Other people’s words about … writing a novel
Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision. The emotion gets heightened. I give the reader more pleasure. In the margins Muriel has written, ‘Linger here’ or ‘Let us feel this’, and I try to stay and feel the moment and my understanding of it expands. Small unexpected things begin to thrum across the whole book. I feel like a conductor, finally able to hear all the instruments at once. I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubts and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that’s still inside me.
From ‘Writers & Lovers‘
By Lily King
I love King’s description in the passage above of that moment when you’re writing a novel and you begin to find things resonating across the manuscript — especially when those resonances are unexpected. For me, this is one of the reasons I write. These moments, when I find the little repeating motifs and echoes in my manuscript, are a form of recognition, an acknowledgment of my purpose. This is what I am writing about, I find myself thinking: This is my story.
I’ve been working on a novel-length manuscript now for a couple of years and I know in my heart that, like King’s narrator Casey in Writers & Lovers, it will take me at least a couple more years to finish the current draft (especially as I keep getting distracted by writing short stories). I know that by that point each chapter will carry with it memories of different places and times, different moods in my life. And like Casey, I know that it’s the little ‘knot of stubbornness that’s still inside me’ that will sustain me through all of this.
This is my story, I will keep telling myself: This.
Coastal vegetation, 2026.
Lately I’ve been reading …
- i stand before you to say / that today i walked home / & caught the light through / the fence & it was so golden / i wanted to cry: ‘Testify’, a poem by Eve L Ewing, reproduced in poets.org
- When the hurricane came, I watched my childhood street rearrange itself into a map of everywhere I’d ever wanted to escape: ‘The Ocean Never Really Leaves You’, a piece of one-sentence micro fiction by Bethany Bruno, in Complete Sentence
- My grandfather used to leave me trails of breadcrumbs. He would exit the house holding a loaf of bread, dropping crumbs behind him. I would follow at a distance: ‘Breadcrumbs’, a short story by Andrew Plimpton, in Hayden’s Ferry Review
- If you are under the age of forty-five and have not had the pleasure of a colonoscopy, allow me to share the specifics: you can’t eat for twelve hours, then you drink chalk, shit liquid all night, get knocked out at the hospital, and wake up an hour later to a nurse handing you juice: ‘A Potion for Sadness’, an essay by Megan Stielstra, in The Rumpus
- My mother was walking in a storm when she saw it face-up in the snow. She knelt down. It wasn’t breathing. She gathered it close: ‘A Frozen Bird Too Beautiful to Bury’ and three other prose poems by Mike Bove, in Electric Literature
- Eli is at the bar because his partner Dylan is in another man’s bed. He orders a dirty martini from the bartender, tells her to add triple the normal amount of olive juice. I want it so filthy I have to go to confession after, he says, and she laughs, one of those head-back, full-throated numbers that clangs around the empty bar: ‘Make it Dirty’, a short story by Christopher Gonzalez, in Grist
- ‘I think it’s an osprey,’ he says, but it isn’t: ‘Bad Artist’, a short story by Francesca Carra, in The Rumpus
- I recently came across an old cryalog that I kept during the month of April in 1998. ‘C’ stands for the fact that I cried, the number of C’s represents the number of times I cried, and ‘NC’ indicates that I did not cry on that day: ‘Pause’, an essay by Mary Ruefle, in Granta
twenty-one words 