Writing Diary #1

The Process of Writing my Current Novel-in-Progress

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

For the past roughly 10-12 days I’ve been working on a new novel. It came from literally out of thin air. I just sat down to write one morning—I always write exclusively in the mornings, after reading and before dog-walking—and didn’t stop. I thought it was a short story at first, until it became clear it was something much more substantial.

Already—believe it or not—I have 41,000 words down. You heard me right. I’m blasting through this beast like a maniac building a tunnel underground before a war. (Nice little Hamas reference.)

The plot is juicy and complex. Here she is: A protagonist (Donovan) who has some of me in him but certainly is not me, has just moved from New York City to Portland, Oregon. Having lived in Portland about six weeks when the novel begins—the working title of the novel so far is HEAT—Donovan is a book editor and aspiring author working on his first novel which he already hates. He becomes friendly with a taller-than-him half white half Black lesbian woman (Jeanine) who owns and operates a bookstore not far from where he lives. He has a “thing” for her until he realizes she’s not attracted to men. Jeanine is in her late thirties. Her serious girlfriend is white, angry, hipster-Woke, hates capitalism and The Patriarchy, is 28, and loathes Donovan.

But the real plot hinges not on Jeanine or on Bianca, her angry white girlfriend. Donovan, arriving at the bookstore one day, meets a new part-time volunteer employee, an older man (Donovan is 32) ten years his senior named Andrew who is almost entirely based on the real me (Michael Mohr). He develops a close friendship with Andrew. But it’s Andrew’s wife whom Donovan meets and falls for, coveting her more than any woman he’s ever known.

Rachael is also in her late thirties and is based 85% on my actual real-life wife, Britney. The novel, so far is about Donovan and Rachael’s secret, painful love affair, how they do it, what happens, how Andrew finds out and reacts, what he does to either himself or them, etc. It’s a fun ride. I don’t know exactly where it’s going. Like Stephen King says in his 2000 memoir, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

It's very fun writing in the third person point of view from a man who is very much not me, but it’s even more fun writing “about me” (Andrew) from a distance. I get to attempt to see myself as objectively as I can, which requires humility, semi-objectivity (as much as I can humanly muster given that I obviously have my own internal human biases, as we all do), vulnerability, and a big walloping dose of self-honesty. I have to ask the question: What do I possibly, actually look like, sound like, smell like, come off like to other human beings? And more specifically to this human being, Donovan? It’s a fun—if terrifying—exercise. But I’m generally enjoying it.

There’s something, though, about the process of writing a novel—and at this point I’ve lost count but I think I’ve completed writing something like 14 or 15 novels, in various forms of revision, about 4-5 of them being solid and tight and ready to go, and one being published—which does feel exhausting, frustrating, even depressing and oppressive. I think it’s the fact that, once I start writing a novel, I slowly—or maybe even quickly, I can’t precisely tell—begin to feel like a literary slave. It becomes something I “must” do, and suddenly everything else in life is “in my way.”

I develop a sort of psychological myopia when working on a book. For example, it’s no surprise that lately I have become completely bored by American politics. I just simply don’t care. I know you’re not supposed to say that. The stakes. Democracy [supposedly] on the line. Fascism. Etc. But I just find the whole circus laughable. I loathe both candidates, though I fear and resent Trump more. But either way, right now it’s all a dumb blur of distraction. So I have tuned all of that white noise out. It’s not as if I have any power to change anything anyway. What’s the point of reading the news when it’s just going to provoke more outrage?

So each morning I get up and I make tea and I sit down and read for an hour, hour and a half. Right now I just finished reading Andrew Field’s 1986 biography, VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. It’s brilliant, well-written and fascinating. Field wrote several other books focusing specifically on Nabokov’s writing. This one focuses more on his actual life. (What a genius Nabokov was.) I just published an essay on Nabokov HERE.

Nabokov—and Field’s—makes me want to write. Those are the best writers, the ones who inspire you to write, who make you want to pump your fingers fiercely against the keyboard and get it all down. Bukowski does that for me. Nabokov. Rachael Kushner. Ottessa Moshfegh. Zadie Smith. Many authors.

