir a while back, and Eileen several years ago, and whenever I read Mona Awad's work, or Tessa Hadley's--or any odd book with impeccable prose--I think, good god, why do THEY get to write like that? Where did they come from, and where are they going? I thought only dead people were allowed to write like that. I imagine these living authors who write like dead ones as supremely confident in elegant, rigorous clothing, toasting the Manhattan skyline with their editors, perhaps with champagne sent especially for this purpose by proud, wealthy parents. But probably they're just like me, more or less. They just write whatever the hell they want to.

That has been my manifesto from the beginning, but following it has been surprisingly difficult. When the pandemic began I stripped everything away and went back to the beginning and rededicated myself to it. I'm pivoting genres right now, as they say in the biz; my work-in-progress (and oh how slow the progress has been!) is a horror novel. But the genre to which I am pivoting is not horror. It's whatever-the-hell-I-want. That's my new genre.

It may look exactly like the old one from the outside. Not sure! Still figuring it out!

It turns out that writing whatever the hell you want is hard. There's a perfect silence at the center of every word. Will anyone want to read this? What if the closer I get to writing whatever the hell I want, the fewer people want to read whatever the hell I've written? I imagine myself at 45, signing up for a temp agency because I have no marketable skills and we need to pay for summer camp for the soon-to-be kindergartner, so that I can continue to sit around trying to write things that come from the deepest part of me, a part that craves Jamesian prose and slasher movies.

I'm currently up to Friday the 13th Part III in 3d, Halloween IV, Hellraiser VI (yes, that one is a labor of love), and the fifth Scream movie. That's a lot of daycare for a lot of not-writing, even though therapists and coaches have assured me that it actually IS writing, because my brain is still writing in the background, or something. All I can say is I hope that whatever my brain is writing, it likes a steady diet of teenagers walking into dark rooms and getting impaled on things. It does seem to help, a little. Maybe if I can enjoy art this stupid--relish it--love it, even!--someone will feel that way about mine, someday. Even if I'm never any of those authors, who probably weren't any more confident in their work than I am in mine. But Iris Murdoch famously did not allow her punctuation to be changed by copy editors! What guts!

So, it is possible to be jealous of dead authors, after all.

Podcasts tell me jealousy is a useful tool, a sign that we want to make an adjustment in our own lives. And I have no choice but to believe podcasts. There are too many of them; in a fight they would quickly overwhelm me. So I am converting my jealousy into a question: what the hell do I want to write? Not yesterday or tomorrow, but today?

Death is in the air. Three wonderful old-Austin types died recently; of course there are lots more, always more. Sometimes I think I'm writing horror (and watching slashers, and reading Anita Brookner) because of the pandemic; other times I think I'm just spoiling to kill, not my darlings, but the darlingest version of writer-me. Who will be the final girl here? Not even I know for sure.

Hot Spinster Summer

This is my first blog post, so hello!

If you don't already know me, I'm Amy Gentry, and I'm a novelist, reviewer, and ex-academic. My first three published novels are all novels of suspense (Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits), and my current work-in-progress is a slight pivot to horror. But honestly, I don't subscribe to strict genre divisions--they're helpful for readers, but can sometimes obscure what an author's really trying to do. Which, in my case, is to write whatever the hell I want! I also read whatever the hell I want, and that's mostly what this blog will be about.

Current Reads Corner (aka Hot Spinster Summer):

I just discovered Anita Brookner's novels, and I'm kicking myself for not reading her before. She died in 2016 and published a whopping 26 books in her lifetime--mostly fiction, though she was an art historian as well and published several academic works. She published her first novel at 53 (!!!!) and thereafter wrote ONE NOVEL A YEAR UNTIL SHE DIED (!!!!!!!). She won the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac.

So, while this is all a leeeetle bit intimidating for an author, it's nothing but glorious good news for a reader--especially a Henry-James-worshipping, Jane-Austen-fetishizing, Muriel-Spark-and-Barbara-Pym-fangirling lady like me. In other words, Anita Brookner is PEAK Spinster Lit. She excelled at acutely internal portraits of intensely guarded women who were too smart to fall for the traditional wifey role, but too cynical and self-protective to enjoy the romanticism of the '60s-'70s. One reason I love her is that her spinster heroines are not prudish about sex--they typically have lots of it, but only with married or otherwise unavailable men, as if to inoculate themselves from emotional disaster (which always comes anyway). In books like A Friend from England and The Rules of Engagement, her protagonists measure themselves against female friends who seem to have figured out how to somehow get the best of both worlds--libertinism AND the benefits of protection and companionship associated with traditional marriage--while they themselves seem to get neither.

Sometimes these portraits can feel dated, but honestly, they mostly don't. So many of the feelings she describes--the freedom and loneliness and subtle shame of singleness, coupled with the overwhelming feeling that within a patriarchy you're kind of fucked either way--made me wince in recognition. Brookner, though writing almost exclusively about white, straight, middle-class-ish women, is unusually clear-eyed about the unspoken role of privilege and wealth in love--the way a stable family background or heaps of money can buy a single woman self-respect and comfort, or a married woman autonomy and clout within her relationship.

Brookner herself rejected many marriage proposals, sensing they came from "people with their own agenda, who think you might be fitted in if they lop off certain parts." She called herself "the loneliest woman in London," and yet, reading her books, you can't help but feel that her spinster heroines are making the best choices available to them in the moment. But she's not sentimental about them, either. She's like a Jane Austen who unflinchingly turns the scalpel on herself--and, by implication, the reader.

There was a "modern literary authors rewrite Jane Austen novels" project a while back--I'm not sure if it's still happening--but I wish she'd gotten to take a crack at Persuasion before she died. I would have liked to see that.

tl;dr: If you, like me, are a sucker for a paper cut to the soul with a little squeeze of lemon, I'd recommend starting with Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac.