Recently, I was working on my novel after a few days off. I hate days off from long projects but sometimes they’re necessary. My fear is always that I’m going to have difficulty getting back into the book, especially something as tricky as a novel, with characters whose stories and identities keep shifting. My novel has been going through a lot of shifting lately, and usually, I welcome this, but I have started to feel of late that the architecture of the book is becoming unstuck, and I fret sometimes that the book might collapse. I wrote one mess of a book several years ago and put it in the drawer because I kept changing its elements until I didn’t even know what it was about anymore. I needed a break and so far, that break has lasted about five years. That’s unusual for me as I tend to finish what I’ve started, no matter how frustrating or painful the process might be. I fully intend to return to this novel, but you know how sometimes when you’re in a restaurant and the server asks you if you’re ready to order and you say, “Could you come back in a minute?” and the server says, “Of course,” and then disappears for half an hour? That novel couldn’t make up its mind and so I had to take care of other customers first. Now the novel is just going to have to wait its turn. But my “new” novel has been having trouble ordering lately, too. Twice, I’ve rewritten the book up to a pivotal moment in the last third of the narrative. I’m full of steam up until that moment, more than two hundred pages in, and then I come to a full stop. My characters start becoming a little hazy and they want to change gender and they say the opposite things of what they said in the last draft, and they look at me like this is all my fault. They say, “We’re going to need a little more time with the menu. We just sat down.” And I say, “Well, actually you’ve been here for three years, but sure, okay, take your time.” And they smile insincerely and ask me if I can recommend the Big Revelation. “I haven’t had the Big Revelation yet, but you know, I hear it’s excellent.” Of course, I’m lying. I just want them to order already and let me move on to the next book.
This is all normal, I tell myself. You’ll get through it. You always do. Or you always did until that one novel that’s still waiting to be completed. The only positive spin I can put on this is that I have written books before and I know it’s not impossible even if it seems that way sometimes.
Frustration and doubt can visit any writer at any point in their career.
What gets me through these wracking moments most often is the old put-one-foot-in-front-of another-routine. Don’t make panic edits. Don’t edit at night when everything looks a little bleak. Come at the project fresh in the morning and chances are something will strike you that feels like a solution. Follow it. If there are other people around you who love and pity you for being a writer, use them mercilessly as sounding boards. They’re used to it. Just say something along the lines of, “What if Shannon [not my character’s real name, but a pseudonym to protect the real character] doesn’t know her father’s secret and only learns of it later in the book?” Your partner, friend, colleague, child, who loves and pities you for being a writer, will most likely not know what you’re talking about. Don’t ask them if what you just said makes sense. If they’re polite, the best response you can hope for is “sort of.” But it doesn’t matter because nine times out of ten, simply verbalizing your problem offers a solution. Light bulb moment. Thank them for their help and ignore their ironic looks and protests that they didn’t really say anything. Doesn’t matter. They helped you more than they can know. And you helped them, too, by not recounting the entire plot of your novel or reading them the last twenty pages with absolutely no context.
So I wrote to that troublesome point in the novel again. The characters were exhausted. They’d swapped genders. They’d rehearsed their lines, listened to my frenetic suggestions, delivered their lines in the same wooden manner. They were at a flower market in Ho Chi Minh City. Ho Thi Ky, Flower and Food Street. Why were they there? I wasn’t sure anymore.
Wait! What if I . . . ?
My characters knew where this was going. I was going to start the whole damn thing over again. They refused to budge. They said, you figure this out already. We’re not moving until you do. What can you do when your characters strike but listen to their demands?
Awkward silence. So we waited there for a while. One of the characters was on a motorbike. The other was about to get on the back of the bike and they were going to drive off to an old apartment complex that had once been a sprawling group of apartments for American officers and their families during the Vietnam War. I saw then that they weren’t ready to go there yet. They wanted to stop for a meal first and then the one on the motorbike would take the other to meet the person she both wanted him to meet and also didn’t want him to meet. But food first and a little conversation.
I always say that frustration is a necessary part of the creative process, but there’s a difference between stating this and believing and trusting that I will get through it. Today I did so. Tomorrow I might need to go through this all over again, but at least the novel has ordered and now, for the moment, the long wait seems again to have a purpose and a finite end.
Very helpful confessions here. The rest of us in that cafe sigh over our tea and murmur thank God we’re not alone, and our looks aren’t pitying but grateful.