Catherine Egan's Blog - Posts Tagged "first-drafts"
First Drafts: A Love Story
Dear Blog,
So it turns out that November is NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month. I am not taking part for lots of reasons and non-reasons but mainly because while I’d like it to be possible, there is just no way I am going to produce however many words you are supposed to produce in a month during naptimes. Anyway, the idea is that you write like crazy and produce, in a month, a draft of a novel. That can freak people out if they think they are supposed to produce a good draft, but as the wonderful Anne Lamott says in her book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” first drafts are almost always shitty. In a chapter reassuringly titled “Shitty First Drafts,” she writes:
“I know some very great writers, writers you love and who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”
So, that’s good to know. The first draft is just getting the story on paper. Worrying about quality is what revisions are for, and from my experience so far, the revision process takes much longer and is much harder than the first draft. If my life allows for it, I’d love to do NaNoWriMo one day (which, as a number of people have pointed out, should be called NaNoDraMo – both for the rhythm and for accuracy, it’s a draft you’re producing, not a novel). I love writing first drafts. Writing the messy thing I will never show anybody. Getting the story down, and not worrying (yet) about whether it is any good.
The first novel-length draft I ever wrote was (is?) called Another Dance for Amaterasu. I was living in a small apartment on the edge of Tokyo with my oldest friend. I was toying with some ideas for a murder mystery set in Tokyo, since riding the trains every day made me feel murderous and I thought I ought to make some use of all that otherwise useless anger. Then, somewhere (I don’t remember where) I read about a sleep disorder in which the sufferer goes into REM sleep but is unable to go on into deep sleep. Because they are only ever sleeping lightly, people with this rare disorder become utterly exhausted, and they dream whenever they sleep. In the article, a man was quoted saying he was so tired that his dreams began to seem more vivid than his life, and he would sometimes doze off and begin dreaming while walking to the bus stop. I thought: Amazing story idea! And then, because I am not entirely heartless, I also thought: Poor guy, that must suck. I started to write about a young Canadian expat in Tokyo whose waking life and dream life were blurring and bleeding into each other. It was a jumbled mess of too-many-storylines and Japanese and Greek mythology, Orpheus and Ame no Uzume shrugging at each other across the pages, wondering, what are we doing together in this scrambled attempt at a book anyway? It didn’t work. But that first draft? Pure joy. I wrote it at home, in cafes, in parks, on the subway. I loved my characters. I still love those characters, and am sorry to have given them such a confused, confusing, fragmented story to live in. If I learned anything, it was that I am a writer who needs to outline. In detail.
The second novel that I finished became Shade & Sorceress, my first published book. I was stuck with Amaterasu. If the first draft was a gleeful sprint, the revisions were a slog. I wasn’t making it work. I needed a break. I decided to write a fantasy story for my niece and nephew. It was meant to be a Christmas present, a fun little novella. I came up with the premise ridiculously quickly, and started making notes. The first thing I wrote, in a tiny room on an oil processing ship in China’s Bohai Bay (what I was doing there is a whole other story), was a conversation between my heroine Eliza and her nemesis, Nia. The delight of writing something new, of finding new voices and a new story that wasn’t the stuck story, was exhilarating. The novel flew out of me, the story kept on growing, and by the time I had a draft done, I had outlines of the next two books.
I drafted the sequel in Princeton, New Jersey, in a claustrophobic grad student apartment. It felt like my only real escape from my should-I-get-pregnant-do-I-really-want-a-baby-no-that’s-a-terrible-idea-I-definitely-don’t-want-a-baby-what-the-hell-would-I-do-with-a-baby-except-I-really-do-want-a-baby-and-how-did-we-end-up-in-New-Jersey-anyway crisis. The fun was in working with relationships between already developed characters. I didn’t need to introduce them, or introduce them to each other. I didn’t need to set anything up. All that work had been done in the first book, and the second book felt like the payoff.
