Every writer has a story about how they became a novelist. Here’s mine, in five acts.
Act I
Early life montage: boyhood in rural Wisconsin, convinced for absolutely no reason that I’m destined to be an actor; theater major at the local community college for two-thirds of a semester before discovering that I’m more interested in how the plays were written than in how to perform the roles (also, because it is 1977, and I’m a young male Midwesterner, I cannot bring myself, in Modern Dance class, to cross the gymnasium floor like a windblown tree); to my surprise, I become captivated (“entranced” may be a better word) by computer programming, which strikes me as some kind of high craft, maybe even an art. They’ll pay you to do this? Comp sci degree follows. For five years I weasel my way into one research lab after another; with only a bachelor’s degree, I don’t have ideal credentials, but I’m good at writing proof of concept computer programs, need minimal supervision, and am good at telling the story of why these programs are significant—what they mean. I’m into graphical user interface design, symbolic AI. Autonomous golf carts, for crying out loud. By 1985 I’m living in Austin, Texas, working day in and day out with people who wrote the textbooks I’ve studied. I’m publishing research papers with my buddies, sometimes even presenting at conferences alongside other researchers who’ve written other textbooks I’ve studied. I feel like I’m working in a well-funded playground for computer scientists. I can’t believe my good luck—and by all indications, it’s never going to run out. I’m happy as a clam.
One day I decide it might be interesting to try writing a novel.
Act II
Enthusiasm, naivete, and arrogance carry me along for three, maybe four, weekends before momentum drains away and I become the writerly equivalent of Wile E. Coyote as he looks down to discover only thin air beneath his feet.
This puzzles me, borderline pisses me off. I’d started with such certainty. I know my way around a sentence. I spend half my time writing memos, research reports, documentation. Novels are my favorite art form. I’ve read a thousand of the things. Surely I’ve absorbed some sense of how they are written. I had a Grand Theme, and three or four Riveting Moments teed up. I’d estimated it would take a year to finish the thing. Yet looking over what I’ve written, one fact is undeniable: Every. Single. Sentence. Is. Drivel. I can’t even say why. They just are. I have the disquieting sense that I know less about writing a novel than I did before I started. Suddenly it’s unclear why novels have all those sentences in the first place.
Luckily, I’ve told no one about embarking on this novel-writing nonsense, so no one is likely to ask how it’s going. But it’s going, all right: into my file cabinet. Floppy disk dropped into an unlabeled hanging folder, way in back. I may as well have thrown it in the trash. I will never look at it again, though there are certain awful sentences I can never completely forget.
Act III
A batch of years pass: new city, new state, new house, new research lab. I’ve been working with linguists, anthropologists, and cognitive scientists for well over a decade now, absorbing bits and pieces of their fields by osmosis. These are experts at observing how people live, work, think—an essential skill if you want to build tools that people will actually use. I’ve stood behind a two-way mirror watching people try to use a piece of software I’ve written. One user resorts to unplugging the computer because he can’t figure out how to exit the program.
I’ve also, from the very beginning, been working around phenomenally talented programmers. I understand that I’ve been witnessing craftsmanship in action—seen the patience that craft demands, the necessity of subordinating oneself to the half-made thing. Egoless programming is so thoroughly imprinted on me that I actually enjoy submitting my programs to hard-core code reviews, where a room full of expert programmers walk through every line, pointing out every clumsy formulation, every missed possibility. Oddly enough, this feels very much like a table read of a play.
Like all seasoned programmers, by now I’ve got an overdeveloped ability to hold large, multi-jointed ideas in my mind—ideas with many parts that connect and interact. I can run such an idea forward like film through a projector, imagine a change to the program, then roll the film forward again. This has immediate utility for programming, but there is also some connection to capital-D Design—something universal about what it means for a thing to be well made, and how, the better a thing gets, the more its maker must contend with trade-offs. I know I’ve gotten to the essence of an algorithm when I’m forced to sacrifice one desirable quality in order to improve another; if I can get something for nothing, design-wise, the thing is just sloppy. When I’m working well, every change is a tiny experiment, a question posed to the work in progress. If I pay close enough attention, the work will reply: It will demonstrate what it is likely to be good at—and what it will never be good at. I’m reminded, quite often, of the philosopher and social scientist Donald Schön and his notion that designers and problem-solvers don’t begin with grand solutions but, rather, find them, through a “reflective conversation with the materials of the situation.”
I’ve also enrolled in a couple of creative writing classes: essays, short stories. My short-story teacher is Robert McBrearty, and he’s especially good. He has published stories that have been included in best-of anthologies. Robert explains to us the basics of how stories work: voice, point of view, plot. It’s interesting. I try writing a few stories. They keep expanding but never circling back on themselves for an ending. That’s okay. It makes me a better reader. I get the basic rules of the game.
One afternoon I’m working in my backyard when apropos of nothing an actual idea for a novel comes to me. The idea takes about 90 seconds to play out in my mind, like a little mental explosion. This idea is of a different order than the one I had back in Act II. That was just a concept. This has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a setting that is essential to the story, and characters that arise from, and belong in, that setting. I know, intuitively, some of these characters, though not all. That doesn’t worry me because, above all, I know how a reader should feel as they read along, and how that feeling should evolve.
I also know that writing such a novel is far, far beyond my ability.
