“As soon as you’ve finished your first book, stick it in a drawer! Now, start writing your second.”
Perhaps you’ve heard that old bit of publishing wisdom—advice meant either to encourage or to warn. Depending on your mood, you might picture it coming from either a wizened publishing vet with a smoky rasp or a soulless form letter with the return address “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Publish Here & Co.”
Consider this week’s newsletter a variation on the former. For when it comes to creative growth, I am an unapologetic optimist—if you’re willing to put in the work, that is.
As I see it, your first attempt at a Big Creative Project isn’t your New York Marathon. It’s the start of your training. It’s the years spent running around the Central Park Reservoir in preparation, the shin splits and twisted ankles, the jumbo-size jar of Tiger Balm.
Even if your first projects end up stuffed in a box in the back of your closet, they have much to teach: they can show you what kind of artist you aspire to be, what moves you, what you want to create in the world. They can also clue you in to your weak spots: your crutches, your hacks, your insecurities.
Now it’s time for me to get honest. I never stuck my first full book in my drawer. Why not? Because it was already overflowing with scores of the beginnings of manuscripts I didn’t even come close to finishing!
I admire artists who have the fortitude to see most of their projects through to the end, but that ain’t me. Whether it’s because I’m a ruthless editor or an easily-bored writer, I have never had a problem abandoning projects long before they reach maturity.
If I find out my premise is too similar to another book? In the drawer.
If the tone no longer fits the mood I find myself in? Drawer.
If the project requires more of me than I have to give at that moment in time? Drawer, drawer, drawer, drawer, drawer.
It would not be an exaggeration to say than I have begun at least 50 books I’ve never finished (If only I had the guts to paste them all into one doc and tell my agent it’s the great postmodern novel of the 21st century). I’m not even counting over a hundred notebooks, or the pieces I knew were only ever going to be short stories or essays. I’m talking books.
Some of these abandoned children only grew to be about ten or fifteen pages before their brutal mother decided to invest her creative energy elsewhere, but others are fully-outlined, deeply-researched, 70-100 pages long.
Some of them are, dare I say it, GOOD.
There was a time I felt such despair about these abandoned works, certain that I would never find the focus to finish anything again. But today I see my drawers and Dropbox folders as treasure chests.
It has required me to think a little differently about the creative process. But, in fact, it has long been my habit to dip into projects, dip out, and return only when I’m ready. It’s how I wrote my first two books, and even this newsletter contains threads of ideas I first began jotting down many years ago. It’s just that I’ve only become conscious of my “slow-cooker process”—and it’s that awareness that’s making all the difference.
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The most I’ve ever run in one sitting is five miles, so you’ll get no more “a creative life is like a marathon” metaphors from me. I will now slide into something I know even less about: time.
The jury’s still out on whether time is something real and physical or a mere trick of the mind.
But when it comes to creativity, time is anything but linear. It’s taken me nearly two decades as a working creative person to grasp that—but there are reasons for that.
If your education looked anything like mine, then a linear approach to project completion was drilled into you from day one. You were given an assignment, you completed it (or didn’t), repeat. Sure, you were given a sense of the bigger assignments down the road—a couple of short papers followed by one long one, three quizzes for every big test—but when the semester ended, you were given a grade. You advanced or didn’t. You sold all but your most beloved books for beer money (was that just me?), and you moved on to the next five subjects that you—or, more likely, some administrator, advisor, or institution—decided was right for you.
I think many of us view our creative work through the lens given to us when we began institutional education. As a project to be completed before moving on to the next. As a homework assignment.
But what if we left the linear approach to creativity back in some dead zone of space-time where it belongs? What if we instead saw our creative lives as a spiral with a bunch of major themes that we return to again and again?
What if instead of trying to push out work like we’re a bunch of conveyer belts, we became comfortable with the ebbs and flows of a creative life—with plenty of tinkering periods interspersed with periods where we complete things, periods where we push things out, periods where we start anew?
