No, this will not be a post about whiskey. At least not directly. I mean, in a sense every post on this blog is about whiskey, because whiskey is like The Force: It surrounds us and penetrates us, it binds this blog together.
No, this post will about writing a novel, because that’s one of the four or five things I have anything intelligent to say about (the others being myself, baseball between the years of 1978 and 2010, yarn, meatballs, and your odds of ever winning the lottery). Specifically, this post is about the process of writing a large portion of a novel — sometimes the entire novel — only to realize what the damn thing should actually be about.
I’m not saying this just happened to me. But it has happened.
40,000 Words of Hot Garbage
Whether you’re a Pantser or a Plotter, there’s always a point when you think you know what your book is about. And sometimes you discover that you’re wrong about that, and sometimes that moment comes when you’re already significantly along in the novel-writing process. Like, tens of thousands of words. And then you suddenly realize that your focus is off — you’re using the wrong POV, or concentrating on the wrong character, or cutting out the wrong stuff.
Whatever the reason, this is okay. This is a process of literary distillation. You just steamed off tens of thousands of the wrong words. The worst reaction you can have is to view this as wasted time. That’s totally wrong — sometimes you have to write those wrong words to figure out what the right ones are.
That’s the lesson here: When you’re writing a novel, any work you do is worthwhile. There’s no such thing as wasted time. Even if you don’t actually complete this novel, chances are the work you put into it will pay dividends later, either in ideas, or material you can re-use, or simply a better understanding of your craft and your best way of working. Once you boil off the stuff that’s not working, you might be left with pure gold.
Although, full disclosure: I do like to play up the despair when a novel collapses, just to have an excuse to drink heavily for a while and pretend I’m F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Yarn?
I am an enigma wrapped inside a puzzle.
Yarn? A campfire tale?
Ditching that first umpteen 1000 words might ache, but as in Ozarks distilling, that’s discarding the foreshots, the bad stuff dripping out that will blind or kill you.
Best get rid of it for the sake of good product.
Thnx, Jeff.