Act IV
It’s six years later. I’m two years post-MFA degree in creative writing from a well-regarded low residency program, which allowed me to continue working full time, except for one week of unpaid leave each January and July. I’d entered the program with one simple question: Why do novels have all those sentences? What keeps a novel from atomizing, crumbling, as in my drafts? In one form or another, I asked this question of every writer I studied under. My graduate thesis consisted of the first half of the story that came to me in my backyard. Its working title is the main character’s name: Edgar Sawtelle.
One striking thing about that MFA program: The teachers, all working writers, give lectures that the other teachers attend. The sense is that the lectures are mostly the teachers discussing writing between themselves, and we are overhearing. Throughout the program, the emphasis is on craft, on skills. Publication is virtually never discussed—the implication being that publication is a side effect of craft well-executed. And oddly enough, critiquing stories in a creative writing workshop feels very much like a code review (though far less rigorous.)
I’ve made little progress on Edgar since graduating from the MFA program. My main character is up a tree, literally, and I have no idea what will happen when he climbs back down. I’ve stupidly been waiting for an answer to spontaneously arrive, but none has. Finally I admit that if I’m ever going to complete this novel, I’ll need to rewrite it from a different point of view, right from the beginning, page one. The thought of rewriting hundreds of manuscript pages is daunting, but by now my only objective is to complete the novel in some, any, fashion—to survive the draft, as the writer Ron Carlson puts it. The thought that the result might be publishable turns me to stone. I put that out of my mind.
Something else has happened, something curious: I no longer see much daylight between the work of programming and the work of writing fiction. The surface details differ in obvious ways, but not far below the surface, the feeling that I am engaged in a “reflective conversation with the materials” is almost identical. Every change I make, in code or in prose, is an opportunity for the half-made thing to demonstrate what it’s good at being and doing. Less and less do I feel that I am the source of much real creativity—the conversation produces what looks like creativity to anyone outside the conversation. Viewed that way, every moment I’ve spent watching gifted craftspeople in any discipline can be taken as a lesson about writing. I’m wary about saying this out loud. Without a chance to qualify and explain, I fear it may sound dopily reductionist: Writing a novel is the same as writing a computer program, eh? Riiiiight. Some novel that must be!
But my wife, Kimberly, says the following to me one day, and I know she’s captured the essence: All making is making.
In any case, it’s obvious that this novel will never be finished. Almost a decade has passed since the idea first came to me, and I’ve spent most of the intervening years vastly underestimating how close it is to completion. From here on out, my job is only to enter the conversation, attend to the conversation, learn from the conversation.
In this way, after three more years, I finish the novel—at least as far as I can finish it on my own.
Act V
This is the Ongoing Act, where I am and will always be a journeyman writer. It’s May 2024, and I’m in my writing room, making notes for a third book. The first novel was published in 2008, 14 years after the idea for it first struck me; my second novel will be published in a couple of weeks. Both have been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, a stunning turn of events. But this is a story about the writer, not the books, and the question I want to address is, did the experience of writing The Story of Edgar Sawtelle make writing Familiaris any easier? Was I faster, more efficient, the second time around? Was I more confident in the process, more certain that the result would be any good?
Nope: no easier, no faster, no more confident. In fact, precious little of what I learned from writing Edgar seemed to apply to this second novel. And the biggest lessons of all (strive to be egoless; attend to the conversation with the materials; locate creativity outside yourself) served mainly to slow me down.
Except…that’s a half-truth at best. I was faster than I would otherwise have been; whatever I learned from writing Edgar made it possible for me to take risks that would otherwise have been unthinkable. I did trust that I would be able to feel the material pushing back, resisting, or encouraging. But after almost 30 years of practice, whatever I “know” is so deeply encoded, it’s almost a physical skill. It has the feeling of mundane practical knowledge: Do thus-and-such when this-or-that happens. Why? I can’t remember exactly, though if pushed, I could invent a plausible reason. The true reason for the way I work these days is that over time I’ve tried dozens of approaches to various writing problems, and I’ve developed some deep catalog of what has worked that’s only accessible to me while I’m actually working. This is not terribly confidence-inspiring, but then I think about the novelist Russell Banks saying, at a bookstore reading, that the main difference between how he felt as a beginning novelist and as the novelist he was then, after 50 years and 11 books, was that he was less uncomfortable not knowing what he was doing. Not that he was comfortable—merely less uncomfortable. And I recall a story, perhaps apocryphal, that long after he’d become a movie star and Hollywood royalty, Henry Fonda would vomit before going onstage for a performance of some play every time.
What is different for me, undeniably, is that vocation and avocation have swapped places: These days I write stories for a living and program for fun. Freed from the burden of paying the bills, writing code has become pure recreation, though I’ve lost some of my former deftness, and a good deal of the pleasure I took in programming involved reveling in that deftness. What agility remains is still profoundly satisfying. When the writing is going poorly, I’ll spend an afternoon writing code, just to remind myself that I used to be good at something. I write little programs to help me see what I’ve written through fresh eyes, or to help me choose between alternate versions of a passage. Or I just fool around with code. Sooner or later that knot of worry inside me relaxes, and I’m able to have a thought: “Maybe if I start the scene this way…” Then I switch to the text editor and hurriedly type out a sentence before the feeling fades. On good days that sentence suggests another, and another, and off I go, wondering what the big problem was, anyway.