I just closed this empty Word document that had been sitting open on my desktop for weeks. What a relief.
Last night during meditation I decided I had to throw away everything I had written so far on this new book and start over from scratch. I realized I was trying to write four different books at once, and that there was a really simple (but emotionally complex) idea sitting there that I was making more complicated than it needed to be. People like big concepts, I know, but I find that books can end up being plenty big emotionally without trying to shove a bunch of plot devices in there.
I’m not innocent of this, of course. I’ve created situations that weren’t exactly natural in the past. (Please see the protest scene at the end of The Kept Man. Which I loved, and it still entertains me, and it is exactly correct in terms of the character response. But also: come on.) When I do add in a device here and there my writing feels the most false to me. Even if it’s totally well-written, and as emotionally true as it can be, it still can end up falling pretty flat.
It’s obviously super important to dig deep to get answers. They’re not always in the front of your brain. And sometimes your writing can really surprise you. But most of the time I know pretty early on why something is happening even if it doesn’t appear on the page. And I had really found myself struggling for the Whys too much already in this new book. There was too much artifice.
Part of this had to do with the fact that I had crammed a bunch of characters in there because I felt like I wanted to write about them, but not because they were necessarily connected to the story in a natural way. One of the really important lessons I learned while writing The Middlesteins is that everybody should feel like they belong in the story. (This obviously is easier to achieve when you write a book about people related to each other.) And I just had too many people that didn’t know each other being thrust together by fate.
Thrust together by fate as a concept, by the way, is totally valid. Just not for this story. It’s too intimate and personal and gentle. There’s just no need for the screeching tires and chase scene in this book. If I write it right, the emotions will do all that for the reader.
That’s a lot of big talk over here. Better get to writing and see if I can back it up.
