My students assume that when well-respected writers sit down to write their books, they know pretty much what is going to happen because they’ve outlined most of the plot, and this is why their books turn out so beautifully and why their lives are so easy and joyful, their self-esteem so great, their childlike senses of trust and wonder so intact. Well. I do not know anyone fitting this description at all. Everyone I know flails around, kvetching and growing despondent, on the way to finding a plot and structure that work. You are welcome to join the club.
On the other hand, in lieu of a plot you may find that you have a sort of temporary destination, perhaps a scene that you envision as the climax. So you write toward this scene, but when you get there, or close, you see that because of all you’ve learned about your characters along the way, it no longer works. The scene may have triggered the confidence that got you to work on your piece, but now it doesn’t ring true and so it does not make the final cut.
I went through this process with my second novel, where an image kept me going while I came to have a strong sense of the people I was writing about. Yet when it was that climactic image’s turn on the dance floor, it was all wrong. So I got very quiet for a few days and waited for the characters to come to me with their lines and intentions. Gradually I came to feel that I knew how the book ended, how it all hung together. By then, I had spent two solid years on the book, sending it off chunk by chunk to my editor at Viking.
My editor had loved the characters all along, had loved the tone and the writing, but after reading my finished second draft straight through, he sent me back a letter that began, "This is perhaps the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write." I saw stars right there at the post office, as if someone had hit me on the head. The room spun. The editor went on to say that while he enjoyed the people and what they had to say, I had in effect created a beautiful banquet but never invited the reader to sit down and eat. So the reader went hungry. And that, to mix metaphors, the book felt like a house with no foundation, no support beams, which was collapsing in on itself, and there was no way to shore it up. I should put it away and get to work on another book from scratch.
The thing is, I had already spent most of the advance.
I went into a very deep state of grief and fear at the post office, and this stuck with me for the next week or so. I was wild with humiliation and deeply afraid for my future. But I called someone who loved my writing, who had encouraged me all along, and she told me to give the book a little space, a little sunshine and fresh air. She said not to pick it up again for a month. She said that everything was going to be Okay, although she did not know exactly what Okay might look like.
So I went off to the elephants’ graveyard, renting a room in a huge old house on the Petaluma River. It was very quiet and pastoral. No one knew who I was. Hardly anyone knew where I was. The meadows outside my windows were filled with cows and grass and hay. I licked my wounds for a couple of weeks and waited for my confidence to return. I tried not to make any big decisions about how to salvage the book or my writing life, because the one thing I knew for sure was that if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.
Finally, I found myself ready to look at the book again. I read it through in one sitting and loved it. I thought it was wonderful. A huge mess, granted, but a wonderful mess.
I called my editor and told him I knew what I was doing now and that I would prove this to him. He was genuinely happy.
There was a huge dilapidated living room in the house where I lived, and one morning I took my three-hundred-page manuscript and began to lay it down on the floor, section by section. I put a two-page scene here, a ten-page passage there. I put these pages down in a path, from beginning to end, like a horizontal line of dominoes, or like a garden path made of tiles. There were sections up front that clearly belonged in the middle, there were scenes in the last fifty pages that would be wonderful near the beginning, there were scenes and moments scattered throughout that could be collected and rewritten to make a great introduction to the two main characters. I walked up and down the path, moving batches of paper around, paper-clipping self-contained sections and scribbling notes to myself on how to shape or tighten or expand each section in whatever necessary way. I noticed where things were missing—transitions, vital information we needed to know before what happened could make any sense—and then, on a blank piece of paper, I blocked in what I thought was needed and lay the page on the pile where it fit in. This page held some space, perhaps for whole scenes, in the way that— after a loss—a great friend holds some space for you in which to grieve or find your bearings. Scribbling notes on various sections to indicate that in fact something was at stake there, I went ahead and let bad things happen to these people whom I had been protecting. I found places where I could lean on them harder, push them, load them up in a way that would make their catastrophe inevitable, and I blocked the catastrophe in, too. Then, when I was sure, I stacked up all the pages in their new order and set about writing a third draft.
I wrote that draft short assignment by short assignment, making each section, no matter how small or seemingly casual, as good as I could. I took out whole paragraphs that I loved, paragraphs I’d shoehorned into the book because I liked the writing or the image or the humor. I worked on it for eight or nine months, sending off the first third, which my editor was amazed by, and then the second section, which he loved. I finished the third section around the time I broke up with a man with whom I’d been involved for some time. I had a brainstorm: I would mail the third section off, borrow the money to fly to New York, and spend a week there, doing the line editing of the book with my editor and, at the same time, getting away from this man I was breaking up with. Also, I could collect the last third of the advance that Viking owed me and do a little retail therapy in New York City.
I wrote to my editor to say I was coming. He did not say not to. I told the man I was involved with to move all of his stuff out of the house. I borrowed a thousand dollars from my aunt, promising her that I would pay it back by the end of the month. And then I flew to New York.
My first morning there, I put on my girl-writer dress and heels and went to meet my editor. I figured we would start editing together that very morning, and then he could give me the last of the advance. It would turn out that I had bounced back from this devastating setback and that truth and beauty had once again triumphed. Everyone would be so shocked to hear that this book had almost been thrown away. But my editor said, "I’m sorry." I looked at him quizzically. "I am so, so sorry," he said. "But it still doesn’t work." He didn’t understand why certain things happened the way they did, or why some things happened to begin with, and most importantly, why so little happened at all. I sat there staring at him as if his face were melting. "I am so sorry," he said, and for a while I was too stunned to cry. I kept touching my forehead, the way you pat your head to make sure your hair is Okay. I think I must have looked like Blanche DuBois on bad acid. Then I started to cry and told him I had to go right that very second. He said to phone him the next day. I said I would, although I did not actually expect to be alive then.
~~Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life -by- Anne Lamott
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