A Letter to My Editor
Dear Robyn,
You asked in our last phone call about my writing process (how I actually worked on my current novel Dusk and Ember), and I have some energy to describe it to you now, so here goes:
I write methodically, and organically. That's the best way I can describe it to you, and to myself, as I sit here trying to put words to it.
Methodically, because writing is a discipline for me now, and over the years, after working on this novel, my fourth book, especially, I can say that I've made a discipline of it. There are patterns. Routines. Every morning I sit down to work; every day; sometimes on Saturday but generally never on a Sunday. When I sit down to write in the mornings I usually know where that day's work will start. But often I do not know where that day's work will end; that is, I often do not know what will happen inside the world of the story until I put my pen to paper. Which leads me to the mechanics of writing.
I write all first drafts in longhand, on yellow legal pads. I buy them by the pack. Docket. Sturdy back cover. 16 pound paper. 50 sheets. I date it at the top, I number the pages as I go. I've developed a coding system over the years so that I can use text inserts freely between the yellow legal pad pages and my printed manuscript pages. I work early, usually from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. or so, quick breakfast, then sometimes back at it. Perhaps I'll work another hour, sometimes not. More often than not the writing of this novel laid me waste. I mean: the extent of the work had me in tears most days. I can describe it both as sheer exhaustion and sheer elation. It brings to mind a story I read once about Flannery O'Connor's writing habits. How she too wrote in the mornings, usually to about noon, then sat herself on the front porch of her house and stared at peacocks in the yard all afternoon to recover. She was that blasted by her work, by what it took out of her, by what she gave to it. So the running joke in our house last year was: Am I staring at peacocks in the yard now? The work of the novel for me is a grand emptying of myself out onto the page.
After I have five or ten or fifteen yellow legal pad pages of text I'll key them in and then of course edit and revise as I type. After I have a new length of ten or twenty manuscript pages, or when the story seems to me to be wanting to be printed (to be needing to be printed) in a fresh manuscript file, I'll do that. The new printed manuscript file is always a celebration day. Whether I have fifty pages of the book or 350 pages of the book, it's always a milestone.
So, for the method of writing, the mechanics of writing, I have three stages: writing longhand first drafts, keying that into the file, and then printing the file and working on that most recent version of the entire manuscript. I'm in one of these three phases on any given day. (I suppose there's a fourth phase, too, now that I'm thinking about method and mechanics. I like words. I enjoy words. I enjoy finding new words, or new uses for words. So, sometimes, typically in the afternoons, when my mind is too spent to really "work" on the book, I'll take my journal and notebook and dictionary and thesaurus, and I'll just page through to find words, to read words, to see their meanings, and I'll take notes, about use and form and meanings. It's very enjoyable for me, when I'm in the mood to do this, and I find that I discover new ways to use language. This practice was invaluable to me during the writing of Dusk and Ember. I would come across a word and at the same time the thought would come to me—I could actually "see" the story in my mind—that could be used on page x or page y to deepen or strengthen this scene or that conversation or that description. Those moments especially are very invigorating for me.) When I print the full manuscript I'll usually start reading to review and revise from the very beginning. Unless, of course, I'm much further into the story. After I split Dusk and Ember into the five parts, it became easier to focus on one of the parts at a time.
The amount of time I can spend working each day depends greatly on the phase I'm in. Writing longhand is exhausting work, but it's the most releasing, and, in a way, relaxing work. I suppose it's because I'm actualizing the contents of my mind, my heart, my soul. I can typically work about two and no more than four hours a day. If I'm keying in my first draft, that's easier work. The material is already there and I'm only cleaning it up, but it can often be just as tiring. So on any day I'll work two up to six hours. Mornings, definitely, and sometimes after lunch. Afternoons are for resting or working out, exercise; flipping through pages of the dictionary and thesaurus; personal writing in my journal; some evenings, if the ideas are flowing, I will have to write them down. I work in silence. No music. Nothing. I don't know how other writers can create with anything going on in the background. Except when I'm typing in new text, or working through page revisions. Then I may have some ambient music playing. I can't tell you how many loops I went through of Brian Eno's album Thursday Afternoon. It was perfect so many days.