I wrote a draft of the third book in the trilogy while I was pregnant. Being pregnant felt like a joke, or a horror film, or an occasionally hilarious horror film. I told That Guy I didn’t think there could really be a baby in there. I said I was going to give birth and it would be a pillow, or a mongoose, or something. (If you slept with a mongoose… he began threateningly, but then concluded that the baby would have awesome snake-fighting abilities). But the book felt real, and more importantly, controllable. Writing was so much more fun than looking for crib sheets on amazon and obsessing about how life-as-I-knew-it was about to end.
When my baby was two months old, he only took naps if I put him in a wrap, on my body, and swayed. I put my computer on the kitchen counter, turned out the lights, turned on the fan for white noise, and wrote 300+ pages, standing and swaying and standing and swaying while I typed. It was about a group of teenagers who could dream things into reality. I’m quite pleased with the first four chapters, but the decline of the novel maps out the decline of my baby’s nighttime sleep and the seizing up of my back and shoulders as he got heavier. It’s hard for me to look at it without reading my own mental / physical collapse between the lines. I finished it, amazingly, and put it away. I think I just needed to be writing. Something, anything. I needed to know that I could do it, would do it, no matter what.
When I was pregnant with my second son, I wrote a novel-draft about a sixteen-year-old spy in a fantastical version of early 20th century Paris while my first son napped (now in a crib, bless him, and sleeping through the night too). It came out like a torrent, and while it was and is still very much a Shitty First Draft, it worked, and I knew that with more work (a lot more work) it could be good.
Writing a first draft is like falling in love. It’s fun, and there’s not much at stake, not yet. The revisions are the real work of the relationship, the staying after that initial glow has worn off, the commitment to building something worthwhile out of whatever your passion has brought into being.
I’ve got rewrites to do. Lots. I’ve got unfinished things to finish. But, oh blog, I’ve got some notes, too. An outline, really, if I’m honest (which I am, on occasion). A group of characters I know so well, with others still waiting to be pulled into focus. All that stuff that feels like pulling a sled to the top of a steep hill, and from here it looks like smooth unmarked snow all the way to the bottom (even though it isn’t of course, there are rocks and tree stumps hidden in that snow). I’ve been doing purely revisions for over a year now. Over a year! And it’s NaNoWriMo, after all! So while I don’t expect to finish even a shitty first draft of anything this month, tomorrow I’m opening up a new file, and writing chapter one at the top of the page. Whoosh.
Yours, with some revision,
Catherine
So it turns out that November is NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month. I am not taking part for lots of reasons and non-reasons but mainly because while I’d like it to be possible, there is just no way I am going to produce however many words you are supposed to produce in a month during naptimes. Anyway, the idea is that you write like crazy and produce, in a month, a draft of a novel. That can freak people out if they think they are supposed to produce a good draft, but as the wonderful Anne Lamott says in her book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” first drafts are almost always shitty. In a chapter reassuringly titled “Shitty First Drafts,” she writes:
“I know some very great writers, writers you love and who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”
So, that’s good to know. The first draft is just getting the story on paper. Worrying about quality is what revisions are for, and from my experience so far, the revision process takes much longer and is much harder than the first draft. If my life allows for it, I’d love to do NaNoWriMo one day (which, as a number of people have pointed out, should be called NaNoDraMo – both for the rhythm and for accuracy, it’s a draft you’re producing, not a novel). I love writing first drafts. Writing the messy thing I will never show anybody. Getting the story down, and not worrying (yet) about whether it is any good.
The first novel-length draft I ever wrote was (is?) called Another Dance for Amaterasu. I was living in a small apartment on the edge of Tokyo with my oldest friend. I was toying with some ideas for a murder mystery set in Tokyo, since riding the trains every day made me feel murderous and I thought I ought to make some use of all that otherwise useless anger. Then, somewhere (I don’t remember where) I read about a sleep disorder in which the sufferer goes into REM sleep but is unable to go on into deep sleep. Because they are only ever sleeping lightly, people with this rare disorder become utterly exhausted, and they dream whenever they sleep. In the article, a man was quoted saying he was so tired that his dreams began to seem more vivid than his life, and he would sometimes doze off and begin dreaming while walking to the bus stop. I thought: Amazing story idea! And then, because I am not entirely heartless, I also thought: Poor guy, that must suck. I started to write about a young Canadian expat in Tokyo whose waking life and dream life were blurring and bleeding into each other. It was a jumbled mess of too-many-storylines and Japanese and Greek mythology, Orpheus and Ame no Uzume shrugging at each other across the pages, wondering, what are we doing together in this scrambled attempt at a book anyway? It didn’t work. But that first draft? Pure joy. I wrote it at home, in cafes, in parks, on the subway. I loved my characters. I still love those characters, and am sorry to have given them such a confused, confusing, fragmented story to live in. If I learned anything, it was that I am a writer who needs to outline. In detail.
