Why Do You Write?

Are Your Reasons Pure, Venal or Complex?

writing

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I just yesterday edited and revised a single-spaced, 97-page-long “novella,” which might be some of the best writing I’ve ever done. It has six POV characters. It’s a long, intense, 37,000-word prose-orchestra of familial nuance, complexity and dysfunction.

I’ve been writing these “novellas” lately, fiction stories that are 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 words long, too lengthy to be called short stories and not lengthy enough to be considered proper novels. The in-between literary form. The twisted, strange 3^rd cousin of the short story and the novel.

I enjoy writing these because they require just the right amount of exhaustion for me. Long enough that it feels like doing somewhere between a half-marathon and a full one, complex enough to be engaging, challenging and fun, but not quite enough to feel like writing a whole novel.

For those of you who’ve never written a whole novel, at least for me: It is absolutely exhausting, and on almost every level. Even physical, to a degree, because I tend to write first drafts hard and fast, my thick, belligerent fingers smashing the faded black keys; my hands end up weak and half-numb.

I’m not one of those writers who can start a novel and then, after 50 pages, walk away for a few months and come back to it later. No. When I start a novel (and I’ve written about 15 novels by now, six of them published) it’s a very binary experience for me: If I think I’ve got something, I’m like the Marlon the old man catches in Old Man and the Sea: I’m hooked, which means I’m in it for the long-haul.

Ergo, months and months and months go by and all I’m working on—minus some Substack pieces to keep the literary chum in the water for my readers—mainly is the novel, day in and day out. It exhausts me emotionally the most, especially when the characters are intense and emotional themselves on the page (and they almost always are). Writing a novel is, for me, a love/hate relationship: I love the writing, especially the raging ambitious fire of the first draft…but everything after that is work: Editing, revising, cutting, deleting, rearranging, getting feedback, etc.

And even before that, before the editing and revising, when I’m still supposedly having “fun” on that first rugged draft: Even then it’s draining as hell because I have to write each character authentically and I have to remember their POVs and their different views and ideas and desires and conflicts and lies. (Self and other lies.) It’s a huge psychological and cognitive undertaking. I imagine it’s very much like an actor working on a movie. Concentration. Loyalty to the goal, to the style and overall structure and plot and inner truthfulness of each character.

So, though I do genuinely love running the marathon of that first draft of a novel, literarily jogging for 70,000, 80,000, 100,000 words (my longest first draft ever was 160,000, which I later sliced in half making it a slim 80K), it’s also a huge blessing when the bastard is finished. Then I can finally focus on other things in my life. I can slide the punk manuscript into a [digital] drawer and not think about it for six, eight months, a year, even two years. When I come back to it the experience is wholly new, original and different. Like Stephen King says: Write hot, edit cold. I come back to the cold manuscript like a surgeon ready to plunge into a fresh warm body needing to be fixed. (Sometimes it feels more like a literary mortician facing a bloated, rigid blue stiff corpse.)

Short stories are a much “easier” artform. Not easy in the sense of style, structure, characters, emotion, depth or meaning. But easier just in the superficial sense of less long. It’s like running a few miles instead of 13 or 26 or 50. I tend to write short stories in the same way I write novels: Hard and fast. I like having a rough draft. I’m not one of those insecure, timid writers who can’t finish a draft of anything or gets stopped by a lack of confidence, perfectionism or anything else. I just go. Get that stuff down onto the page, man! It’s only after that first fast run that I then go in and rework, edit, revise, etc. And that inevitably takes time.

I never understood writers like George Saunders who say they go at short stories or novels like timid surgeons: They spend hours on one sentence, say, or months on one chapter, or they write a chapter or three and then delete them entirely feeling that they’re suddenly inadequate. To me this is like stopping halfway through a run and messing around on your iPhone. Don’t just dilly-dally and tinker and be surgical about it: Get in there and finish the fucking job!!!

Of course this is all tinged with humor, what I’m saying, because Saunders is a much, much, much, much, MUCH (did I say ‘much’?) more talented author than I am. Obviously. Not even anywhere within the same league by a thousand universes. And I am not here to judge anyone’s process.

But. Still. For me. In my opinion. In “my experience.” Etc. (These are all phrases everyone should start saying again en masse, btw.)

So anyway, short stories are easier and in some ways harder (because you have much less canvas to paint your literary prose on and yet you have to hit home emotionally) and novels are hard as fuck but fun if draining, and then the little incest-child of the two forms, The Novella, comes in to do it’s dirty work, which is actually lovely work which I appreciate.

Because, as I said, lately this has been my new thing. The medium through which I am beginning to understand my taste for multiple POVs and the search for universality and meaning via seeing how different human beings think their own way and understand reality in different ways (always fascinating to me!) and misunderstand each other in complex ways and see how everyone has their own biases and denial mechanisms and their own way of assigning self and other blame and their own way of surviving psychologically in the world. And for me, the novella, right now, for whatever reason, seems to work for me in exploring this.

*(It fascinates me, as a writer, how two people can see the “same” thing completely differently, not to mention feel it differently. Novels really succeed, if done well, in showing you how relationships suffer and fail for one major reason: A lack of clear, regular communication. People assume that what they see, experience, think, feel and understand is exactly the same for everyone, or at least very very similar. It is not. Understanding this fundamental truth is the crucial foundation of emotional intelligence, clarity, human bonding, love and empathy.)

When I write I lose contact with the real world. It’s absolutely glorious. Sober almost 15 years now, I nevertheless still escape and get “high” by using my fingers to bash keys which produce strings of letters and words and sentences and paragraphs and pages which become translated into Art which I can then read and share with others. It makes me feel alive, more alive than I ever felt when I was wasted or fucked up on cocaine or heroin or anything else. It’s a rocket-ship straight to not pleasure (for me) but accomplishment, self-understanding, spiritual freedom, and ultimately love.

Writing is how I understand the world, myself, my hardcore past, my wonderful and also painful (sometimes) life now, my wife, our animals, my era, my generation, my own inner struggle to be a human being and comprehend the finality and ridiculousness of death.

Why do you write?