And so I sip tea and read and I get into the flow. My wife reads and drinks coffee alongside me on the couch. She gets up to workout in the office around 7:30. I keep reading. When she’s done, around 8, I enter the office, sit down at my desk and start the process. How it works for me is: I sit down, go to the most recent chapter of the novel I’m working on, sometimes two chapters back, depending, put my head phones connected to my laptop in, and use the “Read Aloud” option on Word under the “Review” tab. This function is brilliant and I recommend everyone use it. What it does is play back my writing to me using a smooth AI voice. That way I can remember what I wrote the day before, plus I can easily catch errors, either grammatical, syntactical, plot, contradictions, nonsense words or lines, etc. Plus it gets me back into The Zone and ready to write the next chapter.

I do this from around 8, 8:15 to about 10:30, 10:45. Then I have to stop to go dog-walk for a few hours. This is the perfect activity to do after writing, especially working on a novel. You go from intense, silent concentration—existing entirely inside of your imagination—to physical movement, walking, often fast, plus you get to be with various dogs large and small. (Plus I get paid so there’s that benefit!) When I walk dogs I try to listen to either an audio book (right now I’ve been dipping into a Great Courses lecture series on the Gilded and Progressive Ages), an audio book or a podcast. (Historically most often a podcast, generally the political ones by The 5^th Column, or else the NYT Daily, Sam Harris, The Reason Roundtable, or Josh Szeps.

The point is to be in the present, moving physically, and distracted. I don’t want to think about the novel. In Hemingway’s memoir about his 1920s Paris years, A Moveable Feast (a brilliant book) he discusses how he would write in the morning or afternoon and then stop at a point when something exciting was about to happen and then do some other activity and try to forget about the writing until the following morning or afternoon, wherein he’d reread what he wrote, revise, and then write the next section. The idea was to forget, as much as possible, until the next day. I try my best to follow this protocol. It’s ideal.

Part of the reason for doing this is that I can become obsessed with the novel, with the various potential plot directions, with what might happen to the central character, with how everything might get tied together in the end, or how a surprise ending might be located, or how character A might do fill-in-the-blank to character B or vice versa. Etc. Even worse, for me: I suffer from O.C.D. Badly, sometimes. I wrote a piece on my OCD HERE. The OCD—and yes, I take medication for it—can be deeply exhausting and oppressive, even when on meds. It just depends on what’s going on in my life.

Right now my life is not exactly what you’d call stable. Britney and I have undergone a profound amount of change over the past year: My father’s death from cancer; our marriage; her son’s leaving home and graduating from high school; losing our beautiful dog, Franky; selling my house in the Bay Area and buying a multi-unit in Portland; moving to Portland; and soon we’ll be moving again, this time out of America to Spain.

Yeah. It’s a lot.

Add on top of that dog-walking, finding tenants for our upper unit and for Britney’s house in Lompoc, discovering a new city, desperately trying to save money, going through the immigration process, and…you get the idea.

Into this yawning maw of chaos steps my new novel.

So yes, with all that occurring, I feel stressed. I feel exhausted by the need I feel to write this novel. And it is, make no mistake about it, a need. A psychological—a spiritual—need. The thing about writing a novel for me is: It comes when it feels like it. I have no control over it. One day I wake up and start writing and it becomes something longer, deeper, more complicated, more expressive. And then I know I’ve been caught by the claws of The Beast. It’s like hiking alone in the mountains somewhere, deep in the forest, and seeing a Grizzly Bear and the bear decides it wants to check you out, maybe eat you. Once the bear makes that choice you’re toast. They’re much bigger, much stronger and much faster, and they know the forest expertly.

That’s how I see writing a novel and the creative process in general. I don’t come to it, it comes to me. I’m not talking about some flimsy “muse” concept; what I’m saying is that, if you write it (or start it), it will come…sometimes. And you don’t have control—EYE don’t have control—over when that might happen. Which is terrifying in one respect because a novel swallows much of your time. Even if I just write for a couple hours each morning, and even if I try my best not to think too much about it after I finish writing for the day, the reality is that the plot and characters and dialogue and voice and tone and style sit with me deep down in my innermost self and contemplate, marinate, bubble and roil around, unconsciously figuring out what’ll happen next. I never know exactly what that is, of course, until I sit down to write the next morning.

It sounds silly and boring, probably, if you’re not a writer. Maybe even absurd, outside of The Real World. Well, there’s some truth to all of that, I suppose. On the flip side, if you are a writer, it’s incredibly thrilling. In all my life—and I’ve done a lot of crazy shit in my life, from hitchhiking across America to hopping freight trains to getting pulled over by highway patrol in a stolen car, to spitting in a cop’s face and much more—I’ve still never found anything more enlightening, thrilling, symbolically dangerous or spiritually satisfying as writing the first draft of a novel. It mangles, even murders those other things.

