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48 Seeing It Through “A true novelist is one who doesn’t quit.” — john gardner deScrIbINg the PartIcuLar chaLLeNgeS of writing a novel, Patricia Henley says, “My life as a short story writer went like this: I would write a draft in maybe a week or ten days, let it sit maybe for a week or ten days, revise it for a couple of weeks. In a month or six weeks, I would have a story. Maybe I would go back to it in another month or so, but I could have a sense of completion and take some time off. Live my life. Writing a novel requires so much more letting go of the rest of your life.” This alternate reality, your novel, is a constant, powerful presence in your real life: delicious, seductive, maddening. Suddenly, in the middle of dinner or a game of Frisbee, your characters come alive in your head; they say or do something that you must write down immediately or risk forgetting it. Then you sit down to a full day of writing and they go completely cold on you, leaving you blank, panicked, incapable of working, and unfit company for family or friends. Months and months pass. Years. And you are still trying to utter these characters into the visible. Seeing a novel through requires massive amounts of intellectual, emotional , and physical energy. “There is a peasant in every novelist,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, perhaps commenting on the sheer drudgery of the form. Michael Chabon thinks it’s “like a war: always begun in the highest enthusiasm , with full confidence of right, and of the certainty of it all being over by Christmas. Two years later you’re in the trenches and the mud, with defeat a real possibility, doubting everything, in particular the wisdom of the commanding general.” Some writers work steadily, when they can. Other writers work in seeIng It through 49 spurts—maybe because they work best that way, maybe because that’s the only schedule their busy lives allow. There are novelists who write their books in white heat, in total isolation. Each novelist must find the time, place, and energy to write her novel. It’s up to you to discover the way to write yours. Perhaps, like Dorothy Allison, you work best at night. By all means, write all night if you can! But if you make your living at a nine-to-five job, you may have to do your writing in the evening hours. Or you could get up at four in the morning and work a few hours before the day’s demands are upon you. But be realistic. Even if you don’t have to make a living, you surely have responsibilities and relationships to tend. Which obligations in your life are nonnegotiable? Which might be renegotiated or even let go? Do you have time slots you can give to the novel? How much time do you spend watching television, for example? The most simple solution to finding time to write a novel may be to turn it off and spend those hours inside your own head. Once you find time to write your novel, do your best to develop a healthy relationship with it. “Every good book, every bad book, and all the great books, too, were all written a little at a time,” Richard Bausch wisely says. “A day’s work, over and over for a period of months or years.” What is reasonable to expect from a day’s work? This depends on the way you write. Some people write quickly, pile up the pages—twenty or even thirty pages a day. Other writers are happy to get two or three good pages in a day; ten would feel like a small miracle to them. Remember: no formula! Figure out what a good day is for you. Write as regularly as you possibly can. The longer you stay away from your novel, the harder it will be to get back into it again. Strict schedules and production goals work well for some writers, but they cause others to freeze up. Again, you must look at yourself, your life, and this particular day’s work. If the novel goes cold on you, it serves no purpose to sit at your desk for seven hours just because you said you would. Wash the dishes, take a run, do some gardening, help out at the soup kitchen, go fishing: you’re not really...

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