Spaced Out

Or what it's like to spend time with me when I am drafting

What?

I’m sorry, did you say something? You were. Can you say it again? I want to hear what it was. Maybe you were asking about my holiday plans, or maybe you want to show me your new awesome Minecraft sword which also shoots Nerf bullets (what? I’m too Gen X to understand this), or maybe you are my friend and just want to touch base with me, or maybe you’re one of my students with a question about your final paper. Maybe you’re my dentist calling to schedule a cleaning.

Sorry, I just need a second to collect myself. You are important to me. I want to hear what you are saying.

I was just on an imaginary staircase with a group of imaginary people trying to move a passed-out guy of indeterminate origins. I’m still there, mostly. I can see them all clearly, I can hear the music playing in the gallery, I can smell the vomit on the passed-out guy’s shirt. Even though I’m starting to drag, having written most of today and made it almost to 2000 words, and am allowing myself to take a break to write a Substack about how impossible I am to talk to while I’m drafting, I am still there.

I’m sorry, you were just saying something again. Did you ask where I was?

I’m not exactly in this grand Gilded Age dining room, but I’m also not not in this grand Gilded Age dining room, as I sit here in my actual office in a different city and also, crucially, in both the present and also real life.

There is something selfish, about the absorption of attention necessary to write a novel. Well, probably to write anything, as I spent plenty of time absorbed while writing nonfiction too. But maybe because novels are so wholly created, so completely made up and assembled and held together with nothing but authorial attention until we can get it all down, they can take writers away from here. From now. From you.

And because novels are so damn long, and take so damn long to write, that means we can be away for kind of a long time.

I’m not the first person to accuse writers of selfishness. Women writers especially come in for it, because we are, as a rule, expected to be available to other people, often on their schedules. I once read about another novelist who refuses to see her children in the morning, to protect her time to work. I sniffed at that. I, the same person who said to my family yesterday afternoon, “Yes, I do want to see, no no, I’m definitely coming, I just need to do two hundred more words first. Can you please close the door?”

So what’s next?

I am almost done with Chapter 3. I’m at the point, word-count-wise and outline-wise, where I start to feel like the book will never actually be finished, and I begin to despair. Watch this space for a future craft Substack on “Stages of Grief While Drafting.” Usually there’s a turnaround at about 30,000 words. God willing.

My friend Matthew Pearl has a new novel out, called The Award, which is tasty and delicious, especially if you like “inside baseball” style satire about the literary world. He’s writing about literary Cambridge in the early 2000s, which - as it happens - was when and where I also started writing novels, largely under Matthew’s tutelage. That means I know some of the real dirt that inspired the satire. Do you think our poker group will turn up?

What else? Grades are due at Marymount. That doesn’t concern you, but I know several undergrads who are very invested in that deadline.

I also need to finish up my syllabus for next semester. Nothing makes Columbia grads more nostalgic than talking about the Core, and next semester I get to live the dream by teaching Lit Hum, the second half of the yearlong freshman Core literature survey class. I am beside myself. They even gave me my old email address back. The only thing missing is Rolma. (IYKYK.)

Until then, I hope that you enjoy safe and happy holidays, whether your plans take you back home, or into the future, or even if you spend them partway stuck in a grand Gilded Age dining room that exists only inside your mind. I’m sorry I didn’t hear what you were saying earlier. I’m listening now. What is it?