If you’re in the middle of writing a novel, at whatever stage, the tendency to feel alone in this quest is overwhelming: how hard or easy should this be? are all writers’ first drafts crap? how many revisions are necessary? how do I determine the structure of this amorphous beast I’m creating?

Recently, I had the reassuring experience of reading Daniel Alarcon’s “The Secret Miracle: A Novelist’s Guide,” and felt, for the first time in my novel writing aspirations, not alone. While my MFA experience was helpful in providing a community of willing readers and fellow writers to help refine my technique and stories along the way, it did not, unfortunately, provide a sense of connection or understanding for me in the process of writing a novel itself–not, that is, in the same way Alarcon’s book has.

Part of this, I think, is the exposure to a plethora of writers’ insights (which Alarcon’s book provides) versus insights from only a handful of MFA faculty. In my case–though this may not be the case for others–I found that my process did not have a “home” among the particular MFA faculty members I worked with, or if had some similarities with their process, there were enough differences to make me feel isolated. This was never more true then when, as a novice novel writer, I attempted to articulate my own unique process which was often met with “well, I’m not sure about that, but this is what I do,” which was all well and good, but left me feeling like I was missing the boat. Part of this, I think, too, stems from the fact that the process itself is a mystery to many writers–they just WRITE, duh–so when I came across Alarcon’s book, I was blown away by the openness, the thoughtful analysis of what novelists encounter in their own unique journeys.

Below are the insights that moved me the most–that spoke to my own unique process, that made me sit up and go “dude, I’m NOT crazy”–and so I’ve pasted them here for your philosophical pleasure. I welcome any feedback or insights–what is YOUR process like? Be sure to pick up a copy of Alarcon’s book if you’re looking for solace in this insanely complicated experience!

* My Mirror Images*

Rhythm of sentences and narrative

“I think that structurally I learn a great deal from music, even though my musical education is rather, uh, patchy. But certainly my experience of narrative form is akin to my experience of music, and I often feel that certain narrative decisions are dictated almost by the musical chord they create.”—Claire Messud

Reading & Writing Inspiration

“When I am really writing, I pick books randomly to read and try to figure out what I am supposed to learn from them.”—Tayari Jones

‘I read randomly everything from physics to ethics to cultural studies, I watch a lot of bad, trashy TV and lots of good TV and above all else, I consume books of poetry voraciously. And no, there is no logic to it; it makes sense but in a more organic way.”—Chris Albani

Research & Integration

“I always do research. And then, I always do too much research, and this is the process: I get swamped by the research. And I reject the research. And then somehow in that process what’s necessary filters into the work.”—Cristina Garcia

First Drafts

“I usually write pretty quickly, so I can churn out a draft in a few months. Then I spend years trying to make it be an interesting and wonderful book.”—Jennifer Egan

“It’s been different every time. With my first book I had a situation and scattered vignettes, and I had to string them all together. With the second, I knew exactly where the characters were going to wind up at the end—the very room in which they would be arrested, the very emotional condition they’d be in, the thing they’d be doing—but I didn’t have any idea how they would get there. With the third book, I knew all those things I just listed—the room, the emotional state, the character’s actions—about the very first scene, and after that I had nothing. Novels in progress seem to me sometimes like landscapes seen through fog. You’re always going to make out something different, have a different handhold at the start, and then you grope your way along.” –Susan Choi

“I don’t really outline. I have a strong emotional sense of the emotional shape of a book, and I hold onto that. The process isn’t easy, but I have found over the years that a lot of my work involves abandoning plans and structures, not making them. I don’t construct books; I sometimes think, so much as grow them, like mushrooms in the dark.”—Anne Enright

“I’ve actually even outlined after I’ve written a draft, or halfway through a draft.”—T Cooper

“Liberty is an essential part of composition. I have no story that I am supposed to tell. And I cannot write the novel in my head. So I will allow this one at hand to meander where it will, and then I will figure out what it is that my subconscious wishes to say in the rewriting phrase.”—Rick Moody

