1.
Long, long ago, a lifetime ago, last March, shortly after FRUIT OF THE DEAD came out, when I was still feeling those post-pub feels—alternately low and exposed and hopeless and weird, and buzzy and high and on top of the world—I told my agent in a fit of manic productivity that, at the rate I was going, she could expect a complete draft of my third novel in her inbox by January ‘25.
LOL.
Back then, in early spring, I did have relatively non-delusional reason to believe I could achieve such a thing. I was trotting away into the new book at a pretty good clip. I felt good about the project: its parameters, its pace, and, generally, the quality of the first-draft prose I was producing.
Now, having lived in and with the work for several months, I am unashamed to admit that, from where I sit today, that claim seems wildly overconfident. I am more familiar with the book now. I have uncovered its weak spots, its eccentricities and over-complications. I understand, more clearly every day I work on it, that the foundation I am currently laying is weaker than I’d hoped it would be, that this sprawling construction will likely require a complete gut-reno before my realtor (/agent) walks through any prospective buyer (/editor).
The thing is, though, I don’t think it was mere confidence that inspired me to make that claim to my agent, four or five months ago. I think it was a combination of things: anxiety about what comes next; some wild, ambitious idea that I could, conceivably, sell my third book before the paperback edition of my second came out (more on that below); most importantly, the kind of grandiose commitment that, I think, any first draft of any project requires.
I mean, in my experience, if you don’t believe—manically and completely—in your first draft before you’ve even really begun, it won’t turn into anything. Like the fairies in Neverland, books which are not believed in either die or never live at all.
From which follows this: that, possibly, a writer’s confidence in the viability of her first draft diminishes in direct proportion to that draft’s progress, so that it is paradoxically when that initial draft has reached a point of initial completion that its writer’s confidence in the ultimate book-to-be is, infuriatingly, at an all-time low.
2.
I have an accountability thread going with two other creative people (a poet, a writer/filmmaker) in which, now and then, we update one another with our daily word counts and other measures of progress. There have been times over the years (!) during which we’ve kept up this practice when said thread has raged with activity. Currently, we are in a period during which it is updated very infrequently. One of us recently had a baby. I can’t imagine he’s been doing a whole heck of a lot besides tending to his son. The second of us has started a new, unrelated career in writing code for software.
Me, I blame summer “vacation,” a period during which I have been able to write very little/have been able to produce just a couple hundred words at a time, when I’ve written at all. I could have shared those measly word counts with my accountability friends, but I guess I felt a little shy about them . . . maybe I was also affected by the inertia of their silence. At any rate, instead of sharing my word counts with them, I’ve been keeping track of these small numbers on a baby animals calendar I got from my in-laws for Christmas, which hangs on the inside of my office door.
Now that summer is finally over (!!), and the children are back at last in the daytime care of seasoned professionals, and I’m back at my desk, writing to you, I’d like to share with you what those word counts have been:
June (happy duckling in a field): over 7 days, produced 7,027 words
July (baby lemur, smiling strangely): 8 days (+ one insomniac night) of work; 8,306 words
August (baby bear, alert on hind feet, hay in his fur): 6 partial days of work; 3,322 words
For context, during a regular week, during the school year, in a perfect world in which mornings were never eaten up by laundry or the dentist or looking for misplaced documents or lesson-planning or catching up on the sleep stolen from me in the night by my four-year-old (the worst, the absolute worst), I am theoretically free to write for at least part of each school day, four days per week. At the end of this past May, for instance, I was averaging about 800 words per day. At this rate, I would be able to produce around 12,800 words per month. Mathematically, then, three months of summertime—during which we paid for approximately 100 hours of childcare—cut my productivity roughly in half.
Truthfully, though, of course we don’t live in a perfect world, and I wasn’t cranking out 12,800 words per month all year long. I’m not a machine. I’m not even just a writer. I’m a caretaker and a friend and a partner and a laundress and a cleaning person and a cook, and a body that requires maintenance and a brain that requires stimulation and a spirit that requires community. So, actually, though 6-8 days per month neither feels like nor is enough writing time for me, I’m going to go ahead and pat myself on the back for getting literally anything done this summer. I’ll invite you to do the same.
3.
