I completed a draft two weeks ago of my next novel. Wednesday morning, I finished reviewing the pages, took them outside, and put them down on a table. The sky was blue. The trees were green. My pages were covered with more notes than words, more self-admonishments than anything good. I had ideas, new plans, I even felt an excitement for the thing, but as soon as I felt the excitement a half-second too long, I felt disappointment, frustration, emptiness most of all.
I never remember how to write a novel. It’s impossible to retrace the steps. Maybe I’ve never known how to write a novel, that’s why I can’t remember. I wonder if the process is easier to remember for people who write the same kind of stories each time. I mean, I know what to do: hold the ideas and feelings in two hands, mash them together, put them into words slowly, slowly—or sometimes fast fast fast faster this is so amazing, and the next morning I’m staring at a mess of frenzy. Fine, material to work with, but it’s difficult to know presently what works best. Writing a novel is writing while trying not to hate what you’re writing. There are good days, of course, but mostly not, at least for me in the early stages. Maybe there’s no way to do it because there’s no real way to say what a novel exactly is – which is what makes the form beautiful, at least to me, in the first place. Sometimes it feels like one long confession. Sometime it’s a muscle flexing for as long (or short) as possible against a constraint. Reading a book, when it’s good, is for me the same pleasure as listening to music through headphones in the dark. And writing one means getting to be the music. But right now the music is far, far away.
I was invited to speak to two classes of students this week at UCLA. I tried my best to convey the task accurately, the satisfaction and difficulty of writing books, but I walked away feeling empty, sensing I made the whole thing up. The next night, I did an event with another author, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and we talked about how, for some of us, a sense of Imposter Syndrome never really dissipates. The grass green, the sky blue, a feeling of emptiness – a conception of the world is hard to change.
But maybe sometimes emptiness is good. The author Nicholson Baker said in an interview with the Paris Review, “When something is beautiful, it can’t be minor.” In Baker’s novels, little things glow when they’re paid attention. Noticing the heat to a coffee when you drink it. The brittleness of some old plastic bottle found on the beach. The darkest spot in a bush outside the window behind my desk right now. Small moments not of joy but timelessness, airtight, shut off from processes that everything else is subject to. It’s also how literature works, it’s the magic: what is sealed-off can still possess life, even be free. Whether this new manuscript of mine will breathe is unknown. But to work on it tomorrow, the day after, I need to believe it can. Maybe that’s how you write a novel: you lie to yourself about the future, you tell the lie to yourself each day, until one day you believe that it had been true all along.
In tomorrow’s Sunday supplement: my favorites from the year’s new music, a cocktail for warmer days to come, and Professor Oscar Peterson.
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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a micro-essay published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful, with a longer essay once a month dispatched from the woods.
Also for subscribers: a Sunday supplement with three-plus ideas for things to love, no paid placements lol 💸
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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Writing novels
Writing a novel is writing while trying not to hate what you’re writing.
I feel this with all writing. And have always wondered if that means I’m not cut out for this thing I want to do more than any other thing in my life. It’s comforting to know it’s not just me :)