The Laborious Art of Novel Writing

I am a horrifically impatient person.  I'm sure I always have been although I didn't acutely become aware of it until fairly recently.  And it's not just impatience about when the next disc of 30 Rock is going to show up in my mailbox or when the Huffington Post is going to update, (although those are trials in themselves) it's an impatience with myself when I realize I can't just magically jump from point A to point D without going past B and C first.  This is why I failed at karate, ballet, piano, French and most relationships.  I don't want to waste time with the baby steps. I just want to get to the part where I play Carnegie Hall in pointe shoes while smashing planks with my bare hands.

I realized this about myself last week, when I heard Lauren Groff speak about her new book Arcadia at The Green Toad.  It, as readings occasionally do, made me panic.  One, because Lauren is awesome and sweet and kind and a NYT Bestseller therefor, I am terrified she will find out that I am, by contrast, a blithering idiot. I feel the same way about Megan Abbott, to the point where I avoided her at a conference for three days even though she was asking other people about whether or not I was there.   God forbid I ever come within two states of Walton Goggins or Geena Davis; I would have no choice but to change my name and flee the country until they were safely gone.

Good thing I had Clive Owen and
Benicio Del Toro to Keep Me Company

When I interviewed her for the paper, Lauren said that the "natural life" of a novel is "about five years."  Five years.  I can't imagine writing something for five years.  I think about the person I was five years ago, the kind of work I was writing then and how much I've changed.  I was just starting what would be the series of stories known as Crimson City Blues, I was obsessed with Sin City, just starting to think about grad school and had never even heard of Walton Goggins.  Five years from now, I will be yet another different person, and if that's the case, I would never get the book finished possibly ever.

Lauren does a cool thing, because she is cool.  She writes a first draft by hand and throws it out.  Then she writes another draft and throws that one out.  Then she writes a third draft on the computer and the story begins to take it's current form.  How I wish I had that kind of patience!  I'm still in pop fiction grad school mode, where I write a novel in six months, spend another three polishing it and then spend another six months getting rejected by every agent and unsolicited manuscript accepting publishing house in NYC.  This has happened twice, each time with some astoundingly nasty rejection letters.

I've got a novel now that I'm working on.  It's a longer version of a short story I wrote that has yet to be picked up, about an ex-con who promises his brother that he'll look after his wife and her two kids when he's released on parole, but after he arrives, it's clear she doesn't want him there and the two of them have to find a way to work into each other's lives.  It's a sad, beautiful story about family and love and grace that Matthew admits just about made him weep.  When I'm done with a story, the characters sort of vanish, their stories told but I couldn't get these characters off my mind, so I started turning it into a novel.

And it keeps coming.  I wrote half a draft and realized that it was just a series of scenes and that would never work.  So I started again, and characters came and went, locations changed, POVs shifted.

Clearly, this was going to take more than six months.

And this terrifies me.

The failed dance/karate/piano lessons can be chalked up to youthful exuberance, but my 20's have been fraught with poverty.  If I hit my snooze button, I missed my bus to work.  If I didn't get to the reception early, the food was all gone when I got there.  I had deadlines to meet, multiple jobs to juggle.  Patience was for people whose lives didn't depend on bus schedules and free spinach triangles.  My life was carefully organized and stacked, and in the world I knew, taking time to write a book was a luxury afforded to beautiful people with grant money and tenure.  I wrote partially because I loved it and partially because I saw it as the only way I knew how to bust myself out of low-wage jobs and crippling poverty.  If I could sell a story to Glimmer Train, that would pay my rent and phone for a month.  A book deal would pay off my student loans.  Heck, even a $25 sale to an internet magazine could pay for two weeks of halfway-decent groceries.

So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.  No one can ever say all I did was daydream.  I wrote "The Weather Girl" in 3 days, "The PI's Wife" in a hour,  "Purgatory Blues" and "Pussy" in 30 minutes each.  And not first drafts either--finished, final drafts ready for submission.  I put my impatience to work.

Then Crimson City Blues didn't land me an agent.  Neither did Six Bullets, which I worked on for a year and a half, part of that time with a high profile agent who, after six months of rewrites, suddenly rejected it and told me I didn't know how to write a novel.  I got rejection after rejection from Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Electric Literature.

But what I did get was a good job that I love, and now I have the arduous task of retraining my brain to enjoy the process and the labor of the story.  From "The Carpoool" to "Goodnight Lily" Crimson City Blues took about four years.  But I loved every minute of it, from the first scribbling of "Hero Cop" on a scrap of paper at the Brooklyn Library to drawing city maps on the placemats at the Spot with Dwight to adding the "take the rape"* sequence in "Until Proven Guilty" to getting that first acceptance letter from Hardboiled for "Big Night Out."

I don't think I'll ever spend eight years on a book, as Mike keeps reminding me his mentor did.  But what I will do is pace myself to enjoy the process, as laborious and difficult as it can be.  Because I look back on Crimson City Blues and think "That was the happiest I ever was when I was writing."  I want to be a happy writer.  If I'm going to spend hours at my desk, I want them to be happy ones.





*A romance writer I went to grad school with actually said this phrase to me in workshop.  She looked me in the eye--someone she didn't know, quite possibly one of the 213,000 women who are sexually assaulted each year--and said, "I really feel like Lily should just take the rape."  I was so appalled that I reacted the only way I knew how--working it into the story as a line of advice from another prisoner.  