“The successes and (more often) the failures of that first draft help to give me a sense of what I need to do to improve the book.”—Jennifer Egan
“You never get the first draft right the first time, though you always think you will.”—Andrew Sean Greer

“When I’m pondering a story, several potential first paragraphs occur to me. When I really like one of them, I know that I have the embryo of a novel. The plot provides the chronology of the events, but the first paragraph sets the tone, the persona, the rhythm, in short, the voice. The narrator is the voice I always feel most comfortable with, but I have no way of discovering it until I’ve begun writing a bit.”—Santiago Roncagliolo

“The first version of what I write is very chaotic—a kind of magma, confusing. Then I begin to rewrite, which is what I like. It’s what gives me pleasure and when I can work with more enthusiasm—with the knowledge that the story I want to tell is there somewhere in the raw material.”—Mario Vargas Llosa

What a First Chapter Should Do

“From the author’s standpoint, reading it should inspire you to continue writing and push on. You should look at it and say, I’ve got something here. I’m not talking about the first-paragraph-of-the-novel-should-hook-the-reader bullshit. I’m saying, the voice should be strong and it should be compelling.”—George Pelecanos

“When the novel is written, one sees that it is not necessary to overburden the first chapter. One needs only to place the story in its proper air.” –Jose Manuel Prieto

“I do admire a first chapter that somehow touches upon in a hidden way all the things the book will be about—but that’s an extra bonus, not required.”—Susan Minot

“A first chapter has to grip me at some point, but it doesn’t have to explain anything. I think a lot of people get in trouble because they feel they have to explain things in the first chapter, and set the scene for the second. I get bored with that. The very first line has to give you an idea of what the novel is about, and the first chapter has to go beyond that”—Rabih Alameddine

“Your first chapter should make your reader want to read chapter two. This is done by being welcoming and engaging and getting the hell out of the way of the story. The first chapter should pose a question or two, at least.”—Glen David Gold

“The rhythms of the sentences compels you forward.”—Colum Toibin

Establishing Voice

“The voice that rings truest after a couple of lines is the one I go with.”—Chris Albani

“This usually isn’t a decision; I’ve only ever found one voice, per novel, that worked. I’ve never thought, Hmm, which of these two perfect voices should I choose?”—Susan Choi

“I don’t find characters whose voice I can sustain very often, and so whenever I find one, the decision is pretty much made”—Nell Freudenberger

Creating Compelling Characters

“If there’s no character, there’s no story.”—Roddy Doyle

“A compelling character is in the journey they make toward some realization or transformation. People care about people, so that’s what we all care about.”—Chris Albani

“Most compelling characters want something. They want revenge against the white whale that took their leg. They want sex with nymphets. They want to get married. They want to destroy the round gold embodiment of all the world’s evil. They want to find someone who isn’t phony. They want to live purely and adventurously as a knight errant. They want to be flattered by their dissembling daughters. They want to get back home from the war. They want to solve the crime. They want to survive after waking up one morning as a dung beetle. In short, they want what they don’t have (or think they don’t have) and their efforts to attain that thing make them both interesting and sympathetic. Characters cannot be content to stare where they are.”—Josh Emmons

“A compelling character is in the voice, by which I mean his way of looking at the world.”—Nell Freudenberger

“ A character’s language must reveal her or his personality, and the personality must reveal distinctive human traits.  If the character isn’t real for the writer, how can he or she be for the reader?”—Ann Cummins

“I need to hear my characters. Kind of literally, odd as that sounds. If I can’t hear them talk, then they’re not alive in my mind.”—Jennifer Egan

“A character becomes compelling when his actions are shameful or painful.”—Sasa Stanisic

“A character becomes compelling when there’s enough mystery that the reader can fill in some blanks. In this way, the reader and the writer create the character together.”—Rabih Alameddine

