Long Dark Tunnel All The Way

Writing a novel is easy; I should know -- I've been actively, if sporadically, working on Norton The Third since the late 1990s, and have toyed with its fundamental premise since, just to name a specific milestone, July 2, 1963.

It's sort of like writing computer software, except that there's no way to find out for sure if you have it right. I've been doing that since early 1965. When you write a computer program, your first feedback comes immediately -- and is almost always in the form of negative criticism. "You left out a bleedin' comma, you fool," the computer will say. "How do you expect me to understand this piece of crap if you don't punctuate it correctly?"

BTW, decades invested in writing software is probably one reason why there are way too many commas in Norton The Third. Perhaps, by the time you get to read it, an editor will have picked three quarters of them out. Ever have to comb lice out of your child's hair? But, I digress.

No such brutally authoritative immediate feedback is available in the process of writing long-form prose. Friends, family and writing groups can look over your stuff, and the feedback they provide is invaluable, but basically, it's a long dark tunnel all the way from that hopeful first sentence to the final click of the final button on the Kindle Direct Publishing website.

You fall in love with certain phrases, paragraphs and incidents in your story, and hope the rest of it lives up to the high spots. But the basic process consists of flying blind. You crank out one incident after another, based on a vague outline that instantly becomes inaccurate and out-of-date as soon as the words themselves appear. The incidents (theater directors call them "beats") connect physically to form chapters, and logically in groups to create characters and plotlines. You know where you want to go, in the end, but sometimes the characters stubbornly refuse to march in that direction. Occasionally, one of them will turn to you and say, "come on, I'd never do that!".

For me, the actual process of crafting sentences and paragraphs to tell a story is really enjoyable -- if it weren't, I'd be off beachcombing or performing Shakespeare! When a paragraph or an interaction between two characters snaps together, it suddenly feels right. I smile, sometimes chuckle to myself, leading my wife to wonder if I am slowly going bonkers. She may be on to something.

Truly professional fiction writers sometimes say they sit down at the keyboard each day, eager to find out what their characters will do next. It feels to me more like the characters are bugs I put in a jar, to watch them fight. I force them to do what I want, and most of the time, they comply. It's the surprising manner in which they do my bidding, and, yes, how they sometimes disobey altogether, that's part of the fun.