During all of last year sleep was usually difficult. Ideas and thoughts and scenes and sentences and words would come, and I'd have to get up out of bed to write them down on the manuscript or yellow legal pads before they all floated away from me. I can't tell you how much escaped; I don't know; too much. Then back to bed. A few seconds, then more ideas and words and scenes would come. Then back to the manuscript. Then back to bed. And on.
I write organically, too. I usually have a pen and notepad with me at all times. In my writing bag or in my pocket. Ideas, thoughts, words, sentences come to me, and I write them down, then something gets built from that. Years ago I got into the good habit of taking a small notebook in my writing bag everywhere I went. Too many good ideas and thoughts and sentences were getting away from me. I'd have to write things down on grocery lists, bank receipts. Ridiculous! Then, when I couldn't bring the bag with me—to restaurants, to church services—I bought a bunch of smaller pocket notebooks. So, now, I'll usually never leave home without a pen and notebook of some kind.
Dusk and Ember started about ten years ago. In November 2005 I had 30,000 words, a mess of notes and fragments of scenes and a loose structure for all of it. It seemed to me to be like a many-branched tree with some flowering branches, some wilting branches, some dying or dead branches. Four years later, by 2009, I had another 20,000 words but not much else. I had eight more versions from 2013 to 2014, but it didn't get much better. In 2015 I had the idea of splitting the novel into its five parts to better separate actions and story lines. I did this as much for myself as for the story. It felt to me that I could get a better handle on the story and where it was going—and where I wanted it to go—after I did this.
Only when I went to Costa Rica for those thirty days in October 2015 to work specifically on this novel did everything gel in my mind. A new way of seeing the work opened up for me. I so very much needed that time alone by the sea to focus solely on the novel. From October 2015 to December 2016 I count 14 versions of book files for Dusk and Ember. That means I wrote about 10,000 words per month. That sounds about right.
About my use of poetry in the novel. Let's call them "poetic diversions." You wrote earlier to me: "You use poetry to great effect throughout the book—blurring the lines between prose and poetry and, in a way, creating a new form entirely..." I have to say that my intention was not to create any new form; it's just that the story develops this way sometimes for me. I get to a point in the story and it feels to me that the words I'm using must convey a certain tone and space for the world on the page, and that's the language that comes out of me.
You mentioned that the novel is a little long. Let's talk leftovers. Leftovers. Let me tell you about what didn't get into this final draft. I have a "leftover" file of 70,000 words and another file from 2005 with 71,000 words. That's a novel itself; it's about 30,000 words more than the novel. What's in those files? False starts, old outlines, parts of chapters abandoned, sections of text written that will never see the light of day. As the novel progressed, especially into 2016, I can say that there were fewer and fewer times I had to abandon large portions of text. It seems to me that by that time the story was fairly solid in my mind and that I only had to get it out on paper.
I know that this novel would not be what it is today without the solid and unhindered time and dedication I've put into it over the past 14 months. Which is a nice coincidence, I think, of time. In the novel it was 14 months that Richard spent in the foundry, brewing over what his life could or should be, or would be. What he could want it to be. Possibilities and probabilities. So many different cuts at the same gem of thought. And time. 14 months. Hard to believe it's coming to an end. Yet here I am. Here we are. At the end of it.
This is the second and the last novel I'll write about Richard, I think. I can't say "never"—that I'll never re-visit these characters—but it does feel like that, at the end of this now. If it is, it's alright with me. It's a good end. I'm pleased and satisfied with how the novel turned out, and I think that's about as much as a novelist can say, or would want to say, about his work. Is it "better" than my first novel There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes? I'm not sure about that. I'll use the words that you told me: "It's a more mature work." I like that. That fits. Also: It's a more robust work. That works, too.
