I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to write an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel . . . to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable; but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable.
~ Virginia Woolf, excerpted in The Faith of a Writer by Joyce Carol Oates
Photograph by Aneta Bartos
When does the story seem most real to you? Before or after you write it?
It’s most real when I’m smack in the middle of the writing, and then again when I’ve been away so long after it’s done that I get sucked in as if I’ve forgotten that I was the one who thought of it. During the sprucing up, it can feel a little plastic-y and I get scared that it’s awful crap. That’s when I need to step away and do something else for a bit, especially sleep.
I was thinking today that the first draft is like a map to the places where later I’ll go back and dig down. My pages are marked {more here} at those points, where I can catch the scent of the story underneath but don’t want to stop to really excavate.
It was not, and could never be real. It was a story, and only that, and though there showed in his face and his hands certain types of scars, which seemed proof enough some real thing had been, in the end, when the day had passed, and the box lowered into the ground, nothing was the same, he wasn’t there laughing into the phone or pouring petrol on wood he’d cut to make the fire, or even completely there in their minds, not enough anyway, never enough to be the same, to be real, and so they had to accept it was only a story (even it pale without him to tell it), and never try to touch it again.
You’re finding your words again, Mr iPants, and they don’t look pale to me. I’m very glad to see you.
XO
I guess when you get that flash of what to write… and then have to make it happen. Or is it when you see it sitting on a shelf in a Barnes & Nobel? I am not a novel writer or even a writer. How do you decide on what to write? Does a story come out of the blue, or do you decide to write about such and such and then make it happen.
however the story comes–from the blue or from the such-and-such–one midwifes (or midhusbands) it. one sees to it that the breathing and the bearing down are done, and one is careful that its cord does not get wrapped around its neck.
Well put, Tetman…
I decide to write about such and such and then make it happen. If I were a natural storyteller it might be the other way around.
That said, I find that there comes a moment when the story exists, in entirety, on the far side of the gulf. And I do think writing is more about pulling it to you than swimming out to find it.
I’m in a weird mood today. Must be the weather.
I can understand that… and I think I can tell the difference when it is the latter.
How is your novel progressing? I plan to buy it in our local indie bookstore and send it to you to be signed… Hell, I might drive down to Portlandia and take you and your husband to the Alibi and get you hammered, so you can do it in person. Maybe your friend Tetman will join us.
You’d buy my book and drinks too? Now that’s my kind of friend! We’ll have a bit of a wait, because publication is over a year away—January 2014. My friend Erika assures me the time will pass quickly and so far I’d say she’s right.
by jan. 14 i may be able to afford to be there. imagine that–averil and tetman meeting at last and raising a glass in good cheer.
Oh, now that’s a beautiful picture.
XO
I think the story lives in different guises. I really feel too that the story is an island, one you have to reach, not necessarily formed, and for me as much a nebulous zone of sensation as much as vision. I can never clearly see my characters, just see them from behind, or smell them, or feel their body volume or the way they move. I love VW’s words. God, that despair! But also excitement. Nothing else can happen while that novel is being pulled from the air.
“a nebulous zone of sensation as much as vision.”
That’s it exactly. Characters are memories of people you’ve never met.
That sounds like the biblical definition of faith: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.
“Characters are memories of people you’ve never met.”
Simply brilliant!
It’s most real before AND after. Just like life?
Yes. It’s always real, but real in different ways, though I admit it’s far more satisfying once it’s on paper. I’m aways much happier in the rewriting phase (where I am now in the WIP) than in the early drafts phase. I love solving the puzzle.
Amen, sister. First drafts are the point for me when the story seems most remote, and easiest to give up on. Every morning I have to go through a round of mental calisthenics in order to convince myself to keep going.
I like the Woolf quotation; that’s pretty much how it seems to me.
My stories seem more real to me as I get further along with them. I guess that seems embarrassingly literal, but the more I “imagine” them, the more tangible and grounded in the “real” world they become for me.
No, that makes perfect sense. I wonder if this perception has something to do with how much planning the writer does ahead of time. One of my books came to me a bit at a time as I was writing it, and that one seemed to grow more real as I went along.
I adore that quote. Thank you, Averil.