The second novel that I finished became Shade & Sorceress, my first published book. I was stuck with Amaterasu. If the first draft was a gleeful sprint, the revisions were a slog. I wasn’t making it work. I needed a break. I decided to write a fantasy story for my niece and nephew. It was meant to be a Christmas present, a fun little novella. I came up with the premise ridiculously quickly, and started making notes. The first thing I wrote, in a tiny room on an oil processing ship in China’s Bohai Bay (what I was doing there is a whole other story), was a conversation between my heroine Eliza and her nemesis, Nia. The delight of writing something new, of finding new voices and a new story that wasn’t the stuck story, was exhilarating. The novel flew out of me, the story kept on growing, and by the time I had a draft done, I had outlines of the next two books.
I drafted the sequel in Princeton, New Jersey, in a claustrophobic grad student apartment. It felt like my only real escape from my should-I-get-pregnant-do-I-really-want-a-baby-no-that’s-a-terrible-idea-I-definitely-don’t-want-a-baby-what-the-hell-would-I-do-with-a-baby-except-I-really-do-want-a-baby-and-how-did-we-end-up-in-New-Jersey-anyway crisis. The fun was in working with relationships between already developed characters. I didn’t need to introduce them, or introduce them to each other. I didn’t need to set anything up. All that work had been done in the first book, and the second book felt like the payoff.
I wrote a draft of the third book in the trilogy while I was pregnant. Being pregnant felt like a joke, or a horror film, or an occasionally hilarious horror film. I told That Guy I didn’t think there could really be a baby in there. I said I was going to give birth and it would be a pillow, or a mongoose, or something. (If you slept with a mongoose… he began threateningly, but then concluded that the baby would have awesome snake-fighting abilities). But the book felt real, and more importantly, controllable. Writing was so much more fun than looking for crib sheets on amazon and obsessing about how life-as-I-knew-it was about to end.
When my baby was two months old, he only took naps if I put him in a wrap, on my body, and swayed. I put my computer on the kitchen counter, turned out the lights, turned on the fan for white noise, and wrote 300+ pages, standing and swaying and standing and swaying while I typed. It was about a group of teenagers who could dream things into reality. I’m quite pleased with the first four chapters, but the decline of the novel maps out the decline of my baby’s nighttime sleep and the seizing up of my back and shoulders as he got heavier. It’s hard for me to look at it without reading my own mental / physical collapse between the lines. I finished it, amazingly, and put it away. I think I just needed to be writing. Something, anything. I needed to know that I could do it, would do it, no matter what.
When I was pregnant with my second son, I wrote a novel-draft about a sixteen-year-old spy in a fantastical version of early 20th century Paris while my first son napped (now in a crib, bless him, and sleeping through the night too). It came out like a torrent, and while it was and is still very much a Shitty First Draft, it worked, and I knew that with more work (a lot more work) it could be good.
Writing a first draft is like falling in love. It’s fun, and there’s not much at stake, not yet. The revisions are the real work of the relationship, the staying after that initial glow has worn off, the commitment to building something worthwhile out of whatever your passion has brought into being.
I’ve got rewrites to do. Lots. I’ve got unfinished things to finish. But, oh blog, I’ve got some notes, too. An outline, really, if I’m honest (which I am, on occasion). A group of characters I know so well, with others still waiting to be pulled into focus. All that stuff that feels like pulling a sled to the top of a steep hill, and from here it looks like smooth unmarked snow all the way to the bottom (even though it isn’t of course, there are rocks and tree stumps hidden in that snow). I’ve been doing purely revisions for over a year now. Over a year! And it’s NaNoWriMo, after all! So while I don’t expect to finish even a shitty first draft of anything this month, tomorrow I’m opening up a new file, and writing chapter one at the top of the page. Whoosh.
