My Process

Area Woman Takes Own Medicine, Spits It Out

About a month ago, I wrote about the importance of fixing macro, bird’s-eye, big-picture, structural stuff in a story before you try to fix the micro, nitpicky, sentence-level stuff. Actually, I’ve written about this twice:

I’m working on my second novel now, and have been trying to take my own advice. I developed this master plan to write a good novel in as few drafts as possible.

The results: mixed.

Step 1: Have an idea for a novel. Don’t breathe a word of it to anyone.

I had the idea for a new novel back in… maybe December of last year? I was excited about it—but then, I get excited about most of my novel ideas, and then they don’t go anywhere. The reason they don’t go anywhere is I start talking to people about my ideas for the novel, and then I answer all my own questions, and then I’m not curious anymore, and then there’s no point to actually writing the novel. This time, I played it strong and silent. “What are you working on now?” people would ask, and I would take off at a sprint, hands pressed over my mouth.

Step 2: Write the novel in a blaze of glory.

I wrote the first draft of the novel in about six months. My rule was that I could not scroll back any farther than the page I was on. Blinders on; keep moving forward. I did break this rule occasionally, but fewer times than you would expect.

I came up with some other rules that were helpful. I did not outline.¹ I did not have any idea what would happen next at any given moment. Every time I had the idea for an upcoming scene (oh, this should happen at the end of Part 2!), I made that the immediate next scene, cutting straight past all the filler and buildup I had in mind. This meant that I was always writing to find out what would happen next, which almost put me in the shoes of a reader, which I found way more fun than trying to pull strings and get all my characters into some preordained configuration.

It worked: I finished the draft.

Step 3: Set it aside. DO NOT SHARE IT WITH ANYONE.

I printed the manuscript out (single-spaced, double-sided) and put it in a used FedEx envelope I had lying around. And I left it there.

I didn’t touch the manuscript (or the word document) for the next two months. I tried not to even think about it. My goal was to forget the novel so completely that when I came back to it, it would be unfamiliar to me—as easy and painless to edit as if someone else had written it.

I was pretty successful in this. I actually managed to forget how I had ended the book. I could not remember the last sentence of my novel, or the last scene, or even the last three scenes. (I was writing pretty fast by the end, blaze-of-glory style.) I couldn’t even remember whether my main character got what he wanted in the end or not.

Step 4: After enough time has passed,

Okay—I fucked this one up. I waited only two months. I definitely meant to wait longer than that. I think it would have helped if I’d set some official, external timer on the whole thing, like if I had asked a friend to mail me the manuscript after six months had passed. Instead, I thought: Wow—I can’t remember how the book ends! And then I thought: Great, I’ve totally divorced myself from any lingering attachment to the book, let’s go.

Step 4: After enough time has passed, print out the draft and read it straight through.

I took my printed-out first draft to a coffee shop (all good editing happens in coffee shops) with a set of colored pens. I told myself: remember, we’re not here to line edit! We’re looking for structural issues only. We can fix all the bad phrasing later. For now, we’re just going to try to experience the novel as a reader would experience it, reading it at the same pace the reader would, feeling the same surprise and disappointment that a reader would feel.

One page in, I was furiously line editing.

I couldn’t stop myself. Not only did I mark up things I needed to fix, I actively tried to rewrite them in the margins. I specifically advise people not to do this. The whole reason I print single-spaced is so I won’t have the page space to do this. And yet.

It was like standing in a forest telling myself: “Forest. Forest. Don’t look at the fucking trees. Ignore the trees. This isn’t about trees. It’s about forest.”

No luck. So here is my revised Step 4:

Step 4: After enough time has passed, print out the novel and put it in a tote bag. Do not put any pens or paper or phones or laptops or any writing implements in the tote bag. Bring the tote bag to the park.

The idea is that I would just be forced to settle in. I’d have all these little line edits prickling in my brain, and I would have to set them aside and just read the thing straight through. And then, on my walk back from the park², the only impressions that would remain in my memory sieve would be the big ones: the plot twists that didn’t quite work, the character motivations still in question, the boring patches, the emotional aftertaste of the ending.

Step 5: Make a list of structural edits.

Following this speed-read at the park, I would return home with a solid sense of the strengths and weaknesses of my book. I’d sit down at my desk and map out the major edits I wanted to make, ordered from most calamitous (the block that crashes the Jenga tower) to least calamitous (the block that slides out easy as a dream).

