I absolutely do not know what I am doing!

Except I might actually and it could be GREAT!

Reading time: approximately 7 minutes

Hello my darlings!! 💖 So I have to admit: I’ve been dreading you.

Not you, but writing a post for Substack.

But also kind of…you. Not specifically you!! …Let me explain. 🫣

It took some journalling to figure this out, but I realized that posting updates on all the work I’ve been doing on my novel felt awful. I haven’t been able to bring myself to do another since the one in mid-January.

So there was this one time when I had a low-paying, high-stress, long-hours double-job in tech. (Double-job because I was working as a tech writer, then they needed a business analyst, so the department VP told me I was going to be the business analyst. I’d have to keep doing the tech writing too, but having a Business Analyst title was better, he said, because he could pay me more. Theoretically. In the future. [He never did.][Also, they hired 5 people to replace me when I left. FIVE.])

Anyway, my Business Analyst boss and I had a bumpy road, and at one point he was frustrated trying to figure out “what I did all day,” so he had me log every minute of every work day, writing down every task and interaction and how long that all took. I’m sure you can imagine how miserable that exercise was, getting grilled on why it sometimes took me 20 minutes to work out the wording on an e-mail.

{What he wasn’t seeing was the emotional labor it took to get all the stakeholders to buy-in on new features and fixes, and hand-holding the engineering team into feeling good enough about themselves in our toxic work environment to get done what needed doing. Because he was more the “bully everyone into just doing it” type. When he finally did realize that’s what was happening and grew to appreciate it, he noted that: “Your job seems like drudgery.”}

I realized that the last update post made me feel the same as giving my ex-boss a log of how I spend my days. Like I need to justify to you that I really am a productive member of society working hard to get stories done so you can read and enjoy them.

I don’t think you signed up to be my boss. I didn’t sign up to feel like I have one. Let’s change the dynamic a bit, shall we?

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THAT’LL LEARN ME

Things I learned and / or figured out from the last two weeks of novel-crafting:

1. The 35-ish heavily-scribbled pages in my notebook would suggest that reflection seems to be a vital part of my process.

2. It takes a huge amount of ideas to write a novel. Right now I feel like I don’t have enough… idea kitty litter to get the traction I need to figure out my plot arc.

3. Did you know anything could happen in a plot? ANYTHING. Anything that any human on this planet could dream up to do or witness could happen in my story right now. It’s TERRIFYING.

   1. This is most likely because I haven’t done a lot of that worldbuilding yet, so the environment isn’t providing me with natural boundaries. Maybe you CAN jet ski in the future on an underground river! IT COULD HAPPEN.

4. Oh hey I did work out my character arc! That was neat and seems so easy now that it’s in the rear-view and I’m pretty much in freefall.

5. I knew writing a novel would be hard, but I’m starting to have the tiniest inkling of how hard it is in the real and not the abstract. SCARY HARD.

6. I’m learning my creative process at the same time I’m going into this project, and apparently my creative process archetype is CHAOTIC RESEARCH FIEND. In the last two weeks I’ve researched: what is a plot; books to read on botany; books to read on funeral / death rites; books to read on cooperative communities in a post-climate change world; Yennifer of Vengerberg’s character arc in Netflix’s The Witcher; what post-Jungian theory has to say about mixed race / multiculturalism; large language models vs small language models; books to read on the Trickster archetype; short story writing craft.

   1. I was really afraid that this all was some version of running away from writing this novel. But then I realized that no, this is my process! I’ve always wanted every story to be a research project. I want each to be an obsessive project that eats my brain, consumes my life, becomes my home. I want to ideate like mad. I want to meander and process and refine and make this perfect crystalline, shimmering piece of utter perfection. And I’ve never once given myself permission to even try. Because:

      1. You need to make money now, not spend a year researching before ever even starting a novel! You have to pump out stories consistently and scattershot them out to infinite magazines religiously or your career will never get anywhere!

      2. Researching or planning for more than a few months at most is a waste of time and you’re just procrastinating!

      3. Real writers sit their butt in chairs and spit out words every day. That’s writing. Anything else is what amateurs do. Word count is all.

      4. You can write a story in a week! 50 in a year! You can write a novel in 30 days! In six months! In a year! Rapid release! DO THE THING! If you keep churning them out, at least one of them has to be somewhat good! Perfection is enemy of done!!

   2. I don’t even need to provide links, do I? Writing culture is saturated with these “truisms.” And what I really want to do is Not Any Of That. I suddenly realized I want writing this novel to take five years. Not literally, necessarily—but I want to explore and enjoy the process so thoroughly that I am changed by it when I am finally done. I want to turn over every leaf I can on the way through. I want the space to actually do my best—whatever that looks like—on every single story I write.

   3. While researching how to land an ending to a short story, I happened across Benjamin Percy’s craft book Thrill Me. And in it he has examples of writers who don’t rush—including him. Who can take a year researching before even starting to plan to write a novel. Authors who throw away 100 pages in search of the exact right 13 pages. Authors who revise their short stories so many times they could have written a novel instead. Authors who visit locations, interview professionals, work for a week in a lab to learn the strange vocabulary, to smell how it smells, to touch the equipment to make all their details as enticingly believable as possible. This is what I have always wanted being a writer to be like, but that’s never the example I’ve seen. It’s all been sit in your chair in your tiny room at your cramped desk and pound the keys. Or artfully brew a cup of tea and make up a curated plate of cute cookies to take with you to sit down at your perfectly decorated desk for a cozy writing vlog! (I love watching AuthorTube, but remembering that content does not equal reality is a thing.) I almost last week took a random class 1.5 hours away that was an outdoor excursion to learn about all the kinds of moss because I think my protagonist is going to be a botanist. Next time, I’m not going to hesitate.

7. Writing this novel is going to be a loooooong, intense process. Not only do I need to write some shorter things to take breaks, I need to practice some skillz, yo. And short stories are a great opportunity to do that.

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DOUBT SHARKS

They circle the mind, endlessly hungry, waiting for their moment to bite.

1. Everything I said up there is a lie and I never finish this book either.

2. I’m not brave enough to transform with my story.

3. All this research won’t give me any ideas to move forward.

4. All the writing tools I’ve gathered aren’t really helpful, just shiny.

5. It might be true that I love craft more than crafting.

6. While I’m not on death’s doorstep, how many slow novels do I realistically have time for?

7. Monkeys.

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So that’s what I’ve been up to for the past two weeks. More or less. I now need to unwind the research-topic-gathering madness and settle in for the learnin. All the while writing down thoughts, ideas, connections, reactions, reflections. I’ve got an Amazon list of something like 36 books, and I bought the first one today. I mean, I assume that’s what is next. I honestly have no clue what will really happen. I’ll let you know in a few weeks!

Until then,

💖 💖 💖

Elnora