Yours, with some revision,
Catherine
First Drafts: The True Story
Dear Blog,
OK. Writing a first draft is not like sledding down a hill. I mean, it sort of is. But sometimes you realize, oops, wrong hill! And then you have to change hills. Or sometimes you hit a tree, brain yourself, and die. (That probably doesn’t happen very often to authors writing first drafts. But you never know. NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – is an extreme sport. Wear a helment)
I do love writing first drafts. Mostly. But maybe I am sugarcoating it a bit because the last time went so well and it was a long time ago too. Maybe it’s beginning a first draft that I really love. After all, I’ve abandoned drafts that stopped being fun when they just started to suck and I didn’t see my way out of or around their suckiness. I’d like to think it’s an important skill, knowing when to jump ship, but I have no idea if I was right about the ships I’ve left behind me, wrecked on strange shores I never even think about anymore. I don’t know if I was being self-aware, or just being a wimp, or lazy.
Of course, even the finished drafts I remember as so much fun to write weren’t actually fun every day. There are days when I am writing crap, and I know it, and I keep banging away at the computer thinking I am an idiot I am an idiot I am an idiot. Then when LittleK wakes up I feel like I’ve wasted my time completely and it’s hard to salvage the rest of the day. The following afternoon I put him down for his nap, open my computer, look at what I wrote, think I am an idiot, and delete the whole thing. And I call that a good day’s work.
So, I don’t really enjoy the part where I am writing worthless crap and I know it. I do, in a perverse way, sort of enjoy the savage deletion, and starting over. If only I could do that in life as well. Just wipe out the way I yelled at my three-year-old this morning, undo leaving my favourite hat at the airport, erase the stupid rambling story I tried to tell some polite new friends. Unmake that dumb comment, unget that bad haircut, do-over, do-over! But I might never get through a day that way. At least I can erase Julia’s boring account of how she fell for Wyn, and replace it with a failed robbery and their first kiss. With a story, at least, we are lucky enough to be able to keep trying until we get it right. Or right-ish.
Bad Writing Days notwithstanding, finishing a first draft is about as satisfying as it gets, for me. Of course I know the real work is about to begin, but even so: My story has an ending! Finishing edits never feels that good. I never think it’s really done, it’s just that at some point, you have to call it done, and stop.
I need to do a rewrite or seven of my spy story, and presumably at some point this winter an editor will want me to revise The Last Days of Tian Di Book 2 (I’m sure it will have a better title than that by next fall!). But right now I am getting into the thick of a sequel to my still-a-draft spy story, with beautiful blank pages ahead of me, limitless for now in their potential awesomeness. So far, so much fun. More on the process as it progresses.
Love to you, dear bloggy blog (I am getting fond of you, see), and happy NaNoWriMo,
Catherine
OK. Writing a first draft is not like sledding down a hill. I mean, it sort of is. But sometimes you realize, oops, wrong hill! And then you have to change hills. Or sometimes you hit a tree, brain yourself, and die. (That probably doesn’t happen very often to authors writing first drafts. But you never know. NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – is an extreme sport. Wear a helment)
I do love writing first drafts. Mostly. But maybe I am sugarcoating it a bit because the last time went so well and it was a long time ago too. Maybe it’s beginning a first draft that I really love. After all, I’ve abandoned drafts that stopped being fun when they just started to suck and I didn’t see my way out of or around their suckiness. I’d like to think it’s an important skill, knowing when to jump ship, but I have no idea if I was right about the ships I’ve left behind me, wrecked on strange shores I never even think about anymore. I don’t know if I was being self-aware, or just being a wimp, or lazy.
Of course, even the finished drafts I remember as so much fun to write weren’t actually fun every day. There are days when I am writing crap, and I know it, and I keep banging away at the computer thinking I am an idiot I am an idiot I am an idiot. Then when LittleK wakes up I feel like I’ve wasted my time completely and it’s hard to salvage the rest of the day. The following afternoon I put him down for his nap, open my computer, look at what I wrote, think I am an idiot, and delete the whole thing. And I call that a good day’s work.
