First off, thank you all for your support of the Last Exit cover launch. After brooding over a book in relative silence for so long, after fits and starts and draft after draft, it’s wonderful to see it become—well, it’s not something shared, not yet, not until February 22nd of next year, but space corresponding to the book now exists in the minds of others, the way it exists in my mind and in the minds of my friends and family who’ve read drafts and heard me talk about the project over the last *mumble mumble* years.
A few of you reached out to ask how I approached writing a novel longhand. The old scoutmaster riddle probably has the best answer to this question. “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!”
That’s a bit of the truth and a bit of a joke and a bit of deflection, because talking about ‘how’ when it comes to writing always makes me a little antsy. It’s not that I think there’s any danger to sharing super secret techniques. There’s no competitive hoarding at work, no attempt to preserve the ultimate Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu power or anything. It’s more of the opposite. I think many artists, and especially many writers, and especially writers of science fiction and fantasy, don’t know what it is they do that works. We all have mental models and approaches and rituals that we use to invoke the complex sets of psychological and practical equipment and technique we bring to bear, just like every diva has their own sense of what they do to produce a quality note, and every pitcher has their own set of checkpoints and rituals to invoke (what they think is) their ideal high and away fastball. Any one of those may or may not be actually, practically load-bearing, let alone a helpful guidepost to someone else.
To make matters more complicated, like most writers I know, my process evolves in response to external and internal conditions. Writing a novel while raising a kid in a pandemic is not like writing a novel in 2013. Writing this novel, that is, following this particular antelope across this particular savannah, is not like writing that novel, which may be more like following a gazelle or a wildebeest or, who knows, a tiger, which might not be traveling over a savannah at all. Tundra maybe? No practice is absolute. Each requires sensitivity.
That said! I think there is a point to talking about technique. I’m not trying to be proscriptive here, I’m just describing what I’ve done, to the best of my ability, and if you think some part of it is useful, you can take it.
For both Last Exit and my current project, I worked without an explicit outline, from front to back. I just opened the notebook and started writing, and when I found a voice, I followed it. In the case of Last Exit, you could make a strong argument that the ‘outline’ was the previous draft of the novel, from 2014. But I never re-read the 2014 version—trust me, I reread it enough the first time around—and while many characters and key thematic and image material from that draft ended up in this one, Last Exit’s plot and its unfolding are almost completely new, and the characters have different shapes and topology, even if, at a distance, they have similar silhouettes.
The advantage of writing longhand over typing is, for me, that it takes longer. Not much longer—I can still write a solidly laid-out page of about 400ish words in half an hour—but it’s just slower enough that I have time to finish the sentence in my mind while I’m still writing, and chain it to the next one. Meanwhile, I’m also entertaining notions for the next paragraph, snatches of dialog, asides, and possible future events. I swim through the manuscript. I feel the currents of the scene. If I’m writing with a nice pen, I’m literally in flow. The ink goes onto the paper.
This tends to streamline my stories a bit, which is (for the most part) good for them. I’m less likely to include a sort of plot cul-de-sac, a ‘side adventure,’ just because I think it’s cool. (That’s an issue I’ve encountered in fully outlined work like Ruin or Empress.) On the flip side, characters are much more likely to indulge in memories, to trade quips, to philosophize or review their current position or grumble about urban planning. Not all of this work is deathless! (Except in the Craft Sequence.) (Damn, guess I missed a trick not calling this newsletter Deathless Prose.) But if something felt urgent enough to actually write out with real ink on real paper, there’s probably something there.
What I didn’t do, much, was write the parts I knew, and then go back and write the parts I didn’t. If I’m writing at a sustainable pace, I tend to uncover cool ideas, and sometimes big heartbreaking emotional beats, as I work on earlier, preparatory material. The shape of the opening work, as I carve into it, suggests a resolution. Those beats or scenes become landmarks for me, in a sort of dream of the novel that evolves as I progress. Those unwritten landmark scenes guide the unfolding story—they exert pressure, create tension—but they can also be subverted, or transformed, by what I uncover about the material while I’m working with it.
The challenge, then, is, how to keep that material alive, and in mind, in a time when my mind has been pulled in a thousand different directions. One approach I absolutely use is the Alfred E Newman method: “What, me worry?” If a beat is pivotal, it will survive. It will Pickle Rick its way through your whole damn manuscript to get itself in. But what about the ideas that may not be ultimate keystone badasses yet, but you don’t want to forget about them? I’ve used a few different tools for this.
The zero tool here, which barely even qualifies, is the old trick that most often gets traced back to Hemingway, though I bet he got it from somewhere else: end in the middle. Try to step away when you still have some clear road ahead of you: a beat to write, a line to finish. Stop in the middle of a sentence. That way you know exactly where you are. The unfinished sentence is its own reminder. It does leave you itching, but that makes it all the more likely that you’ll be sure you get back to the draft.