“I often try a story from several points of view. I end with the character who can see the most. This is usually a character who is an outsider in some way. Whomever is least invested in the values of the story can give the most rigorous examination of it.”—Tayari Jones

“As the story advances, the structure requires that they take certain predetermined actions. Then I ask myself, why would this person do this? Often the reasons lie in his past. Other times, in his relationship to the other characters. Either way, creating them and getting to know them are one and the same.”—Santiago Roncagliolo

Establishing Point of View

“I stick with the first person if the perspective is crucial and if the person’s language is important to the telling of the story.”—Susan Minot

“I’ve only written in the first person, and I suppose it’s because I’m always trying to figure out just who the voice in my head really is.”—Dinaw Mengestu

Bringing Autobiography Into Your Fiction

“I think fiction has worked best when you don’t discover what you have in common with your characters until you’re deeply involved in their stories.”—Nell Freudenberger

“The key to writing real events is not to overprivilege the ‘real’”—Tayari Jones

“I always use bits and pieces of my life, so all my characters have real DNA in them, but only in a Frankenstein way. Plus, they’re all made out of other people’s fictional characters, as well as real people.  And they’re all party me, if I’m interested in them.”—Jonathan Lethem

“I would use the events as a frame but the characters should be born out of my imagination”—Yiyun Li

“I find that I write better when the main character is interrogating my own point of view.”—Tayari Jones

Dialogue

“Good dialogue of one character is no interchangeable with another character. In other words, it’s good if you can recognize an individual character, if you can recognize the peculiar poetry of that voice. Even in mundane utterances there’s something about them. I think good dialogue comes from a good sense of rhythm, essentially.”—Cristina Garcia

“I think in a first-person story it’s excessive sometimes when your character is noticing gestures too much. Less is definitely more.”—Amy Tan

“Dialogue has to be realistic and reveal character psychology.”—Chris Arbani

“Real conversation isn’t logical; it’s chaotic, interruptive, and often circular. Rarely are people responding directly to what’s just been said.”—Jennifer Egan

“When the characters each are trying to get something from the other but must not talk about it.”—Andrew Sean Greer

“Good dialogue is like double-word score in Scrabble—you say one thing, but it works two ways.”—A.M. Homes

The Awkward Period After Writing a Draft, Patience, Distance, Writer’s Block & Revision

“You can always change the events of a story, and make the plot fit the people; it doesn’t work the other way around.”—Nell Freudenberger

“I write many hundreds of pages I don’t use.”—Nell Freudenberger

“I just do the writing and if the character doesn’t make sense to me, I revise.”—Susan Choi

“I write only when I have something to write. There might be long periods of not writing much. But when I am on a project, I just keep working until I’m done.  But thinking about it and being tormented by not writing and avoiding writing and writing crap—all of those are legitimate parts of the process.”—Aleksandar Hemon

“Time wasting is a very important part of novel writing.”—Rick Moody

“I might have a crisis going on and then I go for days without writing, although every single day I’m in the novel. I think about every observation I’ve had that day, about the structure of the novel and so on.”—Amy Tan

“Even if I think I have no ideas that day, I try not to luxuriate in that depressed feeling, and instead try to just write something, anything, even something bad, figuring it’ll somehow help me write something better another day. For me, this kind of plodding regularity is the only thing that brings out the ghosts. And there’s no good writing without the ghosts. (In order for me to like something I’ve written, I need to go to that place where it doesn’t feel like I’m writing, but instead me transcribing. But I can’t just go about my life and wait for haunting, it needs to be called to, and regularity is, for me, a kind of séance.”—Rivka Galchen

“There is something about the words on the printed page, rather than the screen, that tells me whether or not I am on the right track.”—George Pelecanos

