REGARDING MY NOVEL

I'm about to do something incredibly self-indulgent, something that a blog should never, ever do: I'm going to write about myself.  Recently I finished writing my first novel in years — the first novel I've finished since my sophomore year of college, in fact. Sometime in the next week, I will be sending this novel out for friends to read.  I've been telling people since last summer that the novel was "almost done" and that was always true — it has been written since last May, but it took a lot of editing and a lot of rereading to get it this close to "almost done."  There were interruptions and other stories that sidetracked me, but mostly, I just didn't want to waste anyone's time, much less my own.  My novel very well might suck, but I needed that time to get it as close to "not sucking" as I could manage.  So this entry isn't necessarily here to share anything profound about the writing process, but merely stand as my record of everything that brought me to this point.  By all means, ignore this entry.  However, so that I might one day look back and remember what it took to write the first novel that I was moderately (possibly very) happy with—

It went like this.

I was probably listening to "The Dead Flag Blues" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor at the time. It's an almost unbearably creepy song, extremely inspiring, and I was living in Bushwick back then — as close as you can get to the end of the world while still paying rent.  I've always been fascinated with the concept of apocalypse, a downfall of society, and almost all of my stories end up being about entropy in some way. This was around August 2007, a few months after I graduated college and moved to Brooklyn.  I had been kicking around some related story ideas for a few years by then, even attempting to start a similar novel during my senior year of college (and giving up after the first page).  The sudden rush I got then (based on little more than a whim, really) became impossible to ignore, so I quickly tossed a plot together and began to write.  I no longer remember what exactly I was going for with that 1st Draft, but much of the story only became clear in the later stages of writing.  To a large, possibly-unhealthy extent, the project was a sort of tribute to the bands that inspired me to write it — I even titled it after an album by A Silver Mt. Zion called Born Into Trouble As the Sparks Fly Upwards.  My goal was to capture the mood I found in those albums.  So I wrote.  Sometime around February or March of 2008, after not-quite half a year of writing, I had reached page 200 and completely run out of steam.  I had enough ideas to wrap it up, but I'd realized them too late, and the plot I had constructed was over-thought and punishingly rigid, giving me nothing to work with and few characters worth working for.  I was in the third act, within sight of the novel's end, but I could write no more than a line or two at a time.  So I quit.

It was a depressing thing to give up on that draft — the closest I had come to finishing a novel in four years. I couldn't do it — finish it, or quit it.  Eventually, I decided to read the whole thing over to see what I was dealing with and hopefully pick up some inspiration.  I knew I liked a few of the ideas, but actually reading the story, I understood that it was awful.  Flimsy, cheesy and poorly executed.  So I went back to the beginning.  The first section in particular was extremely weak, a cheap copout in terms of plot and set-up, but even in considering what I didn't like about this 1st Draft of my novel, I became determined to see it through.  It would take a great deal of work to make it worthwhile, I knew, but I had come too close to quit altogether. So I wrote a new first scene.  It came out significantly improved, enough to encourage me, but I had to flesh out its events a great deal, and suddenly it no longer matched the scene after it.  For the next few months, I wallowed, and procrastinated, and ignored.  I knew, any time I glanced at that messy draft, that very little of it was salvageable.  I would have to start over completely.

Sometime in the fall of 2008, a year after I'd begun, something spurred me to get back at it.  I began with that new intro, figuring I would merge it into my 1st Draft eventually, maybe after I rewrote the first "section" to make it all consistent.  When that didn't happen, when the writing demanded to be new and unaltered, I thought — maybe the next section.  Or the next.  But it never happened.  That 1st Draft was total shit, and it's all gone.  There might be three or four heavily-edited paragraphs from that draft remaining in the entire final novel — that's crazypants man.  The plot is greatly altered as well, retaining its general shape and many of the same points but basically 100% reworked in content.  It's interesting to me how certain settings and scenes morphed into something totally different while retaining the same basic shape, but I don't want this to turn into an audio commentary track (besides, the plot is highly confidential).  What at first was a largely action-driven novel featuring "epic" battle scenes and many inconsequential side characters has been shaped into a primarily character-driven, introspective meditation on memory, identity, and the unspoken mechanics of relationships.  Though I originally went for broad, tedious social / political / religious jabs, I realized I'm a pretty bad writer of social satire.  I can leave that to others.  Instead, I tried to recognize the sort of story I had been writing from the beginning, toy with its structure and subvert the expectations I had created (and believed myself, at first).  It's still a heavily plotted novel — in a rather unique and appropriate way, I hope — but it took that second vision to refine what scraps of inspiration I had in the first. 

More interesting to me than the abandoned "Shitty" 1st Draft is the huge amount of work I had left even after writing the "Way-Too-Long" 2nd Draft.  After writing the last sentence on May 19, 2009,  I was facing a manuscript of 170,000 words. If published in standard print size, that would be almost 600 pages, give or take.  (The average novel published today is between 70,000 and 100,000 words, though some genres lean toward 150,000).  Since I wasn't trying to write a fantasy epic, I knew I had to cut a lot — almost as daunting of a task as that 1st Draft rewrite.  But it was fairly easy to cut.  I might even say I massacred that draft, hacked it to bits, and I'm awfully glad I did.  I went through 2nd Draft, 3rd Draft, Beta and eventually Release Candidate.  Despite removing an entire novel's worth of words by the time I was done, I feel the final draft is unquestionably more developed and detailed. This is standard procedure for a novel, I'm sure, but I still find it amazing how much effort is required in the editing process — it's probably more work than writing the damn thing in the first place.  Of course, that's also what I get for going in without a solid gameplan, something I'll undoubtedly try to remedy in the future.  But now, at long last, I've ended up with As the Sparks Fly Upwards — 104,000 words, content-complete, ready, but still not entirely finished.

Boo-yah achieved.