No doubt people reading this novel—perhaps yourself—will ask or wonder: how much of this is autobiographical? How much of Robert is Richard. To answer that I can say, I am Richard. And in the same breath, I am not Richard. Richard is a vehicle through which I was able to create a world more real to me sometimes than the world I see when I look outside my window. He's given me that freedom, that cross to bear. Now it's close to being over, and I can set that particular cross aside. I don't think I can convey the joys and sorrows of carrying it, though. Not through words. There's too many meanings lost, misconveyed, misconstrued.
This little exercise has been helpful and enjoyable to me to set my thoughts down here to you. I hope it's of some value.
I want to finish by saying thank you so very much for your time and effort and talents on my novel. It's no cliche to say that Dusk and Ember would not be what it is today without your help. For that I'll be ever grateful. I could hear the sadness in your voice on the phone when we talked about this being the end of this work now. I confess: I'm sad, too, when I stop myself to think about it. Really think about it. To leave the writing of this behind, the characters, the story, their world. But my gladness comes in to overcome that sadness. I'm pleased with the novel, and I'm satisfied that I gave it everything I had to give, my craft, my passion, my mind and my soul. A writer can't ask for more than that; it's the culmination of our craft. So I can be happy that it's over.
And I have to tell you that I'm very much looking forward to working on my third novel. I've already started work on it, as you know. I shared with you already what it's about so I won't rehash that here. When I write about it—a novel I'm working on—it feels a bit like I'm letting the air out of a full tire. And I don't want to do that. I think it's the internal tension of the story, the work of it, that I must keep inside until there is the proper time and proper place to let it out so that I can actually see what it is that I'm trying to write, to craft, to tell.
It's a strange and lovely process, this writing. I think I can call myself a novelist now, now that I have completed Dusk and Ember, my second novel, and now that I'm starting in earnest on my third novel. It's funny even writing that, even though it's true. Time does odd things to us. We're unique among creatures that way, though, aren't we? We know enough about our own mortality to try to leave something of us behind, to let others know we were here, that we might have mattered to someone else, to anyone else.
I think that's all any of us really wants, in the end. To matter.
Thank you for helping me make this book matter.
Sincerely,
Robert
You asked in our last phone call about my writing process (how I actually worked on my current novel Dusk and Ember), and I have some energy to describe it to you now, so here goes:
I write methodically, and organically. That's the best way I can describe it to you, and to myself, as I sit here trying to put words to it.
Methodically, because writing is a discipline for me now, and over the years, after working on this novel, my fourth book, especially, I can say that I've made a discipline of it. There are patterns. Routines. Every morning I sit down to work; every day; sometimes on Saturday but generally never on a Sunday. When I sit down to write in the mornings I usually know where that day's work will start. But often I do not know where that day's work will end; that is, I often do not know what will happen inside the world of the story until I put my pen to paper. Which leads me to the mechanics of writing.
I write all first drafts in longhand, on yellow legal pads. I buy them by the pack. Docket. Sturdy back cover. 16 pound paper. 50 sheets. I date it at the top, I number the pages as I go. I've developed a coding system over the years so that I can use text inserts freely between the yellow legal pad pages and my printed manuscript pages. I work early, usually from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. or so, quick breakfast, then sometimes back at it. Perhaps I'll work another hour, sometimes not. More often than not the writing of this novel laid me waste. I mean: the extent of the work had me in tears most days. I can describe it both as sheer exhaustion and sheer elation. It brings to mind a story I read once about Flannery O'Connor's writing habits. How she too wrote in the mornings, usually to about noon, then sat herself on the front porch of her house and stared at peacocks in the yard all afternoon to recover. She was that blasted by her work, by what it took out of her, by what she gave to it. So the running joke in our house last year was: Am I staring at peacocks in the yard now? The work of the novel for me is a grand emptying of myself out onto the page.
After I have five or ten or fifteen yellow legal pad pages of text I'll key them in and then of course edit and revise as I type. After I have a new length of ten or twenty manuscript pages, or when the story seems to me to be wanting to be printed (to be needing to be printed) in a fresh manuscript file, I'll do that. The new printed manuscript file is always a celebration day. Whether I have fifty pages of the book or 350 pages of the book, it's always a milestone.
