About That Book I’m Writing

Yeah so I’m writing a book (again) and I’ve been stuck in about the same place for months (again).

It’s not a surprise. It’s happened to me every time at about this point in a book — halfway through, let’s say. The squishy middle. This is where all of the decisions you couldn’t get yourself to make early on come back to haunt you, and you have to go back before you can go forward. What exactly is this character trying to do, how much time passes between these two scenes, what does everyone think is going on here vs. what’s actually happening. Decisions. Hundreds of them, and that’s not even considering the basic problem of which words go in which order.

At about this point I’ve always, always had to go back to note cards on a corkboard and think really hard about who does what in what order and why. And then (this is the important part) I need to actually decide everything that happens.

This is a lot harder than you might expect! Sometimes I change my mind about something after I’ve written a few scenes and now I have to go back and fix it. Sometimes I forget which decision I made even after the book is out and have to smile and nod along when a reader talks about it, because you’re probably supposed to know what happens in your own books? Pretty sure.

I see a story as a system; a spiderweb; most of all an elaborate machine — something like a clock. (For a long time, the view from inside of a clock was my site’s banner image, though I don’t think I ever explained why.) A clock and a story are both made up of hundreds of little parts that each have to fit neatly with all the others and work in concert so the whole of it moves steadily forward at the right pace. Each decision is rebalancing the clock. First so it works at all, and then so it works better and better, until eventually, if you’re both skilled and lucky, you’ve made something beautiful and bejeweled, where the mechanism is just as lovely to look at as the face.

The big picture matters. The details matter. There’s no talking about which is more important, because ultimately they’re all the same thing.

Each decision about what-happens-when-and-why changes the way the whole clock works. And at about the midpoint of a book is when the clock needs to start feeling like it’s actually ticking because you’re over the flush of excitement over putting a bunch of fresh new pieces together however they fit, but you haven’t yet seen how beautifully the whole thing will work when it’s done.

Here’s what that looks like in practical terms. Right now I have 50,000 words of a manuscript called The Greenville Conspiracy (unless and until some enterprising marketing team comes up with something better). A lot of those words are wrong and have to go — not necessarily because they’re bad or boring, though there’s some of that, but because they’re weighed down with decisions I hadn’t made yet, or I’d started going in one direction and it turned out to be all wrong. The clock doesn’t sound right.

So the step I’m on right now isn’t writing a single word. It’s working out in painstaking detail what it’s going to take to make sure the clock works at all, even if it keeps the wrong time.

And even then, even after you think you’ve decided everything, the clock is always there in the background. As you keep putting words and scenes and chapters together, you’ll find the click of a gear slipping a few teeth, an empty space where something needs to be or where something wrong is jamming the mechanism. But if you really understand the big picture, the complete way the clock is supposed to work and what work every single piece of it is doing, then fixing these problems as you find them is simple.

NB: This was all true when I wrote this in mid-December but I’ve moved pretty far along since then. It’s great!