So, I don’t really enjoy the part where I am writing worthless crap and I know it. I do, in a perverse way, sort of enjoy the savage deletion, and starting over. If only I could do that in life as well. Just wipe out the way I yelled at my three-year-old this morning, undo leaving my favourite hat at the airport, erase the stupid rambling story I tried to tell some polite new friends. Unmake that dumb comment, unget that bad haircut, do-over, do-over! But I might never get through a day that way. At least I can erase Julia’s boring account of how she fell for Wyn, and replace it with a failed robbery and their first kiss. With a story, at least, we are lucky enough to be able to keep trying until we get it right. Or right-ish.
Bad Writing Days notwithstanding, finishing a first draft is about as satisfying as it gets, for me. Of course I know the real work is about to begin, but even so: My story has an ending! Finishing edits never feels that good. I never think it’s really done, it’s just that at some point, you have to call it done, and stop.
I need to do a rewrite or seven of my spy story, and presumably at some point this winter an editor will want me to revise The Last Days of Tian Di Book 2 (I’m sure it will have a better title than that by next fall!). But right now I am getting into the thick of a sequel to my still-a-draft spy story, with beautiful blank pages ahead of me, limitless for now in their potential awesomeness. So far, so much fun. More on the process as it progresses.
Love to you, dear bloggy blog (I am getting fond of you, see), and happy NaNoWriMo,
Catherine
First Drafts: Some Final Thoughts
Dear Blog,
I remember asking my mother, when I was five or six years old: “When do you play?” I was behind her and she was at the sink, wearing an apron. Doing dishes, or washing vegetables? I think it was before supper. She said something breezy about how she was playing all the time inside her head, letting her imagination wander and tell her stories. But I felt terribly sorry for her. It seemed to me she was always busy doing something chore-like, and we were always playing, and of course, that’s exactly how it was.
Now that I am technically an adult, and have children of my own, chore-like things threaten to take over my life, and my kids are always playing. Their play is intense and important, to them and to me. Building lego towers, hiding from dragons under the covers, fighting bears, making leaf piles or snow men, taking a tour of the solar system in the rocket ship under the dining table: they are so busy, so completely caught up in it. And there is, always, this chorus: Play with me, mom! Play with us!
I have to confess that, while I love to be part of their fun, I do not, myself, enjoy waving a stick at an imaginary bear, or crouching under the kitchen table and commenting on how big and smelly Jupiter is. Lego, likewise, bores me. I do like leaf piles and snowmen and the world without walls in general, which is why we go outside as much as possible. But even then – I wouldn’t build a snowman by myself, for my own pleasure, anymore.
But if my kids ever ask me, concerned, when I play, I will tell them that when I say I am "working," when I am seated at my computer and typing faster than I can think (I don’t think very fast), that is when I am most at play.
The revision process is crucial to creative satisfaction, but it is hard. It is work, albeit my favourite kind of work. First-drafting, on the other hand, feels an awful lot like my adult version of running outside and creating an imaginary world for my younger brother and next-door-neighbour, who were always eager and willing to be the heroes of whatever story I was concocting. Playing was what I wanted to be doing whenever I was doing something else, and I pitied my mother so desperately for not having time for it in her busy days. As soon as I got home from school, as soon as supper was over, as soon as we were released from whatever chores we had to do, there was this bubbling up of excitement and impatience. And I feel exactly the same way now. As lunch wears on and the boys are munching oh so slowly, wanting more of this and none of that, squabbling and chatting, asking for stories and songs, I start getting more and more foot-tappy and irritable. I bundle LittleK into bed as soon as he is done eating, set the clock for LittleJ’s Quiet Time (which is not particularly quiet but that sounds nicer than don’t-bug-me-time, and I am ashamed to say it precedes a movie on the kindle), put on the coffee, open my computer, and there, there – I am running outdoors, bursting with story. This is playing.
Yours, cheerfully after a few very good writing days,
Catherine
I remember asking my mother, when I was five or six years old: “When do you play?” I was behind her and she was at the sink, wearing an apron. Doing dishes, or washing vegetables? I think it was before supper. She said something breezy about how she was playing all the time inside her head, letting her imagination wander and tell her stories. But I felt terribly sorry for her. It seemed to me she was always busy doing something chore-like, and we were always playing, and of course, that’s exactly how it was.