So, for the method of writing, the mechanics of writing, I have three stages: writing longhand first drafts, keying that into the file, and then printing the file and working on that most recent version of the entire manuscript. I'm in one of these three phases on any given day. (I suppose there's a fourth phase, too, now that I'm thinking about method and mechanics. I like words. I enjoy words. I enjoy finding new words, or new uses for words. So, sometimes, typically in the afternoons, when my mind is too spent to really "work" on the book, I'll take my journal and notebook and dictionary and thesaurus, and I'll just page through to find words, to read words, to see their meanings, and I'll take notes, about use and form and meanings. It's very enjoyable for me, when I'm in the mood to do this, and I find that I discover new ways to use language. This practice was invaluable to me during the writing of Dusk and Ember. I would come across a word and at the same time the thought would come to me—I could actually "see" the story in my mind—that could be used on page x or page y to deepen or strengthen this scene or that conversation or that description. Those moments especially are very invigorating for me.) When I print the full manuscript I'll usually start reading to review and revise from the very beginning. Unless, of course, I'm much further into the story. After I split Dusk and Ember into the five parts, it became easier to focus on one of the parts at a time.
The amount of time I can spend working each day depends greatly on the phase I'm in. Writing longhand is exhausting work, but it's the most releasing, and, in a way, relaxing work. I suppose it's because I'm actualizing the contents of my mind, my heart, my soul. I can typically work about two and no more than four hours a day. If I'm keying in my first draft, that's easier work. The material is already there and I'm only cleaning it up, but it can often be just as tiring. So on any day I'll work two up to six hours. Mornings, definitely, and sometimes after lunch. Afternoons are for resting or working out, exercise; flipping through pages of the dictionary and thesaurus; personal writing in my journal; some evenings, if the ideas are flowing, I will have to write them down. I work in silence. No music. Nothing. I don't know how other writers can create with anything going on in the background. Except when I'm typing in new text, or working through page revisions. Then I may have some ambient music playing. I can't tell you how many loops I went through of Brian Eno's album Thursday Afternoon. It was perfect so many days.
During all of last year sleep was usually difficult. Ideas and thoughts and scenes and sentences and words would come, and I'd have to get up out of bed to write them down on the manuscript or yellow legal pads before they all floated away from me. I can't tell you how much escaped; I don't know; too much. Then back to bed. A few seconds, then more ideas and words and scenes would come. Then back to the manuscript. Then back to bed. And on.
I write organically, too. I usually have a pen and notepad with me at all times. In my writing bag or in my pocket. Ideas, thoughts, words, sentences come to me, and I write them down, then something gets built from that. Years ago I got into the good habit of taking a small notebook in my writing bag everywhere I went. Too many good ideas and thoughts and sentences were getting away from me. I'd have to write things down on grocery lists, bank receipts. Ridiculous! Then, when I couldn't bring the bag with me—to restaurants, to church services—I bought a bunch of smaller pocket notebooks. So, now, I'll usually never leave home without a pen and notebook of some kind.
Dusk and Ember started about ten years ago. In November 2005 I had 30,000 words, a mess of notes and fragments of scenes and a loose structure for all of it. It seemed to me to be like a many-branched tree with some flowering branches, some wilting branches, some dying or dead branches. Four years later, by 2009, I had another 20,000 words but not much else. I had eight more versions from 2013 to 2014, but it didn't get much better. In 2015 I had the idea of splitting the novel into its five parts to better separate actions and story lines. I did this as much for myself as for the story. It felt to me that I could get a better handle on the story and where it was going—and where I wanted it to go—after I did this.
Only when I went to Costa Rica for those thirty days in October 2015 to work specifically on this novel did everything gel in my mind. A new way of seeing the work opened up for me. I so very much needed that time alone by the sea to focus solely on the novel. From October 2015 to December 2016 I count 14 versions of book files for Dusk and Ember. That means I wrote about 10,000 words per month. That sounds about right.
