FIRST BEST STEPS AT THE START OF A NOVEL
If you grow up poor, societally despised, historically shattered or a chimera of these and others, trust -- like summer houses -- tends not to be part of your inheritance
I’ve been working on a new novel — the first one in four years, I guess. It’s early days and naturally I have no idea where this will all lead but I have been thinking quite a bit about this book’s making, both within the making, and without. As the form becomes clearer I’ve been detecting certain dynamics that seem worth tracing for those in similar straits.
For me the central challenges of writing this particular novel are as follows:
1. Trust
Real talk: you can’t write literature without some kind of trust that things will work out, that your passion for literature or your love of your particular form will lead you through the process, will keep you lashed to the mast. Or is this hope? Or faith? Or a compound of the three? Either way if you grow up poor, societally despised, historically shattered, or a chimera of these and others: trust, like summer houses, tends not to be part of your inheritance. Low trust doesn’t begin to capture the experience of how, when, where, and with whom I grew up with. If you’re from a similarly challenging downbringing: to write, one must compensate or enact a kind of inner avengement — you cultivate confidence, erudition, arrogance, craft, habits, mindfulnesses, alternative societies, masquerades (the most common one: pretending not to care about rewards even as you pursue them with the single mindedness of vat-grown ninja), love. You perform unsanctioned exorcisms or perhaps they are devotions: you walk ten miles a day because your back is finished (or run seven miles a day when it isn’t). You read the books that put you on this path and you read-search for others that will keep you on it. This ain’t a war but a labor, a devotion. You do what you can to keep the No Trust Axis at bay and to strengthen the Truth-Faith-Hope Alliance.
That the No Trust wins out on occasion isn’t the surprise. That you, despite the losses, return to the task is.
2. Authoring