100 THINGS ABOUT WRITING A NOVEL

2 0 Y 1 0 0 T H I N G S A B O U T W R I T I N G A N O V E L A L E X A N D E R C H E E 1. Sometimes music is needed. 2. Sometimes silence. 3. A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one, then, is like remembering a song you’ve never heard before. 4. I have written novels on subways, missing stops, as people do when reading them. 5. They can begin with the implications of a situation. A person who is like this in a place that is like this, an integer set into the heart of an equation and new values, everywhere. 6. The person and the situation typically arrive together. I am standing somewhere and watch as both appear, move toward each other, and transform. 7. Alice through the looking-glass, who, on the other side, finds herself to be an Alex. 8. Or it is like having imaginary friends that are the length of city blocks. The pages you write like fingerprinting them, done to prove to strangers they exist. 9. Reading a novel is the miracle of being shown such a fin- 2 1 R gerprint and being able to guess the face, the way she walks, the times she fell in love incorrectly or to bad result, etc. 10. The novel is the most precise analogy the writer can make to what was seen in the rooms and trains and skies and summer nights and parties where the novel was written, as the writer walked in moments with the enormous imaginary friend before returning to the others, which is to say, the writer’s life. 11. Or you are at a party and hear someone call your name outside the window, and when you get there, a dragon floats in the night wind, grinning. How did you know my name? you ask it. But you already know it’s yours. 12. You write the novel because you have to write, in the end. You do it because it is easier to do than not to do. After all, a dragon has come all this way and it knows your name. 13. Typically, a novelist’s family will not believe the novelist to be someone who does ‘‘real’’ work, even after the publication of many novels. 14. It is said that families should try not to punish their writers. I am the one who said it. 15. The family of the novelist often fears they are in the novel, which is in fact a novel they have each written on their own, projected over it. 16. For the novelists in your life I have heard it said that it is better if you pretend they do something else and that it is always attended to and doesn’t need your attention in the slightest. And then when asked for support, muster an enormous enthusiasm. 17. Attempts to find out what the novel is about on uninvited occasions will meet with great resistance. 18. If I do not answer the question What is the novel about? or How is the writing going? it is because my sense of a novel changes in the same way my knowledge of someone changes. 19. You are looking for the sort of answer you can rely on later, when you see the book, and so am I. But my answer will evolve into the entire book, and so whatever I told you may have almost no relation to what is eventually found there. 20. If I seem cagey, it is because I am not a liar and hate being considered one, due to an accident of craft. But also, if I tell you the idea, and the description disappoints you, the novel can be lost. 21. Novels are delicate when they are being written, if also 2 2 C H E E Y voracious. They move around my rooms, stripping half-finished poems of their lines, stealing ideas from unfinished essays, diaries, letters, and sometimes...