writer & the city: this novel wants me dead

Monday, September 30th: “Fuck this.”

Here is the thing with revision. 99.99% of the time you are not done even when you think you are. Even when you want to be done. Even when you will offer your soul to Satan tissue wrapped in a decorative gift bag so you can be done.

Here’s what happened: I turned in a revised draft of my novel at the end of August. Today, my agent got back to me: she wants two more aspects of the novel revised. Fair, but also, fuck me. After three years of revision, I’m itching to go on submission. But also I know rushing right now won’t serve me. This moment calls for slowing down, hammering any loose nails. It is your wedding day and you better make sure those seams are tight, that satin train falls just right, and your bust is secure because it is not the time to throw the towel in.

Fuck, I don’t feel like doing this though.

writer & the city: reporting live from revision jail

Tuesday, October 1st: “Fuck this, continued.”

I woke to gloom. It was a dark, drizzly day in D.C, fitting for the first of October. I’m probably an outlier, but I love this kind of gray, London weather—perfect for working on a novel that’s trying to kill you.

Last night, I made a revision to-do list which has become a crucial part of my process. I’m trying to take solace in the fact that there’s only eight items on there, and about four of them are the same: you need to cut more words.

I started the day by drafting several dreaded emails. Ate an apple my friend left behind at my apartment en route to Morocco. I made a Very Necessary stop at Starbucks, slumping back home in the rain. I read a poem by Michael Ondaatje, then began trying to fix the pacing in the second half of my novel.

At 2pm, I was awarded the Nobel Prize in Procrastination. The first day of revision is always rough, but damn. I had planned to work on the pacing problems in the back half of my novel my agent mentioned in her edit letter—but I was completely stuck, mostly because I didn’t see the pacing problems. The chapters are short (on average 2-3 pages), more “big stuff” is happening, the stakes are higher than in the first half as in, the stakes have risen, as they should. I was worried about leaving readers wanting by shaving off more scenes. The novel was 89,000 words, but it’s a literary poly love story with THREE love interests. I’d certainly read novels that felt overly long. But I’d read just as many that left me wanting, that left a thin impression. I didn’t know. Maybe I was dealing with a structural issue? Maybe it was a problem of scene chronology? There was nothing worse than being told there’s a problem but being incapable of seeing it yourself. How could you patch a hole whose opening you couldn’t find?

Later that afternoon, after having done virtually no work, I decided I needed to switch up my approach. Originally, I was doing spot treatment revisions: touching up and changing the parts that needed revising, ctrl search style. But my brain couldn’t sink into the story this way. I was going to have to start from the beginning and comb through the text, page by page.

Once again, fuck me.

Wednesday, October 2nd: “How can we work like this?”

This week was a weight on my chest: Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, the escalation with Iran, the over one million Lebanese displaced, the continuing violence in the West Bank and Gaza. Last night was the vice presidential debate. I bought a copy of Ta-Nehisi Coate’s The Message and hope to write about trying to be a good journalist in this moment. Spoiler: it was as hard as everything else right now. But hard is just a hill we have to climb.

I was wondering why my mind felt more scattered and unfocused than during my last round of revision, and realized it was because I’d been off of work that last time and I was currently revising between the demands of my day job. Regardless, today was a good day. I’d combed through the book page by page and had almost reached page 50.

Friday, October 4th: “How to fall in love with a love interest.”

PAIN. I had a nightmare and woke up at 5am. I had to turn on a baking show to get back to sleep. I’d able to cut a few hundred words but, God, was it a painstaking process. Mercifully, I’d revised up to page 96.

Remember Uncompelling Love Interest from the last round? Well, he was fixed, but now my agent was saying one of my other love interests wasn’t compelling enough. I wrote a list of what makes a person compelling: humor, wit, intelligence, generosity, specificity. But pouring all these qualities into a person would make them appear perfect and perfection was uncompelling.

I think it’s this last quality—specificity—that makes us fall in love with someone. There’s a part in the novel when one of the OTHER love interests arrives in town, carrying a weekend bag that’s falling apart at the zipper. He’s a fan of political thrillers and pulls granola bars from his pockets as though from thin air. These details don’t make him necessarily likeable, but they make him knowable. I realized THIS was what I had to do—get granular with the female love interest, chiseling away generalities so the singular shines.

Tuesday, October 8th: “Ocean Vuong knows what’s going on.”

This week, my period and this novel teamed up to kill me.

I’d seriously struggled to see this novel with any sort of distance, objectivity, or clarity. Working and bleeding drained me, but I couldn’t take off work—not this close to the election, so I was going to have to revise through it.

I texted my bff, “I’m learning that you can absolutely edit a book to death.”

I kept thinking about something poet Ocean Vuong posted on his Instagram:

“10 years ago today. Staring at the manuscript for my first book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, in utter frustration, disgust, and what seemed like an insurmountable sense of failure. I swear, you look at something long enough, even something you’re proud of, and it starts to wither right before your eyes. After working on it for seven years, I was never prepared, baby poet that I was, to arrive at a moment where I just wanted to scrape it all away, start over and cleanse myself of all the things I felt was wrong with it. I think I would have done so if I wasn’t so exhausted, having stayed up into the wee hours trying to “make it right”.

The very next day, in what seemed like a sequence from the most melodramatic, saccharine movie ever, I got a call from @copper_canyon_press (while on the train to my first class in grad school) saying they wanted to publish it, having sent it to them nearly a year ago and thinking it was lost in the mail. Some things are so corny you couldn’t put them into art—and yet they arrive, in all their contrived serendipity, right before you.

The truth is I kept the book as it was not because I was happy with it—but because I respected the editors’ faith in it. It’s possible, I learned then, to work on something for so long, with so much obsessive, at times maniacal, care, and still not truly “know” it. Could the final state of a work be so arbitrary, wherein what gets sent into the world has nothing to do with excellence or achievement or internal triumph—but rather, love? Your bewildered love of and for others, for the vocation itself, that allows you, not so much to complete something, but simply hand it off the moment you are called forth? When you are summoned, despite yourself?

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Monday, October 21st: “An update from after my release—I’ve been summoned.”

I turned in the *final* draft of my novel to my agent last Monday (!!!) I was so drained, I couldn’t even document this process properly, I just had to get it done (hence, why there’s like a week missing from this entry).

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that I entered a kind of mourning afterwards—I’d been revising this novel for three years. Of course my emotions about being “done” would be mixed.

I scribbled on a blue Post-It note and slapped it on my wall: “I’m so fucking proud of this book <3.”

I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I don’t know if anyone will want this book. There’s a place in the market for it, but will it make it there? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

All I know is it’s so much more than what the 25-year-old who started writing it had envisioned. All I know is she needed this story—and now she has it.