“There’s a think called writer’s blank, which is different from a block. The blank means that in the depths of one’s brain the soup is not soup yet, it’s not ready to happen; writing novels is a process and to do it well you have to dig deep and it takes a while for that material to be ready and available for use—not that it’s personal material, but just processing and preparing for one’s thoughts on a subject or character.”—A.M. Homes

“Not writing is a very important job for writing.”—Aleksandar Hemon

“Great patience is needed. I have discovered, after many miserable weeks and months of suffering, that when a writer is blocked it generally means that he doesn’t know what he is trying to say. You have to go back and examine your motives, your intentions, what you are trying to accomplish. But the essential thing is not to force things merely for the sake of putting words down on the page.”—Paul Aster

“I usually don’t get blocked on the writing. I get blocked on planning the plot and pace of events.”—Mehmet Murat Somer

“I tend to find that when I’m really struck, immersing myself in a few novels, old or new, tends to spur my imagination back to life.”—Dinaw Mengestu

“I put the work away and start reading other books that have similar patterns. Often I find clues in others books as to how to unblock myself. Time itself helps too. I refuse to tell myself that I’m blocked. I tell myself either that I’m not ready or the story’s not ready.”—Edwidge Danticat

“Sometimes my unconscious is working hard without my actually writing.”—Josh Emmons

“Sometimes I get unblocked my taking a break and writing a story.”—Yiyun Li

“I don’t like showing parts or sections of a novel in progress, so I wait until I have something that feels representative of the entire project; that way, the feedback will be more helpful for me, and I won’t be disrespectful of my readers’ precious time.”—T Cooper

“I look for openness in readers—who take the work on its terms and don’t want to rewrite it on theirs.”—Ann Cummins

“Sometimes the hardest material to cut is the stuff that you’ve labored over the most, and often the reason you’ve labored so hard is that it was never quite right in the first place. Those are the most brutal cuts to make, but also the biggest relief once you’ve made them, because in some way, you always knew the stuff had to go.”—Jennifer Egan

“The most important thing to keep in mind is the story—you must be willing to sacrifice anything for the sake of the story. Your best research, characters, scenes, lines, plots, everything. Nothing counts except the story.”—Andrew Sean Greer

“You have to figure out the just the fight and judicious amount of backstory to keep the present afloat without sinking it.”—Cristine Garcia

“I don’t believe in false starts; every piece of work, even if it ends up in the garbage, gets you closer to where you need to be with a project.”—T Cooper.

“I overcome false starts by banging against the story until it cracks open again and then I dig deeper into it, and fingers crossed, it’s fixed!”—A.M. Homes

“I did not know I had a false start because I reread it, but because the rhythms I was using did not enter my own spirit and thrive there. They were tired, sad things.”—Colm Toibin

“It’s good to remember that first drafts are provisional, practice, nonbinding, and that your initial entryway into a story may have to change once or twice or ten times before the final draft is done.”—Josh Emmons

“All I know is that there was some tiny kernel in the wreckage of my first draft that made me think I could salvage the thing and get it going again.”—Tash Aw

“A novel is not like a growing flower but like a cypress that must be trimmed. It must not take form based on a nucleus, from a seed, by addition or bloom, but through its volume, through trimming and removal.”—Julio Ramon Ribeyro

“I always know the ending before I begin—I write toward that ending. It’s the path along the way that always trips me up, and the motivations of the characters to end up where I imagine them. I trust my instinct for where they should go, but sometimes it takes me a long time to figure out why.—Andrew Sean Greer

“The difference between a novel and a short story is the difference between taking a train cross country and getting on when you’re three-quarters of the way there.”—A.M. Homes

Crafting The End

“The ending of a novel should end before the end. Let the reader end it.”—Roddy Doyle

“I think that the plot of a novel is really a question. When you have answered that question, or even made a compelling case that there is no answer, then you’re done.”—Tayari Jones

“A bad ending is when everything is neatly tidied up, all the plot strands tied up, nothing left hanging.”—Aleksander Hemon

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