Now that I am technically an adult, and have children of my own, chore-like things threaten to take over my life, and my kids are always playing. Their play is intense and important, to them and to me. Building lego towers, hiding from dragons under the covers, fighting bears, making leaf piles or snow men, taking a tour of the solar system in the rocket ship under the dining table: they are so busy, so completely caught up in it. And there is, always, this chorus: Play with me, mom! Play with us!
I have to confess that, while I love to be part of their fun, I do not, myself, enjoy waving a stick at an imaginary bear, or crouching under the kitchen table and commenting on how big and smelly Jupiter is. Lego, likewise, bores me. I do like leaf piles and snowmen and the world without walls in general, which is why we go outside as much as possible. But even then – I wouldn’t build a snowman by myself, for my own pleasure, anymore.
But if my kids ever ask me, concerned, when I play, I will tell them that when I say I am "working," when I am seated at my computer and typing faster than I can think (I don’t think very fast), that is when I am most at play.
The revision process is crucial to creative satisfaction, but it is hard. It is work, albeit my favourite kind of work. First-drafting, on the other hand, feels an awful lot like my adult version of running outside and creating an imaginary world for my younger brother and next-door-neighbour, who were always eager and willing to be the heroes of whatever story I was concocting. Playing was what I wanted to be doing whenever I was doing something else, and I pitied my mother so desperately for not having time for it in her busy days. As soon as I got home from school, as soon as supper was over, as soon as we were released from whatever chores we had to do, there was this bubbling up of excitement and impatience. And I feel exactly the same way now. As lunch wears on and the boys are munching oh so slowly, wanting more of this and none of that, squabbling and chatting, asking for stories and songs, I start getting more and more foot-tappy and irritable. I bundle LittleK into bed as soon as he is done eating, set the clock for LittleJ’s Quiet Time (which is not particularly quiet but that sounds nicer than don’t-bug-me-time, and I am ashamed to say it precedes a movie on the kindle), put on the coffee, open my computer, and there, there – I am running outdoors, bursting with story. This is playing.
Yours, cheerfully after a few very good writing days,
Catherine
Revisions, Love, and being In It For The Long Haul
Dear Blog,
It’s time to abandon my fun, scraggly, unfinished draft for final (!!!) revisions of The Last Days of Tian Di book 2 (currently Unmaking, but we’ll see if that title sticks), and I am feeling all dramatic about it. Can I be a drama queen, in my blog? Where better to be a drama queen? Who else would put up with it as patiently as you, blog?
If a first draft is like falling in love, as I suggested here, the revision process is like going through several traumatic divorces and remarriages with the same person while trying to settle down and build that perfect, happy union. Staying in love is so much harder than falling in love, and takes longer too.
Revisions are moving beyond the infatuation stage, and now you are staring at the little hairs he didn’t clean out of the sink after trimming his beard. Revisions are getting stuck halfway up the stairs, looking at him over the sofa you are trying to move into your new apartment, the sofa you can’t really afford, and thinking, oh god, is this a terrible mistake? Revisions are moving to New Jersey after years of gallivanting around the world in that reckless, spontaneous, first-drafty way, making Long Term Plans now and Serious Commitments, while every evening you secretly go and look at airfares on-line, trying to pretend that anything is still possible. Revisions are failing to grow a vegetable garden, kneeling in the dirt trying not to cry over the stunted, barely edible, and too-symbolic carrots and radishes that you’ve pulled up out of the earth.
You do it for love, you are looking for the plot, for the thread that will hold it all together, but it was so much easier before, when your only goal was something new and the future didn’t matter. You are trying to build something that will last, but you are thinking about how free you were when you didn’t owe your heart to this attempt.