Yeah.  Like This.

Every so often, I stumble across a song in my collection that reminds me of my ex-best friend, who we'll call Dwight.  And every so often I'll dream about him, and it'll remind me of how great things were, rather than how badly it all ended.

I tend to avoid songs that remind me of ex's, whether they're friends or lovers or boyfriends.  I didn't listen to a single Billy Joel song for almost four years after Aaron and I broke up.  I gave up October Project after Martin shattered my heart by getting engaged to someone else while we were still dating (worst. breakup. ever).  I keep my Matthew Sweet and my Elvis Costello CDs even though I don't listen to them ever, but I turn off Elton John's "Levon" when it comes on the radio because it makes me cry thinking of a man who used to tear up whenever he heard it.   I still barely listen to the Smashing Pumpkins because I had to get over two guys who were both fans.

But I still listen to Cracker's "Sick of Goodbyes" and John Mellancamp's "Key West Intermezzo" and all the songs that remind me of Dwight.  I play Oingo Boingo's "War Again" and once again I'm on the NJ Transit and we're leaning against each other, half-asleep and sharing earbuds, alone in the car and alone in the world.  Or the Goo Goo Dolls "Blackout," driving through a hailstorm while our friend Mike stood outside in line for Green Day.  That would have been six years ago today--the day before my birthday.  We were buying party supplies for my infamous Sin City party.

I wonder if he ever listens to the mix CDs I made him or if he ever dreams of me.  I like seeing him in dreams, when everything is great and all is forgiven and nothing has changed.  I could apologize for what I did, but all it would do would be to forgive the past.  We have no future and I think we both know that, which is why neither of us has tried to reach out to the other.  We're different people and nothing we could do would be enough to reconstruct what we had. 

But when I'm listening to those songs, or I see his face in dreams, I get this wonderful bittersweet feeling.  Because for a few minutes while I'm sleeping, we're friends again.  For a few minutes, there's nothing between us but old jokes and an instinctual connection.  He's always exactly how I remember him, with his curls and his grin and that laugh.  And I wake up with one of our songs in my head.  Bon Jovi's "I Am" or Sonata Artica's "Shamandalie," which when I heard I knew was how things would end. 



And they did.  And it was my fault and Dwight if you're reading this, I'm sorry.

* *

I'm turning 28 tomorrow.  Time keeps ticking down, and the older I get, the more I want to distant myself from the past.  When I was younger, my whole existance was bent on trying to recapture what I felt like I'd lost.  I pined like it was a hobby, and while there's a part of me that misses the passion of those days, the better part of me is glad for what lies ahead. . . because what's gone is gone, and will never be again.  I'm learning to be okay for that.

The fire, Baby . . . there's no place in the world for our kind of fire.

Ugly Men I Have Loved

On this, the eve of both my final graduate school residency, my friend Eeon's wedding and, most importantly, the release of Predators, it is time I confess what everyone has known for months.

I am so in love with Walton Goggins.



I love his femmy eyes.  I love his woodchuck teeth.  I love his receeding hairline and his southern accent and his boot cut jeans.  The man's got the nicest pants I've ever seen, even beating out Jeff Goldblum's skinny slacks on Law and Order: Criminal Intent.


Ian and I have been devouring The Shield. We just finished season five, and things are getting rough.  I sobbed during the finale.  It was not good, but for whatever reason, I just couldn't stay mad at Shane.  And I know things aren't going to end well for him, because it's The Shield, and nothing ends well for anybody.

By all logic, I should have had the crush on Dutch Boy, because he looks like Homicide's Det. Bayliss, who I was secretly in love with back in the day.

Or Lem, who looks like Trigun's Vash the Stampede.

Okay, that's cheating, because I did have a crush on Lem, but anyone who's watched The Shield knows that that's a love that ends pretty badly.

But there was just something about Shane that struck me.  Maybe it was because there's an ernestly about Shane, a real divide between wanting to do right by Vic and the team and wanting to do right by Shane.  He's the most complex character on the show, and I'm drawn to that.  Plus, as I said before, the man wears a pair of blue jeans like you can't believe.

Walton Goggins is just one more in a long list of ugly celebrities I've had the hots for, which includes babes like Benicio del Toro in Sin City, Adrien Brody (who's also in Predators) and Tom Waits in Down By Law.  In my defense, Tom Waits has an absolutely breathtaking heinie.  Watch the scene where the cops frisk him and check that thing out.  It's really something special.

My adoration for ugly dudes does not manifest itself in my real life.  Ian looks like Ewan McGregor.  My friend Matthew, the second hottest guy I know, looks like Jeff Goldblum, unless he's wearing his other glasses and then he looks like Morrissey. 

But on film, ugliness carries a raw sexuality.  There are a million petty boys, but to find a man with Benicio del Toro's lips or Walton Goggins' eyes or Tom Waits butt is a real gem.  They captivate me and I can't look away.

Also, Shane once said, "Eatin' ain't cheatin'" which just about made me faint dead away.  The man knows what the ladies like.

Of course, my friend Eeon, not thinking ahead, planned his wedding for the day Predators opens.  I think he's letting me give Bill Pullman's speech from Independence Day to make up for this grevious error.  I forgive him.  I'm a generous girl.