"I'm gonna finish this novel in just a few months."
After quite a meandering detour, I’m going to circle back to the theme of “expectations vs reality” I touched on a few articles ago. Just to recap, I previously discussed my plan to “treat writing like a full time job” when I moved over to London. This week I’ll dig into my intentions to “finish my novel within a few months.”
But first I’ve got a story (which I promise will tie back into this theme).
In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, whenever you are awarded a higher belt, you have to pass through two rites of passage:
One, the whole gym lines up and you have to walk the gauntlet of your teammates whipping you with their belts (the higher the belt, the more times you have to make that walk). Yes…I know it sounds a bit like I’m in a cult…
Two: You usually have to give a speech.
Although the first one’s physically much worse, I personally dread the second one more. Public speaking isn’t terrifying to me as a rule, but in that setting it's uniquely tricky. Do you go the joking route? Do you reach for something inspirational?
Either way there’s a lot of cringe potential whichever direction you choose.
For my purple belt speech, I took an “observational” route.
In my speech, I pointed out how for all their cheesiness, I believe the belt system is a great tool for visualizing the path towards mastery in any skill.
Whenever you get put up a rank (at least this is my experience) you inevitably get a dose of imposter syndrome. There’s a new target on your back at the hands of those who feel they deserved to be advanced instead of you, not to mention your own memories of what people with this belt were able to do to you in the past.
It's a weird phase, but after a bit of time you can usually take your head out of the weeds and notice, “oh yea, I am actually managing to hold my own against other blue belts these days. Maybe I do deserve this?”
You then free up a bit of head space to run an itinerary on how far you’ve got left to go. Purple belt after five years, if I stay consistent, maybe a black belt after ten or twelve?
That might seem like a drag. Who’s got the time to commit that much of their life to a single pursuit? But realistically, that’s about how long it takes to get good at anything (and of course by mastery I don’t mean, you’ve got nothing left to learn)
So on this basis, I argued that the belt system is a great means to understand just how gradual a learning curve can be in reality. Yet, if you stick with it–provided you’re actively working on improving–you will get better.
Put a pin in this thought, I’ll come back to it.
So: I planned to finish my novel within a few months after moving to London….
The thing is, I’d actually already finished my first draft in January of 2022 (I moved overseas in June) so in my head all I had left to do was tighten the flow of it up a bit, maybe cut out a few boring bits, then I’d be on my way to submitting to publishers. This wasn’t the case.
I already touched on the disaster of trying to work on the novel while traveling around Europe in my last article, but what I didn’t get into, is how it ended.
The last two weeks of our trip were spent just out of Faro, Portugal in a private farmhouse, dog sitting for a pair of doctors.
It all sounded very nice on paper. But what we didn’t get told was:
One of the dogs (a three legged stray) wouldn’t let you touch it, yet would bark all night if you couldn’t find a way to lock it inside.
The next had a crushed trachea which meant that it would burst out in violent coughing every half hour or so. And this one insisted that it sleep ON THE BED. Unlike the first, you could let it out at night, but there was a good chance it wouldn’t be there in the morning, so we didn’t…
The third was seventeen years old, didn’t have full control of its bowels and just before it’s owner left, she told me with a straight face, “If Strelly dies, just pop her in the freezer.”
Nonetheless, despite some patchy sleep, this was my first opportunity to really focus my full attention on the novel.
Now, the moment I decided to write a novel, I became extremely conscious of my shortcomings on the craft side of things. Sure, I’d written a shitload of essays at university, but I didn’t have any formal training in real storytelling.
So I crammed all the fiction specific rules of thumb I could fit into my head:
Avoiding “tidy resolutions” that compromise tension, using varied language, cutting out pretentious lines whenever I find them, making sure to utilize different textures and always maintaining a sense of forward momentum.
Which all served me well on the scene level. Unfortunately, when I finally got to the stage of zooming out and examining the entire piece? I still feel a little bit sick thinking about it.
It was like spending all morning on an elaborate birthday cake and when you finally cut into it, the whole thing implodes into a soggy clump. Except, in this example that cake took half a decade to bake.
All at once it dawned on me just how much work I had left to do.
Although my demeanor might say otherwise, I’m not a depressive type by nature. But that day? Man….
It was definitely a low point. I lay on the bed for about five hours staring at the ceiling.
No two scenes fit together, I’d written sixty-thousand-words-too-many, and worst of all I’d overwritten each section to the point where it was dead on the page. On that afternoon I couldn’t find a single part that I was happy to keep, what was it going to take to salvage?
I seriously considered giving up for the first time, and went through a genuine existential crisis, but I won’t bore you with any more of that. The point is, I had to go through some serious self examination and figure out how this had happened.
I concluded two things:
One: I hadn’t devoted enough time towards understanding how structure works–I’d leaned more towards “following my nose,” without respecting the necessary beats that all stories must hit.
Two: I hadn’t offered my work up for critique enough times to gain an accurate feel for where it stood scene by scene.
I was a bit like one of those old kung fu masters you see on youtube who make the mistake of sparring against an MMA fighter one day only to realize in the most painful setting, “Oh shit, I’ve been focusing on the wrong skill all this time…”
Which brings us back to the Purple Belt talk:
See there was a second part to my speech which I’m now a bit embarrassed to have said out loud. I drew a parallel to writing, and pointed out how when pursuing any type of subjective art, it's helpful to have something as objective as Jiu Jitsu to compare to.
In my head, I was calculating how many hours I’d devoted to writing and drew the conclusion, “Well, I’ve spent a lot more time typing away than I have training Jiu Jitsu, so I’ve got to be at least a purple belt equivalent. Right?
It doesn’t quite work like that.
So here I am a year later, by no means out of the woods but I’ve reworked the entire novel. I’ve cut it in two, got to the core of what it’s really about, decided it probably won’t end up being a two-parter, I’ve fed it into a range of in-person, online and cross-ocean critiques. I’m fairly happy with my first act, acts two and three are a bit shakier. I’ve got pitch emails ready to send to agents at the beginning of next week, even though I feel like the work is still far from perfect, but that’s where the biggest adjustment in my thinking lies.
It will never be perfect and it will never feel “done.” Of course I’m ambitious and want it to be good, But it’s just like deciding to run a marathon. You probably won’t get your fastest time on the first one you run, but the important thing is following through once you’ve started. Learn along the way, adjust, make the next one better.
Jeez, I don’t know why these things keep taking on this weird self help tone. I should have gone for the joke angle…