A more formal method is the project journal. I got this idea from an Alexander Chee interview, I forget where. At the end of every day’s writing, journal about the work you’ve just done. The goal here (for me) is to journal like an athlete journals, not like a character in Dracula journals. Think of a writing session like a training session: what did you do, what issues did you encounter, how are you going to try to resolve those issues, what are you going to do next? I imagine any journaling system could work here. If you’re an inveterate Bullet Journaler you might be able to fold it in with your existing setup, but I have faith in the sovereign might of a new notebook—and it makes flipping back to figure out what you were thinking five weeks ago a lot easier. The project journal can expand into an outline or a map for the rest of the story if you need one. If you have a brainwave and scribble the key to your novel down on a napkin, just tape it in. Which is also a good excuse to buy some washi tape, come to think.
That’s basically all I used for Last Exit, but the lion’s share of drafting for that book happened pre-Pandemic (though the revision has been my constant companion for the last year and a half). As I’ve wandered through the new book, my needs have changed.
Now that my parenting schedule is more involved, and writing takes place less in extended sessions than in contained units distributed throughout the day, I’ve needed more agility. Tacking a journaling session onto the end of writing feels a bit much when you’re sitting down to write two or three separate times a day, or more. I still use the project journal to track the athlete details, like length of session, motivation and focus, and so on. But for ‘what’s next’ or cool idea stuff, I’ve started taking advantage of the physical form of the notebook. I just jot the concept down on one of those tiny post-it notes, the 1.5”x2” ones, and stick it in the notebook roughly where I think I’ll be drafting that particular plot point. I’m almost never right, but if I’m wrong, one of two things happens when I come to the note: I chuck it, or I reposition it. This adds a nice physical reinforcement ritual: the joy of hitting a long-anticipated beat, peeling the post-it off, and adding it to the stack. This isn’t as helpful for future archivists as the project journal, but I like that it’s flexible and ephemeral. Going against your own outline can feel transgressive, or worse, like lost work. A post-it note, though? Toss it! That’s what they’re for!
I like the post-its a lot. Who knows whether they’ll make it to the next book, but I hope so.
So much for what’s next—what about what’s past? What do you do when you need to add a scene earlier in the draft, or to chuck a scene? A couple thoughts here.
First: who’s to say your novel needs to be in chronological order? Even if you want to keep time’s arrow marching forward, in prose you have so many tools to establish that something has happened. Characters can remember something that happened to them; they can recount it to another.
Then: it’s possible the tension you’re right now feeling as “I need a new scene earlier in the novel” can be addressed in some other way, right now. You didn’t feel you needed that scene until this moment—can address it in this moment? (I’ll admit, this ducks the question a bit.)
Of course, if you know exactly what scene you need, and where it needs to go, you can just… write it? I number my notebook pages—it’s a simple matter to stick a stickie note flag into the draft that says “scene from pg. xxx goes here.” Proust’s manuscript drafts are full of little asterisks that just say “copy thing from that purple notebook in.”
And then there’s the power of revision. When you’ve typed the whole manuscript up and it’s sitting there in Scrivener or Ulysses or whatever, if you really need to insert material, or move material, you’ll have the chance, with all the power of a computer NASA could have used to put a few million astronauts on the moon. Some of the power of the longhand draft rests in how real it feels, how permanent—there’s a full notebook, there’s honest ink on your hands, you’ve done something. You didn’t just sit in front of a glowing piece of glass making waggle fingers for hours. It cuts through a certain kind of vagueness, and invites a certain kind of dream. But the random-access word processor draft has strengths, too—I just take advantage of those later, after I’ve gone slow.
So that’s it. More or less. (Or at least those are the parts of it that I have time to write down today!) But still, at the end of the day, at the end as at the beginning: “one bite at a time.”
Hi, and thanks as always for the post!
This is SUPER useful. It might be the most useful blog post length thing on writing that I've ever read, kudos! I tend to find writing advice as either too general ("follow your heart," "explore the uncomfortable spaces," etc.) or too specific to be relevant to me. This strikes a very nice balance.
I love the idea of a writing journal and of post-its. The journal I might just incorporate into my daily routine. I already, on writing days, literally copy-paste the text into a word processor so I can count the words and make sure I'm hitting my writing goals. The post-its, I'll have to either do analogue or use an app to do digitally, but I love their ephemeral -- and yet extremely useful -- nature.
A very detailed question, did you use OCR or some software to copy the novel into your computer, or did you just literally type it, one word at a time? If the latter, did you feel a temptation to change things as you typed from longhand?