Recently, I will confess, I was procrastinating in a way I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I was scared of my novel and I couldn’t quite pin down why. Was it simply because I hadn’t really looked at it properly in a couple of months or because suddenly I had a deadline breathing down my neck? It was a self-imposed deadline, but also real: baby plus political science PhD equals not a lot of novel writing time come September.
As soon as I forced myself to go to the library, open my computer, and turn off the Wi-Fi I realized what was freezing me. There were these two outstanding questions that I had received from the Tin House Winter Workshop that I didn’t know how to respond to and it was throwing off my project.
Question 1: In a short phrase, what is your novel about? What ties all the moving parts together?
This one can be tricky because the way my group meant it, they weren’t looking for a book blurb or a log line. They weren’t even looking to be sold on the novel. They wanted to know how specific I could get in a short description that would link the three separate parts of my novel together. Arguably this is more of a concern for my novel than other novels as it has three parts made up of self-contained story lines and characters. My workshop leader suggested that the phrase for my novel be: the dissolution of marriage. This sent me into a few weeks of deep thinking because that was not at all what that section was about let alone my novel as a whole. So what was missing?
In a nutshell, this question gets at what is the necessary and sufficient thing that a story is about. It’s not too broad and not too specific.
There’s a quote that fellow Kernelist Sarah sent me a few weeks ago that she said reminded her of my novel, and I pasted it at the top of my writing document because even though I don’t think I’ve found the phrase that captures my novel yet, I do think the quote is hinting at what I’m working on: “If we’re completely honest, not sentimental or nostalgic, we have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is one unending thread, not a life chopped up into sections out of touch with one another” (P.L. Travers). Now my novel isn’t about childhood, but there is a meshing of memory and reality and questions of who we are that I am exploring at three critical points of maturity (youth, middle age, and old age) to posit how these critical junctures can serve as invitations into maturity though not always. As you can tell, I’m not there yet. I’m trying to let this question guide me instead of stall me and hopefully as I dive deeper into my novel, it will demystify.
Question 2: What are your characters’ desires and can you share them up front? If you can’t, you need to have a very good reason to keep their desires from the reader.
The issue people took with my novel so far is that I had presented two characters that were very clearly unhappy; however, it was unclear what was causing this unhappiness and therefore it was unclear what they wanted. The implication here from my group was also that a general dissatisfaction with life and a general desire for greater happiness isn’t specific enough for a good novel. What did each of my characters specifically want? And showing their dissatisfaction is fine, but at what point do I move on and show their desires or get more in depth?
There are counterexamples to this of many great novels—The Moviegoer, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (some might argue she wants to sleep for a year, but honestly, that was the surface level and it was never really clear that she wanted anything more specific than for the world to feel or look different in some way)—but oftentimes this is because the novel is doing something else to keep the reader hooked (like trying to keep the character asleep for year). I’ve realized that if I didn’t know any specific desires for a character I, too, would likely become uninvested in the story. However, I do want to share a quote from a beautiful moment in one of my favorite novels, The Moviegoer, that keeps the character in a state of general dissatisfaction and the explanation of desire in a very broad, though explicit, state for the entirety of the novel:
Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire. Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral. My search has been abandoned; it is no match for my aunt, her rightness and her despair, her despairing of me and her despairing of herself. Whenever I take leave of my aunt after one of her serious talks, I have to find a girl.
Being explicit really worked for Percy even though he kept his protagonist’s desire so general. With my novel, I realized that I did know my characters’ desires but I had been too sneaky with my reader. They didn’t pick up on my subtle hints, and so I’m working on bringing them to the front a bit more and maybe even getting explicit with them.
I’ll keep mulling over these questions probably until my novel is across the finish line. In the meantime I am trying to remember that a lot of the rules or things we say a novel has to do can be broken, but I want to make sure that when I do I’m doing it because it’s right for the story or because I did it intentionally, not because I hadn’t executed the story right or done enough work.
My kernel of advice: Find the questions that stump your novel and be okay with working despite resolution.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Natalia finished Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars when jet lag was getting the best of her in Tokyo. It has all the movements of a lovely quiet novel, but she noticed a fascination of the writer that she thinks was executed in its final or perfected form in a more recent novel, The Dutch House. She’s now turned to Prophet Song for the trains and planes she will be taking to get back home. The photo this week is from the Shibuya Scramble Square—all the people walking in different directions embodied a lot of the chaos that unanswered questions feel like in a novel.
Sarah is also on vacation this week and packed more books that she can ever possibly read, including The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon, Weather by Jenny Offill, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, she suspects she will only get through reading To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, as she does when she visits her special island. She is taking this rereading of the novel (her ninth time reading it!) extra slowly for a writing project she is working on and is, at the same time, trying to keep up with #1000wordsofsummer project by Jamie Attenberg.
Neidy is reading Fire Exit by Morgan Talty. So far, she is impressed, but not surprised by Talty's immersive prose.
Shelby finished reading Ambition Monster by Jennifer Romolini, which came out this week. The memoir details Romolini’s climb up the professional ladder in the New York media industry as it intersects with her ambition and workaholism. She attended a live virtual event where Romolini was in conversation with Porchlight’s managing director, Sally Haldorson, and enjoyed learning more about Romolini’s writing process and life.