Greetings, writers—
“I have 75,000 words of a novel,” I told Jon the other day. “The problem is, they’re all the wrong ones.”
Maybe a few of them are fine, but we’re still just talking about a bunch of sentences on paper, which bear very little relationship (I hope and assume) to the delightful and cohesive story they’re supposed to become. While I’ve got a book-length text, I’m still very much at the beginning of the writing process.
“I believe the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish,” Virginia Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West in 1928.
Is this a comforting or terrible thought? Sometimes I do sort of feel like my novel already exists in some cosmic mist somewhere, and that it’s my job to yank it into the regular, human world—but I hope I don’t have to call it forth “in a breathless anguish.” I’d prefer it to be fun, or as close to fun as writing can get. (I mean, enough with the complaining about writing, right? If you don’t like it, don’t do it!)
But what does Woolf mean when she says that words can’t cross the gulf? Aren’t words all we have to work with?
Well no, not at first.
“‘Writing’ isn’t specifically verbal for me,” Joyce Carol Oates writes in The Faith of a Writer. It’s “cinematic, dramatic, emotional, auditory, and shimmeringly unformed before it becomes actual language, transformed into words on a page.”
“See it like a movie,” James Patterson often says—which is approximately the same thing in less than a third of the words.
I think it took me years of writing full-time to realize what a visual medium writing is, at least for the writer herself. I have to see everything (except, stupidly, my main characters—I still can’t decide what they look like).
Today, take a page from Joyce Carol Oates, who—I learned this in The New Yorker’s recent profile of her—has written 63 novels, 47 collections of short stories, and all sorts of plays, librettos, children’s books, and books of poetry.
“[I]magine first, purely without language; and then remember.”
What do you see, hear, smell, feel, taste?
Write that.