update on novel

i’ve always had a deep-rooted compulsion to create (specifically to write, more specifically to write original stories, scenes, or characters), but i’ve also always had an equally-powerful (probably more powerful) reluctance to declare the things i create completed and ready to share with people. in fact i’ve never — still, as of right now — shared any of my fiction with a stranger or published any of it anywhere. in 2016, i shot a low-budget feature film (which i self-financed), and i’ve never shared it either; it doesn’t feel complete, because it’s “not good enough” to share. and look, if you’re an artist, there’s a 99.9% chance you’ve felt this feeling at some point. but that’s not how art works; that’s not what art is. art is meant to be vulnerable, imperfect. there are obviously once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-century works of art that exist, and maybe some of the artists who’ve created them thought they were perfect, but probably not; and it’s probable that at the time those artists released those works, they were in the mastery phase of their craft, not the infancy of it.

the expanded prelude is for context. i finished the first draft of my first novel “diomedes” at the end of september. it’s eight chapters, each with several subchapters. i wrote it mostly in order, and finished the bulk of chapter seven in roughly six week and all of chapter eight in about four. early in chapter seven, i got stuck. i had a general outline for the story that i was working from, but by this point, i’d learned to let the characters take me where they wanted or were supposed to go, so i did. and literally all of their arcs pointed me in the same direction, and that direction directly contradicted my planned ending. for a couple weeks i tried desperately to bend the story back to the ending i’d outlined because doing so was the path of least resistance; writing a completely new ending sounded harder than scrapping the entire novel and starting over with a new idea. when i couldn’t figure out a way to cheat the narrative back to what i’d previously planned, i gave a rather limp effort to writing a new ending, and everything i wrote after that just fucking sucked. so i did what i’ve always done — i put the novel aside, told myself i just needed a break but i’d figure it out after some creative recovery, and didn’t come back to it for a couple months.

after watching dozens of author interviews and lectures (and reading a few), and watching a bigger number of writing encouragement videos, i came back to the draft with only one goal on which to judge myself: i’d “write” for at least one hour every day, no matter what, until i was done. (a prolific and very famous author, whom i won’t name because he’s apparently a sexual predator, said in an interview i watched that he spends an hour a day in the gazebo in his back yard with only a pen and notebook, and noted that, eventually, the boredom of sitting in the same spot every day doing nothing is worse than the mental “pain” of writing, and that helped me a lot.) in the first six days, i think i wrote maybe a sentence, maybe a paragraph, and spent almost all of my hours thinking deeply about the story, listening to the characters, visualizing what they’d actually do if they had agency. and i figured it out. and the ending i came to is waaaay better narratively and thematically than what i’d originally planned. i zipped through the rest of the draft, and finishing was the proudest moment of my life. i ordered myself a $70 whole carrot cake from my favorite cafe with the inscription “you’re an author” because i was so proud of myself (i intended to pretend at pickup that it was for someone else, but the person who retrieved it for me said congratulations and i instinctively thanked her instead of contesting; it was humiliating, but the cake was so good, so worth it).

i sent the draft off to an editor and got it back a month later. i spent another month on revisions based on her edit and recommendations. at the end of december, right before christmas, i was done-done, ready to query agents. i was in such a groove, had so much confidence and motivation, i wrote a 7,500-word short story called “fetch” that is probably the best thing i’ve ever written. i started to hear back from agents in late-january and throughout february, and they all politely declined representation. i thought, “eh no biggie, this is how it’s supposed to go, just gotta keep grinding out queries until i find the right agent.” and at the end of february, i did — i found the right agent. she declined. but. she gave me an explicit reason and made a suggestion. this, by the way, is not normal; it’s almost always in an agent’s best interest to NOT provide direct feedback that an author might then try to argue with. plus it just takes more time and effort for them, and they’re sifting through thousands of queries a year, some many multiples more than that. her feedback was simple: you need to expand the novel a bit, the word count needs to be higher, and she even explained why, which i’ll get to.

the manuscript was 42,500 words. that’s incredibly short, many wouldn’t even consider it a novel, but rather a long novella. no point in parsing the definitions of novellas and novels here, but in scope, “diomedes” is a novel. i did, while drafting it, research the importance of word count, but the research was cursory, and i concluded word count was arbitrary anyway; “the great gatsby” is under 50k, so is “this is how you lose the time war,” a “novella” i recently read and adored, so are countless other classic, bestselling works. and here’s the thing: when i was getting back into reading fiction a few years ago, longer novels were intimidating, daunting. i gravitated to shorter works, and reading shorter, faster works developed the reading focus that being online constantly had eroded. writing a fast, short work of thematic narrative fiction was, i had convinced myself, a public service (not literally, obviously, but go with it), an invitation to people who might not read often to give it a try, to ease them into a reading habit, to help them to view reading as an enjoyable, desirable activity.

but after the feedback, i researched word count more intentionally, reading or listening to interviews from nearly twenty agents who specifically addressed the significance of word count. literally every one of them said that, especially for debut authors, meeting genre-standard word count ranges is nonnegotiable. like the agent who generously gave me detailed feedback, every agent in the interviews said the word count expectation ultimately comes down to publishers and the agent’s ability to sell a manuscript to a publisher. and publishers aren’t gonna bother with a work that’s far outside word count norms (unless the author is a well-known and proven bestseller) because readers expect a certain length depending on the genre.

anyway, over the last month (after a two-week grieving period), i’ve been writing a second timeline that i’d already given considerable thought to for a potential follow-up novel, which would have split timelines between far-past and directly succeeding the events of “diomedes.” and like the “diomedes” draft, the process has been frustrating, surprising, informative, hopeful, and exciting. it will span eight subchapters (eight is thematically significant), one in each chapter, and i’ve written three to this point, fleshed out another two, and know where it’s going. i don’t know how long it’ll take me to finish, or to incorporate the subchapters into the larger novel (it’ll surely require revisions, though hopefully not too many), or how many words it’ll add to the manuscript’s word count. but it’s progress. and frankly, in hindsight, it makes sense that after a lifetime of bailing on creative projects right at the end, the one i actually finish and am proud of wasn’t finished after all.

the journey’s supposed to be hard. and now more than ever before, with the looming, terrifying ai threat, i am choosing to appreciate and cherish the struggle because as brandon sanderson said in his dragonsteel convention keynote (blog version here), the struggle is what makes the art and why whatever ai pukes out won’t have the same substance of my — and every author’s — work.

love ya.

nick