Stuff to think about:
1. Is it time to play cut and paste?
I joked about stitching together all my unfinished little monsters into a kind of bargain basement Infinite Jest, but I do think it’s worthwhile to think about how two seemingly unrelated projects might fit together in surprising ways. A word of caution: don’t force it. I can’t tell you how many Franken-novels I’ve tried to create because I JUST WANTED TO PUBLISH SOMETHING, ANYTHING, NOW.
Publishing alone can’t be the goal. I don’t think we should treat our drawers full of treasures like industrialists have treated the planet for centuries—stripping out every precious resource that promises a return on investment without a thought about what that will do to the fragile ecosystem that is the entirety of a creative life.
Instead, I suggest an occasional dive into your drafts folders and notebooks with deep reverence. You’re not simply mining for material, you’re trying to understand who you were, what moved you at some other time.
What do you know now that you didn’t know then? How might you tell a deeper story than you ever could have imagined possible when you were younger?
2. Resist the urge to put on your editor’s hat too quickly.
Your goal is not necessarily to “finish” something you already started. In fact, I’ve occasionally found it impossible to slip back into a point of view which once seemed so vital but just isn’t mine anymore. Other times, I’ve happened upon voices that were too stylized to carry an entire book—but that might be right for a short story or a longer work told from multiple perspectives.
When you revisit abandoned drafts, think about the larger goal that transcended a particular style, tone, or mood. What story were you trying to tell? Who were you trying to tell it to? What got you out of bed that morning and bid you to write? (And if the mood was itself the point, is it one that still excites you?)
Remember, you’re not editing yet, you’re just reconnecting with a story and deciding if it’s one that wants to be told now. If it is, write it how it wants to be written now—and worry about bringing it all together later.
3. Recognize the themes you keep coming back to.
Here’s a rough sketch of just a few of the themes, time periods, and topics I find myself returning to again and again.
· Memory—individual, ancestral, emotional
· Countercultural movements, communal life, the 60’s
· Classic myths, fantasy, and horror tropes
· Elizabethan England
· Yoga, Buddhism, Ayurveda, Vedanta
· Identity—individual, familial, psychological, ethnic and religious, sexuality and gender, etc.
No matter what I’m writing, at least one or two of these themes can be found baked into the foundation holding the whole thing together. Even if I have yet to find the right vehicle to explore each idea fully, I suspect I will someday.
Your list will probably look nothing like mine. But I think it’s worth thinking about the ideas you keep coming back to, worth thinking about what’s under the surface of the stories you tell, worth knowing what lights your fire.
Which brings me to my last thought to ponder:
4. When you’ve forgotten who you are, your drafts can remind you.
Whenever I start to feel myself getting particularly cranky or anxious, I’ve noticed that one of two things is usually true:
1. I’m not currently reading a book I love.
2. I’m not currently writing a book I love.
A trip to the bookstore or the library helps me widen my perspective enough to move beyond my suffering, but the real healing begins when I start to work. Often, my story-starved malaise can only be cured by diving back into the worlds I’ve begun to create and reminding myself what matters to me.
What often happens is that I’ll come across passages I don’t even remember writing—passages that seem bigger than my own mundane worries and insecurities. There’s something I find both exciting and comforting about such discoveries.
My everyday mind is practical and linear—and it has to be. It’s what helps me get the dishes washed and the bills paid.
Luckily, that’s not the part of my brain that writes my sentences.
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Read more about the stories in the drawer (there are a bunch out there, but I wanted to highlight a few that discuss process):
· As I was putting the final touches on this piece, Brad Listi’s interview with Madhuri Vijay popped up on my Twitter feed. I love how Vijay talks about her earliest stories as “experiments.”
· Chloe Benjamin at The Millions shares five writers’ thoughts about the novels in their drawers.
· Stacey Roberts of ProBlogger explains why Steven King stuffs every manuscript in a drawer—at least for a little while. (If you haven’t read King’s classic On Writing yet, I highly recommend it.)