Revisions are working through it, the days when you fantasize about Some Other Life, Not This One – an early morning train, days that are yours alone, a sleek black cat with iridescent green eyes watching you from the wall in the courtyard. You stay, every day, you stay anyway. You rewrite it, you rewrite it. The following summer, the garden will flourish. You’ll come back with tender ripe squash and zucchini, handfuls of basil, bags of crisp beans, because you’ve learned what to grow in this earth. In the early evening, the fireflies will rise up in semi-synchronized masses, bright blinking lights filling the lawn outside, and you’ll be glad you are here, for the first time not secretly plotting your escape. You can almost see it, the thing you’re trying to make.
The thing you end up with is never as perfect as the thing you imagined when you had really barely started, when he made you laugh so hard in that cave covered in batshit in Malaysia. It’s never as perfect as all those other lives you won’t live and the books you won’t write. The black cat eyes you resentfully in your dreams, like it is sneering at you, Really, is that all you can do? But that cat is just pissed off because it isn’t real. Dumb imaginary cat.
Whatever. I have had some practice at this now. I know all about being disappointed in myself. I could teach a master class on self-loathing, blog. But it is worth it, every time it is worth it, either for what you make, or for what you learn about how to make something. Revisions, like love, have never not been worth it.
So I’m suiting up. Once more into the breach, or something. Tian Di, book 2, you’re going to wish you’d never met me.
Melodramatically, imaginary-machete-wieldingly yours,
Catherine
It’s time to abandon my fun, scraggly, unfinished draft for final (!!!) revisions of The Last Days of Tian Di book 2 (currently Unmaking, but we’ll see if that title sticks), and I am feeling all dramatic about it. Can I be a drama queen, in my blog? Where better to be a drama queen? Who else would put up with it as patiently as you, blog?
If a first draft is like falling in love, as I suggested here, the revision process is like going through several traumatic divorces and remarriages with the same person while trying to settle down and build that perfect, happy union. Staying in love is so much harder than falling in love, and takes longer too.
Revisions are moving beyond the infatuation stage, and now you are staring at the little hairs he didn’t clean out of the sink after trimming his beard. Revisions are getting stuck halfway up the stairs, looking at him over the sofa you are trying to move into your new apartment, the sofa you can’t really afford, and thinking, oh god, is this a terrible mistake? Revisions are moving to New Jersey after years of gallivanting around the world in that reckless, spontaneous, first-drafty way, making Long Term Plans now and Serious Commitments, while every evening you secretly go and look at airfares on-line, trying to pretend that anything is still possible. Revisions are failing to grow a vegetable garden, kneeling in the dirt trying not to cry over the stunted, barely edible, and too-symbolic carrots and radishes that you’ve pulled up out of the earth.
You do it for love, you are looking for the plot, for the thread that will hold it all together, but it was so much easier before, when your only goal was something new and the future didn’t matter. You are trying to build something that will last, but you are thinking about how free you were when you didn’t owe your heart to this attempt.
Revisions are working through it, the days when you fantasize about Some Other Life, Not This One – an early morning train, days that are yours alone, a sleek black cat with iridescent green eyes watching you from the wall in the courtyard. You stay, every day, you stay anyway. You rewrite it, you rewrite it. The following summer, the garden will flourish. You’ll come back with tender ripe squash and zucchini, handfuls of basil, bags of crisp beans, because you’ve learned what to grow in this earth. In the early evening, the fireflies will rise up in semi-synchronized masses, bright blinking lights filling the lawn outside, and you’ll be glad you are here, for the first time not secretly plotting your escape. You can almost see it, the thing you’re trying to make.
The thing you end up with is never as perfect as the thing you imagined when you had really barely started, when he made you laugh so hard in that cave covered in batshit in Malaysia. It’s never as perfect as all those other lives you won’t live and the books you won’t write. The black cat eyes you resentfully in your dreams, like it is sneering at you, Really, is that all you can do? But that cat is just pissed off because it isn’t real. Dumb imaginary cat.
Whatever. I have had some practice at this now. I know all about being disappointed in myself. I could teach a master class on self-loathing, blog. But it is worth it, every time it is worth it, either for what you make, or for what you learn about how to make something. Revisions, like love, have never not been worth it.
So I’m suiting up. Once more into the breach, or something. Tian Di, book 2, you’re going to wish you’d never met me.
Melodramatically, imaginary-machete-wieldingly yours,
Catherine