For whatever reason, I’ve ended up in a total of three adorable creativity trios, the aforementioned accountability thread included. The second of these is a group text / sporadic Zoom hang I have going with the authors Danielle Lazarin and Jessie Chaffee, both native New Yorkers like myself (they are still in the city), currently raising small humans while working on book-length projects.
It was in our group text that Danielle recently updated Jessie and me with her progress returning to a manuscript she had not touched since completing a first draft, months ago. During our most recent Zoom we had cheered her on, reassuring her that the novel would still feel alive to her when she returned to it.
“Wanted to report back,” she wrote, a few days later, “that I have started to dip my toes back in the novel again, and you were both right to suggest I should just get back in there, trust myself that I’d find my footing. I have as much as I can at this point.” After our exclamations of delight and cheerleading, she added, “Was quickly reminded how SLOW writing is, but also yes, I do know these people / this world. Bird by bird, baby.”
By the way, Danielle actually wrote about this exchange in her own Substack last week! Her newsletter is wonderful. You should totally sign up.
But, also: isn’t it incredible how all of us, even these writers who’ve been working and publishing for many years now, have to relearn this, over and over? Big news, folks: writing is SLOW. Slower, even, I suspect, the more material you have.
4.
For instance, I recently completed an almost 18,000-word draft of my novel’s fifth chapter. Anyway, no sooner had I sent the final section of this chapter to the other members of my third creativity trio—a little writing group I have formed with two other woman writers, up here in Western Mass—than I found myself lost again in Chapter 1, reading and rereading paragraphs I know I’m going to cut; fretting to myself about how much revision I am going to have to do, now that I know so much more about the characters; and about how much is going to have to be established in those initial pages; and that, for instance, if the highly anticipated houseguest, whose arrival functions as a kind of fulcrum of that first chapter, is going to be coming not just for any old November weekend but for Thanksgiving, as I’ve recently decided, shortly followed by the novel’s near-entire cast of characters, my protagonist is going to have to be doing a heck of a lot more preparation. I mean, sheesh, this woman has not just a house to clean but yams to candy, pies to bake, a turkey to brine—and I, a middling cook on a good day, have copious research to do.
Herein is the necessary paradox of “progress.” As I attempted to reassure myself, having faced the music re: the copious revision that awaits me, a certain phrase kept kicking around in my head—you know it—an old chestnut: “two steps forward, one step back.” But that phrase itself, though somewhat reassuring, strikes me as a fallacy. Writing a novel is not linear. Indeed it feels worth noting, here, that while I did just write a doozy of a Chapter 5, chapters 4 and 6 remain unwritten.
I imagine the writing of the novel as more of a sculptural or constructive process, like building some giant, traversable object in three dimensions. You sketch out a draft of this area, then go over it, revising as you do, in more permanent material. You tug over here only to feel some depletion over there. You cut from this spot and paste on that. You fasten unrelated bits together, or dig a tunnel from one area to another, or compress a whole meandering field of bits and pieces into one hard, glittering thing. It is only [x] steps in some direction, [y] steps in another, if by “steps” we mean gestures of all kinds, if by “in some direction” we mean in and out and up and down and around and through and on and on.
In Other News
Got a few fun things coming up:
The new UK paperback edition of my first book SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY will come out with Scribner UK on September 12! Preorder it now and receive it on pub day.
I’ll be at the Mississippi Book Festival 9/14, on a panel called Reimagining Classics. It’s from 10:45-11:45 AM in State Capitol Room 113 and I’m just thrilled by the writers I’ll be in conversation with: Katy Simpson Smith, Jen Fawkes, Julia Phillips, and Katya Apekina.
Submissions to the Pigeon Pages 2024 Flash Contest will close on 9/15. Send in your tiny stories! I want to read them!
This month’s Dream Away Reading Series will be at 6PM on 9/21 at The Dream Away Lodge. We’ll host bestselling debut novelist Essie Chambers, novelist and Straw Dog Writers Guild founder Ellen Meeropol, and novelist/songwriter Nerissa Nields.
I’ll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival via The Urbane Arts Club on 9/26, at an event that promises to be a real party (you can RSVP here):
That’s all for now, I think. Thank you for reading,
Rachel x