Routine and disruption
Summer novel writing
I was midway through reading Ann Patchett’s essay “The Getaway Car,”1 when I knew I’d have to write about it. There’s a lot in the essay—thoughts on teaching, on the novel genre vs. the short story, on the benefits and drawbacks of workshop—but for now the part I want to linger on is her approach to writing her first novel.
I should put astrisks around the statement that I was *reading* this essay and perhaps around my desire to *write* about it too: I was listening to the essay on audiobook, and I’m starting to write this post with my screen turned off, with plans to try editing it later in short spurts or to send the text through a document reader and listen to a robotic voice read it back aloud. This has been my *writing* and *reading* practice at present, following a concussion about a month ago—a stupidly minor one that has nonetheless insisted on persisting throughout July, interrupting my plans to finish a draft of the novel this summer and thwarting my intention to continue on with the quiet rhythm of writing, running, and work that characterized most of June.
It takes typing this now for the irony of Patchett’s title to hit me: Writing is her metaphorical “getaway car” in the essay, the way out of the circumstances of her life in her mid-twenties (a divorce, her waitressing job at TGI Fridays, general tedium.) But I have little love for cars at present, given that my literal car is the source of the injury currently impeding my writing. (The car door to be precise, which I opened too quickly onto my head, sending it back into a telephone pole. Not that hard, I thought, but hard enough that my head still goes fuzzy if I read or write for too long.)
Listening to Patchett read her essay aloud on audiobook, I felt my distance from writing more acutely. It was a bit of a painful tease, hearing her injunctions to write consistently, to sit down at the desk and embrace boredom, to do the hard work of writing. Like someone lecturing on the benefits of vegetables when you actually really do like broccoli, honestly, and are hungry enough that it wouldn’t matter in any case.
I couldn’t stay frustrated for long, though. The particulars of Patchett’s writing process differ in many ways from my own—but this was part of the point. Even as she explains the rationale behind her approaches, she remarks about how they diverge from others, including her friend, the writer Elizabeth McCracken:
Not only is our work different, but how we work is incredibly different: I get everything set in my head and then I go, whereas Elizabeth will write her way into her characters’ world, trying out scenes, writing backstories she’ll never use. We marvel at each other’s process, and for me it’s a constant reminder that there isn’t one way to do this work. I love Elizabeth’s books, but the road she takes to get to them would kill me.
There isn’t one way to do this work. It’s a fact that I know has frustrated my students in the past, when they want a clear road to the end of an essay, an exact map that I’m never able to give them. But I find this a comforting statement, a reminder that there’s no pressure for my process to match the person next to me.
It’s a point I’ve encountered before, but it hit me differently this month. Halted in my own particular writing routines, I found myself thinking that there isn’t a singular process even for an individual writer. That when your go-to process stops working—because, say, you hit your head with a car door or, hopefully, something less cartoonishly stupid—there might be other ways. That there’s a balance between holding to given routines and accepting when they have to change.
In *reading* about Patchett’s process, I felt an invitation to try approaching the work of writing differently. Not to follow her road, exactly, but to take some of the spirit of it into my own and see if it might allow me to continue traveling in the direction I intended, even if this backroads route might not be the path I would have chosen to take.
“Weathering the death”
Patchett’s novel process is, in short:
Live in the imagined space of the novel for a long period of time (months, years) without putting anything on paper.
When the time comes to translate that story to the page, write it in order, start to finish.
For her, the transition between these two steps—the imagining and the writing—is painful, hard, disappointing. The first part, when the story exists only in her head, is “the happiest time in the arc of [her] writing process”:
The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling. During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don’t take notes or make outlines; I’m figuring things out, and all the while, the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life.
The act of writing is not, for her, a means of capturing that “oversized butterfly” of the mind, but rather facillitating its unavoidable death:
When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page.