I think the above statement is true—for me—because writing a novel allows you to explore a whole open wide canvas, a whole open new world, which is both created and not created by “you.” Created because, of course, you’re the one writing it, “creating” it. Not created by you because your unconscious is really doing much, if not all, the heavy lifting. And in that sense, at least for me, it never feels like I’m sitting there “trying” to express myself or attempting to “create” characters or a plot; instead, it simply feels almost as if I’m a vessel. Not a “Divine” vessel; I don’t think I’m “God” or “Bob Dylan” or Nabokov or anything like that. Dylan and Nabokov were geniuses. That’s a whole different level from the rest of us.

What I mean, rather, is that the creative drive, the impulse, the ambition, the material: It’s already there inside me. In my deepest inner life. All I have to do is tap into that resource and mine it like mining for coal or gold. Some of it will, for sure, be crap, and will later be edited and revised out of existence, or perhaps used for later projects. My one published novel—THE CREW—was written in a fever of wildness when I first got sober in 2010 (actually I’d started it in 2008, at 25, in San Francisco, still drinking, and finished about half; the rest I completed after quitting the booze in the fall of 2010).

But it wasn’t until 2016 that literary agents finally started asking me for the entire manuscript to read based off the query letter. Those years between 2010 and 2016 had been absolutely crammed with revisions, cuts, additions, grammar edits, plot changes, character development and deletions, renaming, retitling, you name it. The book must have gone easily through 50, maybe even 60 drafts. I kid you not.

Stephen King said it best in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: Write hot, edit cold. That’s what I love about the [hot] first draft. It’s hot as sin, hot as hell-fire, hot as the burning flames of your inner world. The first draft is all about running a marathon. And often you feel unprepared. That’s fine. Just keep running. Don’t stop until the end. You have all the time in the world—theoretically, at least—to go back and mess with it. But that first draft is crucial.

Now, look: I get it. This is just solely my way. Everyone does it their own unique way and that’s great. Some of you can’t relate to my method at all. Some of you take years to write a first draft. Some of you edit and revise chapter by chapter. Some of you take weeks to write one “good” page. Some of you write by hand and then edit while retyping it. (David Foster Wallace famously did that.)

Some of you tape pages onto your blank white walls and use that to inspire and structure your novel. Some of you don’t reread what you wrote the day before, flying by the seat of your pants. Some of you create a complex list and family tree chart for characters in the novel. Some of you feel the need to read writing how-to books while working on a novel (before or after writing). Some of you read fiction or nonfiction while writing. Some of you claim you can’t read anything at all while working on a novel.

All of these are fine. Whatever works for you is great. This is just my own personal experience. Writing is a very personal experience, at least for me. Like Nabokov I have always been a hyper-individualist. I don’t belong to any writing “group” or workshop or club. (I have in the past.) I believe very much in Pure Art, meaning Art for Art’s sake.

No political agendas, no requirement to “contribute to society” in some “positive” way. No concern about getting a certain type of character—perhaps a minority—“perfect.” (Perfect according to whom? If you were writing a Black character do you think by interviewing half a dozen Black people you’d understand how to write one single Black character? That would imply that all Black people are the same, precise robot versions of each other. But that isn’t true, of course: All human beings are individuals.)

For me, I let the words fly, uninhibited, unworried about people’s potential future judgments, criticisms, furiousness, disagreements, etc. Because it’s my novel. Not yours. Not society’s. Mine. Anyone who writes a novel does so principally because they get to play God. Why else write if not to establish an element of control in an otherwise out-of-control reality in which we’re all unwitting, frustrated true-life characters? Life is out of control, out of our grasp, and so we writers translate that lack of control, maybe transfer it—onto the page. From chaos—from nothingness—we get order. The order we accomplish when writing is called a story or a poem or an essay or a novel. We create something from nothing. This is what God did, is it not?

For me, I can’t worry about what future potential readers may or may not think about my work. I have to express it as truthfully and as honestly as I can. That’s the most important thing. Maybe the novel will never see the sordid light of day. Maybe it’ll transform over time into something totally different. Maybe some other path will be walked.

Or, maybe, it’ll be the best thing I’ve ever done and it’ll blow everyone away.

I guess we’ll have to wait and find out.

Won’t we.