I reread a story of mine a while back. I was astounded that it was mine—I knew I’d written it, but, like childbirth, the experience had faded and I’d forgotten how much the characters had meant to me and how i struggled with them.
I can’t read my stuff once it’s finished and out of sight for a while. The cringe starts at about paragraph two and I’m too much of a coward to carry on.
I pretend I’m reading a stranger’s stuff and I become much more forgiving . . .
What a great quote, and for me, so very true. I get a lot of ideas for stories and novels, most of which are quickly abandoned when I can’t see where it might go. My writer friends have a hard time believing this, but when I get a keeper, I can usually envision the scope (but not the outcome), and the length almost immediately. I may lose the map along the way, meander for a while, but as long as I remember the destination, I can eventually get there. (Sorry for the overdone travel metaphor.)
I borrowed your metaphor, above, to keep it rolling.
“When does the story seem most real to you? Before or after you write it?”
It’s not a matter of the quantification of the story’s reality, but the qualification of it. The nature of the story changes, for me, when I craft it, from being a world which exists tenuously, amorphously, and fragmentally within my mind, to being a concrete object–words on a page–which operates as a doorway into a world which is now external to me while remaining a construct of the mind.
I agree– and for me, my idea of the story before I have written it is always bigger and more magical than after I have found the words. Perhaps this is because I have not quite got the hang of it yet. Although certainly, the act of finding the words is often delightfully surprising, too.
They’re two different things, yes? The imagined story and the one that makes it onto the page. A finished novel is accessible and concrete and satisfying in that way, but only after you reach the point of resignation and accept that it’s the best you can do.
Most real when I hear what I have written read aloud. Only then do I know if it works.
Who reads them to you, CJ? Or do you read them aloud yourself?
I read aloud everything I print to proof. Then when I “think” (hope) it is right I print two copies and my husband reads it to me. I hear where he falters or misreads and see better where I need to revise.
God, what a cozy mental picture I’ve formed of the two of you: him pushing up his glasses, you with your pen in hand, tucked there together by the fire, or out on the back deck with a half-finished bottle of wine between you. Don’t disillusion me, I’m green with envy and I like it. There’s not a chance in hell that my husband would ever do that for me.
He and I met in a newsroom both of us working as researchers and in love with convincing words. He doesn’t drink and I am distrustful by nature so our life together is a one day at time supporting adventure for which I am profoundly grateful.
Your pic of a girl in the lake fits well with a Virginia Woolf quote…switch out the net for some rocks…I know, sick humor.
I’m not sure when it seems more real. Right now I’d say before because I don’t often feel I’ve done it justice after I have it written down.
I hear you, sister.
Years ago I was a designer of stained glass windows. There are only certain cuts you can make with glass; cuts create weakness, so the technical part of the craft has to be designed in as if no weaknesses exist. Once the drawing was done of the window or the lamp, it was ‘finished’ in my mind. I saw it complete, lit, in all its glory. Then and only then did I have to plant ass in chair, take glass-cutter in hand and begin the project. Once it was complete it was always more beautiful than what had existed in my mind or in the drawing.
Writing is like that, more beautiful, or funnier or more moving once the project is complete, letting the light shine through. You know, I think I’ll write about the parallel of my two art forms. Thanks A you have inspired me.
What an interesting job. I had no idea the pieces of glass were cut out. I thought they were poured into the pattern, a la those 1970s craft kits where you’d melt the glass beads in the oven.
Live and learn.
Tom Spanbauer calls the process of writing a first draft “shitting out the lump of coal.” For me, it’s more like a dumpster dive. I know that there’s something in the pile of rubbish that, when found, will whisper a truth I didn’t know I knew.
I love the dumpster dive analogy, the whole image of that, the rummaging around. But on the whole I’m going with Spanbauer’s coal constipation, which speaks to the discomfort of the shitty first draft.
Some scenes come alive for me so it’s in the writing that it seems real. Once I’ve walked away from the story, the realness fades.
The scenes come alive that way when you’re in the zone. That beautiful, elusive place. For me that happens during the third or seventh rewrite.
Averil, you did inspire me. As an answer to your question:
http://wrywryter.blogspot.com/