About my use of poetry in the novel. Let's call them "poetic diversions." You wrote earlier to me: "You use poetry to great effect throughout the book—blurring the lines between prose and poetry and, in a way, creating a new form entirely..." I have to say that my intention was not to create any new form; it's just that the story develops this way sometimes for me. I get to a point in the story and it feels to me that the words I'm using must convey a certain tone and space for the world on the page, and that's the language that comes out of me.
You mentioned that the novel is a little long. Let's talk leftovers. Leftovers. Let me tell you about what didn't get into this final draft. I have a "leftover" file of 70,000 words and another file from 2005 with 71,000 words. That's a novel itself; it's about 30,000 words more than the novel. What's in those files? False starts, old outlines, parts of chapters abandoned, sections of text written that will never see the light of day. As the novel progressed, especially into 2016, I can say that there were fewer and fewer times I had to abandon large portions of text. It seems to me that by that time the story was fairly solid in my mind and that I only had to get it out on paper.
I know that this novel would not be what it is today without the solid and unhindered time and dedication I've put into it over the past 14 months. Which is a nice coincidence, I think, of time. In the novel it was 14 months that Richard spent in the foundry, brewing over what his life could or should be, or would be. What he could want it to be. Possibilities and probabilities. So many different cuts at the same gem of thought. And time. 14 months. Hard to believe it's coming to an end. Yet here I am. Here we are. At the end of it.
This is the second and the last novel I'll write about Richard, I think. I can't say "never"—that I'll never re-visit these characters—but it does feel like that, at the end of this now. If it is, it's alright with me. It's a good end. I'm pleased and satisfied with how the novel turned out, and I think that's about as much as a novelist can say, or would want to say, about his work. Is it "better" than my first novel There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes? I'm not sure about that. I'll use the words that you told me: "It's a more mature work." I like that. That fits. Also: It's a more robust work. That works, too.
No doubt people reading this novel—perhaps yourself—will ask or wonder: how much of this is autobiographical? How much of Robert is Richard. To answer that I can say, I am Richard. And in the same breath, I am not Richard. Richard is a vehicle through which I was able to create a world more real to me sometimes than the world I see when I look outside my window. He's given me that freedom, that cross to bear. Now it's close to being over, and I can set that particular cross aside. I don't think I can convey the joys and sorrows of carrying it, though. Not through words. There's too many meanings lost, misconveyed, misconstrued.
This little exercise has been helpful and enjoyable to me to set my thoughts down here to you. I hope it's of some value.
I want to finish by saying thank you so very much for your time and effort and talents on my novel. It's no cliche to say that Dusk and Ember would not be what it is today without your help. For that I'll be ever grateful. I could hear the sadness in your voice on the phone when we talked about this being the end of this work now. I confess: I'm sad, too, when I stop myself to think about it. Really think about it. To leave the writing of this behind, the characters, the story, their world. But my gladness comes in to overcome that sadness. I'm pleased with the novel, and I'm satisfied that I gave it everything I had to give, my craft, my passion, my mind and my soul. A writer can't ask for more than that; it's the culmination of our craft. So I can be happy that it's over.
And I have to tell you that I'm very much looking forward to working on my third novel. I've already started work on it, as you know. I shared with you already what it's about so I won't rehash that here. When I write about it—a novel I'm working on—it feels a bit like I'm letting the air out of a full tire. And I don't want to do that. I think it's the internal tension of the story, the work of it, that I must keep inside until there is the proper time and proper place to let it out so that I can actually see what it is that I'm trying to write, to craft, to tell.
It's a strange and lovely process, this writing. I think I can call myself a novelist now, now that I have completed Dusk and Ember, my second novel, and now that I'm starting in earnest on my third novel. It's funny even writing that, even though it's true. Time does odd things to us. We're unique among creatures that way, though, aren't we? We know enough about our own mortality to try to leave something of us behind, to let others know we were here, that we might have mattered to someone else, to anyone else.
I think that's all any of us really wants, in the end. To matter.
Thank you for helping me make this book matter.
Sincerely,
Robert
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