In other words, I’d come out with a proper plan for a structural edit—and I would have spent zero time futzing with individual scenes and sentences, many of which wouldn’t make it into the next draft anyway.

The thing they don’t tell you about killing your darlings: the less quality time you’ve spent with your darlings, the easier they are to kill.

Step 6: Implement all the big structural changes.

Here’s what makes structural edits hard: you have to

• identify what you need to do

• resign yourself to the necessity of doing it

• no, really, you have to do it

• smaller edits aren’t going to work here

• cut a bunch of material

• write a bunch of new material

• sew it all back together

But the Patent Pending Bring-It-To-The-Park Method takes care of most of this. You’ve identified what you need to do. You’ve made up your mind to do it (after all, you came up with the list of things to change). All that’s left is to cut some chapters that were riddled with mistakes anyway, and then write some new stuff that you like better.

It’s all so much easier when you’re less attached to the book—and you’re less attached to the book when you haven’t been wallowing in line edits for the past ten years.

So Step 6, assuming you’ve followed Steps 1-5 to the letter, is really just a matter of deleting stuff (easy), writing new stuff (fun), and reading back through to make sure it all makes sense (totally doable).

And that’s it! A foolproof way to structurally edit your own novel, producing a second draft so streamlined and well-organized that your readers will be left with nothing but typos to critique.

Okay, so… is that what happened with your novel?

Not exactly. As confessed, I brought my printed-out novel draft to my favorite coffee shop.³ I started furiously marking it up with my colored pens. Red for line edits. Blue for overall impressions. Green for consistency issues. I made it (several coffee shop sessions later) to the final page.

And, honestly?

The draft was really good. I’d absolutely crushed it. 10/10, no structural notes.

The trouble is, I always think this about all my drafts. I’m a delusions-of-grandeur kind of writer. With every single draft of my first novel—and it went through many—I finished the draft thinking, Whew, finally! Nailed the structure. And then someone had to shake me and explain to me that twelve main characters is not a viable number of main characters.

I’ve been at this long enough that I know not to trust myself. Which is why I’m trying to develop this whole method whereby I can evaluate my own drafts on a structural level and actually trust the readout. (My meter for my own work is stuck at 10/10.)

I’m now typing up the edits I made to the printed-out draft, and I think I am making good changes. I’m fixing up a lot of scene work. I’m figuring out who the characters are. I’m trying to keep an eye on the forest while I work on the trees.

But, realistically, I’m not going to be able to do a structural edit of this novel until I send it to someone else and they tell me what’s wrong.

And that’s disappointing. I wanted to figure out a workaround for my own editorial shortcomings. I haven’t quite cracked it yet. With my third novel I’m going to try drafting it even faster, letting it sit for longer, and then reading through it without a pen in hand. That sounds like it could work, right? I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, the second draft of my second novel is already filling up with darlings. In a way, that’s nice: I’m really glad that I like the thing I produced. I’m feeling excited and hopeful. On the other hand, I have to accept that I still haven’t mastered the art of self-editing.

Then again, has anyone?

Then again, if no one… why not me?

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My first novel is called To Stay, To Stay, To Stay, and it’s coming out from McSweeney’s next October. My second novel is called TITLE REDACTED and so far no one has seen a word of it except for me. Occasionally I publish things; a couple weeks ago I published a review of Natalie Bakopoulos’s Archipelago, and I have two short stories coming out later this year, though when they drop is anyone’s guess.

This information is for anyone who feels that their weekly supply of Devon Halliday is lower than optimal. For all the rest of you, please be assured that when I engage in self-promotion it will be both meek and brief.

I’ve been thinking lately about the category of “literary fiction” and what that even means. Next newsletter will be my attempt to construct a perfect definition of “literary fiction” that resolves all outstanding debates on the subject (ha).

1. Outlining is poison to me, for the same reason that talking about my novel too early is poison. Outlining requires me to have the answers, and once I have the answers, I lose all interest in writing. I write to figure things out, not to set things down. I have no idea if anyone else operates this way, so I’m not about to rail against the practice of outlining generally, but it totally, totally doesn’t work for me and I’ve had to learn that lesson too many times over.

2. Or the ice skating rink, or the dungeon, or wherever. It just needs to be a place with no paper or pens.

3. Upcoming newsletter on my All-Time Top 10 Coffee Shops, anyone?