Drafting Like Vonnegut - Ex Libris
Don't, if you can help it.
This isn’t writing advice. This is a warning. Don’t be like me.
I’m in my early 40s, and I have not yet drafted a novel I want published. Everything finished was done under the influence of some species of mania and is in the wrong fucking genre, and everything unfinished has stopped at some invisible gate.
The problem is perfectionism. Or insecurity. Or taste? I draft slowly. I heard an anecdote about Vonnegut: he would add a comma one day, take it out again the next, and every change he made, he’d retype the whole page.
This is how I draft. I call it ‘editing off the page’. What you do is you obsessively edit all the draft you already wrote days and months and years ago, and you make dozens of minute changes, until you get to the end of the draft, and then you keep going, usually for a sentence or a page at most. You do this hundreds, maybe thousands of times, until you have, on average, twenty- to thirty-thousand words, and then you stop, at an invisible wall, which can fall at any point in the future but usually doesn’t.
My drafts are clean. They don’t read like drafts. People tell me they’re wonderful, and then I don’t finish them. I have been an editor for decades, and when it’s someone else’s book, I have strong, educated opinions about it.
I used to advocate for slow creation. I blogged about choosing words based on their etymology, when to read up (writing you wish you’d done) and when to read down (writing you don’t like), how I plot (the magpie method), and planned to write about my approach to description (something I call ‘deep POV’).
But like, fuck. I’m in my 40s! It’s not too late, I guess, but it’s pretty late.
I was in darkness for a long time. Now I’m out, maybe I can learn to draft more quickly. I have some rocket fuel: a book deal, for a novella, we hope out next year. I have a handful of friends, writers, who are waiting for me to finish the drafts I’m working on.
Keep watching. I’ll get there. Don’t be like me.
Bisous,
A
I'm a line writer with a systems brain, and I either write in one shot and it's done or I spend eight years tuning a story. Novels have a halflife of 6-9 months before I shelve them. I've been in a drought.
More apocrypha: Amy Hempel can take up to a week. To write one sentence.
More apocrypha: Friends and acquaintances suggest and vaguely allude to Pynchon working on Against the Day, Mason & Dixon, and what would become Vineland, in one form or another, all at the same time, as early as when he was couch surfing the north coast of California in 1973.
“But like, fuck. I’m in my 40s! It’s not too late, I guess, but it’s pretty late.”
I’ve never felt so understood.