This is why she emphasizes the importance of routine in writing, of showing up regularly to the page, even if it’s just to sit at your desk and not write for the hours you’ve set aside for it. Eventually, she says, you’ll be bored enough to do the hard work of writing, to stop avoiding it out of the fear that you’ll kill what you’ve imagined. The repeated act of writing, aside from the honing of one’s craft, makes it easier to get past the inevitable disappointment of the mismatch between what you imagine and what you write:
Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
Patchett describes long days of writing her first novel at a residency in Provincetown. The expanse of a day feels intimidating with no obligation other than working on the novel she had come there to complete. But the space forces her into the act she’s inclined to avoid: killing the story she’s imagined for so long by pinning it to the page.
Keeping contact
I love Patchett’s description of the butterfly story in her brain, but I should say that I don’t write like this at all. I can recall living with a story in my head as a child, of experiencing just exactly this kind of death when I tried to write it down—but this is no longer the case for me. When I first start writing, the story is very much alive for me—in part because it’s often propelled by language in the first place. I never know where it’s going. To the extent that I live with it in my imagination, this happens after I’ve started putting words on the page. The death, for me, occurs much later—perhaps after workshop, perhaps after I’m forced to actually shape the story into a kind of form.
But I wondered, hearing Patchett speak about holding the story in her head, if I couldn’t resurrect some part of that process myself, as I waited out the concussion symptoms. I’d already put quite a few words on the page—but perhaps I could still retreat back to the imagination even so.
Because I’d already externalized a good part of the story, I felt inclined for the imagination part to be more concrete and exernal as well. I wasn’t supposed to be writing, but I could draw, so I spent a good amount of time illustrating a large posterboard, something I’d done with the previous novel as well.
It was a small way of remaining in contact with the story, even as the writing itself remained stagnant. I began recording voicenotes on my phone, too, something I’d tried to do several times on long drives home, but had never been able to do until now. Most of the text is likely unusable, but I became better at speaking full paragraphs aloud the more I tried, and it kept me in the imaginative space of the story while I bided my time.
In the end, it felt less like a way to “weather the death” of the story and more like a way to keep it somewhat alive.
Cross-training
Patchett finds value in showing up to the page consistently, but also argues that it doesn’t do to be slavish to routine: “In keeping with the theory that there are times to write and times to think and times to just live your life, I’ve gone for months without writing and never missed it.”
She compares novel writing to channel swimming. (Long, arduous. Don’t think about how far you’ve come or how far you have left to go or you’ll never finish.) I’m not a swimmer, so I’m more inclined to thinking in running metaphors. And as far as routine goes, I think: There are times to run and times to rest. Seasons when running outside makes sense, when I’m inclined to go for miles down a trail. Seasons when sprint workouts in an indoor track will have to do. But if you’ve committed to run a marathon, if you want to complete a longer race—or, in Patchett’s swimming metaphor, if you want to make it across the channel—well, you might not follow the training schedule religiously, but you better be building to those longer miles pretty consistently.
Of course, if you get injured and can’t run—you simply can’t run. But if there’s a minor injury, you take a beat, cross-train, do what you can to keep training even as you modify it.
And, likewise, when something gets in the way of writing regularly—you might need to put it aside. Or you might be able to “cross-train” for a bit, do the work another way until you’re able to return to the routine you had planned.
As I finish drafting this post, I’m back to physical writing and reading, both of which I’m able to tolerate for increasing periods of time—a fact that has made me incredibly happy and energized about writing.
I don’t want to deny the frustration that comes with disruption to a good routine. When you’re working on a long piece of writing, it’s not always the case that you want to write, that you feel a kind of energy and momentum. So when you have that feeling and can’t follow it, it seems like such a waste.
But as I start transcribing the voicenotes from July, I have to admit that I wouldn’t have written any of them in my planned version of this summer. A lot of what I’ve recorded likely won’t make it into the novel—but some of it will. Some of it I like. And who’s to say how those pieces will end up shaping the direction of the novel and even its language in the end?
And I’m still thinking about the ways in which routine and disruption coincide in the writing process. That disruption is an invitation to new, unexpected routines. That the challenge of writing is both the monotony of showing up to the page when you don’t want to—and finding compromises for staying in touch with the story when you want to but can’t.
Patchett concludes her essay with the following advice:
Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
Patchett, Ann. “The Getaway Car.” This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. HarperAudio, 2013.