Survive Writing the First Novel by Finishing It!

My writing career began in second grade when the teacher pinned a poem I’d written about spring on the bulletin board. I can remember taking the long way around the classroom every day to the clothing closet so I could admire my achievement. My teachers advised that if I wanted to be a writer, to keep a journal. Being an attentive student, that’s what I did. 

In my twenties, I kept writing for community-based and political newspapers, journalism rooted in the heat of those issue-driven times and interviews with Vietnam veterans. Later, in the Bay Area, I spent years as a technical writer and web content manager where I learned to appreciate accuracy and honed my skills interviewing subject matter experts. Those years drifted into my becoming a young mother working full-time and raising two children. 

Poetry called to me then, a long apprenticeship where I learned about the music and economy of language, but it was fiction that challenged me. For years I had listened to stories that people tell each other drinking coffee, riding the subway and buses, standing in line, or sitting around the table in kitchens.

I was living at the time in Louisiana, not far from Arkansas, and became aware of a health issue that threatened people in the entire area—run-off from pulp and paper mills that was compromising the water, soil, and air. I went to meetings, talked to people, took notes, and at long last, sat down at the computer. The main characters were based on two people who’d been organizing the community. I completed several drafts, and in doing so, realized I needed the support of a writing community to show me how to structure a novel. I returned to the Bay Area and earned an MFA in fiction.

My goal was not to create a stepping-stone to a job teaching at a university, past the age of serious consideration by any hiring committee. It was the novel itself that tugged at me, invaded my dreams with plot possibilities and new dialogue. When I wasn’t meeting class deadlines or substitute teaching, that’s what I thought about; however, in the end what I had stored on my computer was a Jello mold that wouldn’t set.

After working on the novel for several years, I was sick of the thing, which is what I called it.  All my friends knew about “that thing.”

I’d read the collective wisdom about writing a novel: Some authors take a structured approach, others unstructured, meaning you plot out the entire beastie and then work from an outline, or alternatively, plow forward by instinct, although everyone seems to agree that at some point, the two approaches converge. The other adage I’d frequently heard was to “listen to your characters.” If they believed you worthy, they would whisper in your ear and tell you what they wanted to do.

Jane Burroway says in the first chapter of Writing Fiction “The variety of authors’ habits suggests that there is no magic to be found in any particular one.” John Gardner advises, “One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.” But the only consistent message advice that I got about writing a novel is that it’s hard work.  

I thought that if I declared my novel finished, it would be. I started reading once again from page one. I was disgusted, unmasked. Where was the story? And what about that awful thing called plot—moving the action forward, something that Stephen King and other popular authors seem to do effortlessly, which had always been difficult since I understood plot as a male story-telling technique— men had historically been the ones with the freedom to take action. But readers want things to happen, to stay engaged with a story. How do you create suspense and move along and be true to your characters? I stumbled.

At the Prague Summer Program for Writers, Stuart Dybek responded to my first chapter by articulating the story I was telling—no more than a few words—I’d gotten hung up thinking I was writing an Erin Brockovich kind of tale, a woman who took on Pacific Gas & Electric in the 1990’s for polluting groundwater. But my novel was about a man and a woman who reach a decision regarding their relationship. Bingo card filled! I needed to understand the bones of my story. Different pieces began to fly together. A structure evolved between male and female characters and the intersection of the two worlds where they moved most naturally. It took me time to understand the story I was telling—I probably had to go through those successive drafts to find out.

Focused on the novel for many years, I hadn’t been able to write a line of poetry. The muse had ben on a sabbatical. But one day after working on a last chapter, I took a walk along on the fire trail behind my house. As I sat at the edge of a pond admiring the bulrushes, a poem formed in my mind. I knew that the novel had let go of me.