MIDWAY THROUGH THE JOURNEY OF…MY NOVEL
Dante Alighieri by Sandro Botticelli, 1495
I recently passed the halfway mark in the drafting process of my first novel—the primary project underlying my decision to create this website. My novel will, I hope, illustrate the fusion of my four pet themes—indeed, Recursion is my working title. It already contains many allusions to the extracts I’ve collected here, starting with the epigraph. Ideas right out of the journal have made it in too, though the journal's greater function has been as an alternative, non-novel writerly outlet for me on days when I am feeling frustrated or stuck.
Since today is one of those frustrating, sticky sorts of days, I thought I’d jot down some thoughts on the midway milestone and what I’ve learned to date in the writing process. None of this is intended as “advice,” which I feel entirely unqualified to give at this stage, perhaps even to myself. But there is something special about midpoints and between-ness, a literary reverence even, going back to Horace’s idea of plunging in medias res (“into the middle of things”) even from the beginning. Murky middles are where Dante gets lost:
“Midway through the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark forest,
Having wandered off the straightforward path.”
And where Eliot’s world ends with a whimper:
“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom”
In conversations with friends and acquaintances about my novel, I’ve been really surprised by how many people are interested specifically in the process. Maybe I shouldn’t be—a lot of my friends are attorneys and consultants, and not everyone, as it turns out, is as obsessed with recursion as I am (yet). The questions I get most often are all process-oriented: how long have you been working on it? How many hours to do you write per day? Are you drafting chapters consecutively, or do you skip around? How, exactly, does it all work?
"I could never do it," people say confidently, often before I've responded, but I'm not sure that this is's true. They sound exactly like I sound when someone tells me they are training to run a marathon. Yes, I've used more of my brain writing the first half of Recursion than in any other endeavor—like when you start a new workout routine and discover muscles you never knew existed. And yes, I'm insanely fortunate to have been able to take a leave of absence from my day job to focus on it. But I'm also conscious of taking a pretty sizable risk, one that I have little assurance will ultimately work out in my favor, one that I think most people would not want to take the way I would not want to run a marathon. My gratitude is laced with performance anxiety, the searing desire to prove worthy of my opportunity. So for the most part I've tended to think about Recursion like real work—which, to be clear, it is. In many ways it is not so different from the consulting projects I've done for clients. There's planning, research, analysis, communications. The biggest downside of the process, and the one that blindsided me the most, is the loneliness. I'm used to working on a team, and I miss it dearly.
The general idea for Recursion came to me in 2015 as a way to merge several discrete ideas for novels I’ve had over the years with my recurring thematic interests—recursion, mythology, innovation, and glamour. I developed a general outline of the entire novel around that time that has undergone moderate changes while drafting. But I did not have anything that could be called a manuscript until this past October, shortly after I went on leave. With the exception of November, I have been working on Recursion full-time for the eight months since, writing 40-60 hours per week (though not on a strictly-prescribed schedule; I'm a pretty flexible boss), and averaging two 2-3K word chapters per month. I currently have 48K words out of an anticipated 70-90K total. For reference, The Great Gatsby—about as short as a novel can be—is 47K words (any shorter and it would be a novella). On the other end, War and Peace is 587K.
My ideation process is hugely non-linear, but I've been drafting sequentially, returning periodically to the beginning for rounds of interim editing, trying to polish it little by little. Ideation is constant; Recursion is always on my mind, and random scraps of raw material often present themselves at inopportune moments, getting captured however I can capture them—usually on my phone or in a notebook. When I am starting a new chapter, I will attempt to consolidate all the extant scraps I expect to be relevant and read through them before jotting out a more detailed outline of the chapter. This "strategy"-type work can be done in odd minutes, but when I sit down to compose in earnest, I want to know I'm going to have several uninterrupted hours. Composition—the "execution" step—is slow, laborious, and mostly linear, involving both the synthesis and revision of scraps as well as the generation of entirely new material. I never delete anything, pushing rejected bits of text even as small as four words down the page for potential use later.
Over-iteration here is where I will sometimes get stuck. The metaphor another first-novel-writing friend and I like is of a Rubik's Cube—you get to this place with a chapter where everything you want to be there is there, but it's still all jumbled together; the colors aren't lining up quite right. This is more or less where I am right now with Chapter 18 (out of an anticipated 30 total chapters). What usually pulls me out of it is stepping away for a bit to write something else, like this. Only very, very occasionally do I toss a Rubik's Cube and start over. Ultimately, all unused scraps, big and small, get dumped into a terrifying Google Doc entitled "novel graveyard." It currently holds 85K odd words and has proved tremendously useful.
At first it was painful for me to show anything I'd written to anyone. Now at the end of a chapter, I force my husband to read it immediately while I lord over him and try to decipher his facial expressions. He does not like this at all. To be fair, I often do not like his savagely-honest criticism. But it's undeniably useful. I treat my other friends who have kindly agreed to be readers with far greater consideration. All of my readers' feedback has been enormously helpful—even when I choose not to take it. That is another thing that has gotten easier over time: knowing when to listen and when to overrule, when to wait for a second opinion, and when to trust myself.
A few final midway through-type notes:
- The best description I've found for what it feels like to write a novel is David Foster Wallace's "The Nature of Fun."
- What I'm reading affects what I write. The most helpful things for me to read are thematically relevant but stylistically different from what I'm writing. The very most helpful have been re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and Moby Dick.
- I have to tell myself this all the time: only unwritten novels are perfect.
My favorite question people ask is whether I am definitely going to finish it. So long as I continue to exist, my commitment level to finishing Recursion falls somewhere between marriage in a Jane Austen novel and getting neck tattoo. Besides, I’m more than halfway there.