Lessons From The Trunk Novel

*Spec cover art done by my cousin Willem Berglund

I’ve been reflecting a lot on my writing process lately, in part because I reached a good intermission point with my current long-form writing project—a novel loosely based on some experiences I’ve had in Chile, mixed with what I hope is a compelling magical realist sub-story—and in part because my good friend and fellow writer Michael C-D is here visiting me, which inevitably led to us delving deep into the obscure cogworks of our literary minds…

And in so doing I feel like I was able to finally flesh out some of the many lessons I learned with my first long-form writing project; or second, depending on how you count. There was indeed a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novella that I grappled with for several years in my early 20s, long-abandoned now, from which I learnt many lessons, but that was a much earlier stage of my development as a writer and not as interesting to discuss.

No, the project in question is Alley Cats And Aliens, a.k.a. my Shanghai novel, a.k.a. my first novel, a.k.a. my trunk novel (meaning unpublished and collecting dust). This was a project inspired by the year I spent trying to be an English teacher in Shanghai, and by a particular incident that occured on a weekend trip to the city of Nanjing.

I knew from the very beginning that the only way I could ever finish this project was through blind devotion. I knew that it would take some form of ignorant madness to actually spend all the time and energy it would take to write the thing, and I was right. I got it to a point of being “finished” only by eschewing any sense of priorities, life-balance, or mental self-preservation.

I started writing it while still living in Shanghai, and I started with the classic method of “a little bit every day no matter how little so long as it’s every day”. Some days I wrote five whole pages at once, other days only a single sentence, but I did write every day. It took six months but I got there, to the 250-pages I aimed for. The problem was, in focusing so single-mindedly on adding content, I had forgotten to include any sense of story…

Okay that’s not entirely true, there was a story in there, but barely. It was more of a thematic throughline connecting the events than an actual narrative, which was structurally pretty close to the kind of novel I was emulating at first—books like The Tropic Of Cancer and On The Road—but when I finally read my first draft it became clear that I didn’t have the chops to pull off that kind of novel.

That first draft was rough. I was back in the U.S. by the time I finished it, and was just desperate to reach a stopping point with the project. But the responses I got from beta readers were, for an aspiring writer with no real-world success to speak of, pretty horrific.

There was hardly a story, they said, and the characters were often self-contradictory. And worst of all, the prose was weak. All of this was valid and I needed to hear it, but damn if I weren’t unprepared for that.

I had pressured myself to the point of panic attacks before even sending it to anyone, so that when I did hear back from readers I was already about to snap. When the criticisms rolled in, I rolled up into a ball and tumbled into a depression for some time.

At least I had the good sense to step away from it for a while. I took a few months to recover before starting on the second draft. But even so, I failed to learn from the first draft. Rather than fixing the story problems, I cemented them in. Rather than clarifying and crystalizing the characters, or tying them into a deeper plotline, I simply added more convoluted anecdotes. Rather than rewriting, as I should have, I tried to splice and dice my way to the next draft.

This second draft was both the most foolish thing I created as a writer and also the most enlightening. I had put even more pressure on myself this time around, as well as a tight deadline that would have made even a veteran novelist sweat. And what do you know, it came out like shit.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. It was a big improvement over the first draft, but only in its execution; on a fundamental level all the same problems were still there. The reactions from beta readers were much more positive this time around, though looking back I’m not sure why. The second draft was just a more polished version of the first, which was hollow down to its very soul. It took me months to realize that, almost an entire year in fact.

I had to step away from it for all that time to finally reckon with the task at hand. As I had predicted before I even started: the only way to overcome the gargantuaness of the task was to ignore its magnitude entirely. Had I known what it would take to finish it, I probably never would have started.

“Sunk cost” may be considered a fallacy, but for novelists I think it might be the only way to reach the finish line. Because, eight months or so after finishing my second draft, and almost two years since I’d written the first lines, I decided to start all over again… from scratch.

Draft three began with a blank page. I scrapped the full manuscript that came before, re-envisioned a new narrative plot-line, re-framed the characters, and re-evaluated my prose with the harshest possible self-criticism—self-criticism informed by the feedback from my beta readers, it should be noted.

This is where I truly developed as a writer, I believe. By laying the tracks ahead of the train, the whole process ran much smoother. And with just a few significant changes to the character relationships, suddenly I had some actual narrative tension and momentum, which the previous drafts had utterly lacked.

There were still some big mistakes. Like, I didn’t realize until I’d almost finished the third draft that one of the climactic moments didn’t have any weight because there were no impending consequences to it. But also, because I’d arrived at this form of the story in such an ass-backwards way, it took on this squishy, surreal arc that was (if I may toot my own horn) unique and unpredictable.

So, while I’m sure it would have saved me an enormous amount of effort to have more formal education and instruction on the writing process, I also think the novel would have come out more generic and less impassioned had I written it that way.

(This is evidence for why I mistrust all forms of institutionalization in the creative process, but that’s a topic for another post.)

But even with this streamlined, narratively consistent draft that took me a year to write, I still wasn’t done.

I tried using it to fish for agents, to no avail. I used the first 5000 words or so as my writing sample when I applied to MFA programs, which I didn’t get into. I re-worked some parts of it and then sent it to a professional editor who validated both my pride in, and my greatest fears about, the project. And at that point I was so burnt out on the thing that I finally set it aside, and haven’t touched it since.

Now, with about three years’ distance, I’m still not ready to go back to it. I feel like it is very close to what I want it to be, but it still needs a few major edits, and I don’t actually want to publish it as is. It’s good for what it is, but it could be significantly better, and with my more extensive experience now, I think I could fix it much more easily than in the past.

But before I even consider going back to it, I want to finish my new project, because the two stories are deeply connected. And I think it will be clear to me once I finish this second one, how the first one should change in order to match each other more closely.

I realize this was a pretty abstract overview of the writing process, and there are certainly more concrete aspects of the writing I could talk about, but I think I will have to save those for another post. Really, it’s just fun for me to reflect on that whole project, now that most of the agony is behind me…I hope.

I think this felt like the right subject for today because, if nothing else, that first novel was a gift to myself. Hard-earned, to be sure, but all the sweeter because of it. The last time I re-read it, I had what I can only describe as a brain orgasm—not because it was that good, mind you, but just because of how much I’d managed to do with nothing but sweat, tears, and a little madness.

Okay that’s all for today, thanks for reading! Do you identify with any of these struggles? Has the “sunk cost” fallacy actually saved any of your projects? Does any of this make sense to anyone other than myself? Let me know in the comments!

Peace,

Mr. Gibs