How to write novels #1

A pre-MFA case study in the theory and practice of novel writing.

Some individuals may try to stop you from writing novels

Since I start school in a few days, I thought it’d be useful to set down some notes on writing craft so we can see how my work process changes over the next two years. This post is a bit long, but I think this topic deserves some elaboration and I respect your intelligence. You’ll be fine. Most future posts will be shorter.

We begin with the fact that the novel is a commodity.

The process of production goes something like this: the idea for the novel is conceived by a skilled craftsman, who then produces a raw draft of his (using masculine pronouns for myself) work. This is like an architectural blueprint or the pattern for a garment. It is a piece of intellectual production in conversation with previous traditions and styles, which is eventually used to produce a standardized, physical product: The Book.

This draft is then refined both by the craftsman and by other specialized workers: agents and editors. The agent sells the conceptual work to a production firm, which, represented by the editor and by marketing, reshapes the work for its own commercial purpose—like a commercial buyer altering some of the stitching in a pattern to economize on thread or a construction firm skimping on rebar in a building.

The final blueprint/draft/pattern is then manufactured through standard industrial processes: Trees must be cut down, processed into pulp and pulp turned to paper. Thread, glue and cloth must be made for binding. And miners must dig up the silicon, cobalt, copper, lithium etc. for the smartphones and e-readers that will be used to distribute the digital versions of the commodity.

The commodity nature of book production in part explains tension between writers across genres; both lump sum payments for manuscripts and advances functions like piecework payment. Increased speed of production by one worker, or one group of workers, will generally exert a downward pressure on wages—to say nothing of the loss of craft that comes with extremely tight turnaround times. Workers who compete for piecework in other industries often collude to slow the rate of production or push up the price of individual works. But writers seem not to have reached the left of craft unionism that skilled garment workers reached more than a century ago.

I have never sold a novel and I do not have an agent. So I cannot speak in depth to the work of those stages. I can only discuss the drafting and early editing. Because most abstract discussions of production processes are extremely boring, I’ll discuss my writing labor as it relates to one specific work: the second volume of a projected four volume historical fantasy series. I wrote this volume in the spring of 2024.

The Idea:

This book started with two books and a video.

When George Floyd was murdered, I was reading Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici and Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe by Samuel Cohn. Both works concern revolts in Europe around the time of the Black Death. Cohn’s work is a collection of court documents and contemporary chronicles of popular insurrections in Italy, France and Flanders in the 14th century. Federici’s work argues that modern capitalism, modern racism and the modern patriarchy grew out of the repression of those insurrections by the feudal nobility and the emergent mercantile bourgeoisie.

During the George Floyd rebellion, I started to wonder what could’ve tipped Europe from the path of Feudal reaction toward a more egalitarian future, thus preventing the catastrophe of chattel slavery, Jim Crow and the prison state. At some point that summer an Italian YouTube account made a silly remix of a lecture by historian Alessandro Barbero about the 1378 insurrection of the Florentine wool carders set to images of the George Floyd rebellion.

Something clicked. I could see the straight line from the social struggles of the past to the crisis of the present.

So I wrote a novel about the 14th century as the point of departure, set in an alternate Europe without Christianity. I’ll spare you a full plot summary, but the book follows a military coup against a monarchy that sets off a round of urban class struggle, as peasant farmers stage a revolt over infringements of their traditional rights.

By spring of 2024, I was working on the second volume in that series. That volume consists of three related novellas. The one we are discussing today is about a spy for a radical Italian city state who is tasked with re-establishing secret revolutionary organizations in sympathetic Flemish industrial cities. The spy exploits the political isolation of the Countess of Flanders, who is in conflict with major merchant families. This forces the Countess to rely on the emergent radical party for political support.

These threads come together when the merchant families launch a coup d’etat that crushes the radical party in Flanders and forces the Countess into exile, though she is saved from death by the spy. The ending set piece is a mix between The Jakarta Method, the Sicilian Vespers and the Bal des Ardents.

Time:

I have a full time job. If I am to write fiction, I must be jealous with my time. Someone with less time, economic resources or energy will likely have trouble matching this schedule. But probably the biggest advantage I have, in terms of time, is that I do not watch television. I watch, on average, much less than one episode per week. It took me four years and two bouts of COVID-19 to watch The Sopranos. Here’s what a week of writing looked like during this project:

On each weekday I would write fiction on my lunch break. At the time I was working on some short stories as well and would often edit those at lunch, so I only rarely worked on the novella during the day.

After work, from 5:00-6:00, I would go for a walk with my partner. We would then cook dinner together and I would do the dishes, taking from about 6pm to 7:30pm. From 7:30 to 9:15, or later, I would write fiction. From about 9:30 onwards, I read books or papers relevant to the topics I was covering: 14th C. Flemish politics, the development of the Mediterranean economy, medieval primary sources etc. Generally one week night was set aside to go out to eat or to socialize, and I would fit in writing either before this or not at all.

On the weekends, I would typically read and write from about 2pm on Saturday to about 5pm, and again from 8pm to 10pm. On Sunday I tried to write in three spans: 10:30 to noon, 2-5 and 8-10. On many weekends, however, I would miss a whole day of writing to spend time with my partner and friends, or to engage in anti-war political activities.*

Now, all this is all an ideal week. Often, I would find myself distracted. But by setting specific times aside for writing, I was creating an expectation for myself.

Pace:

In an average week, I was able to edit one short story, get in a few hundred words on another and write between 6,000 and 7,000 words in the novella, equivalent to about 1.75 chapters.

I could finish a draft novella in six weeks.

However, I am not an outline writer. I write three or four drafts of most works, one focused on plot, one focused on character, one focused on thematic elements and one that blends those disparate elements together. Each subsequent draft generally takes less time than the preceding version, so to produce a 40-50,000 word novella took me about 15 weeks. This brings me to my central craft observation: I write by feel, and I never stop.

Writing by feel and writing by clock:

For me, the key sense in writing a novel is one of unease. Writing is easy if you have a solid vision of the work. When I slip away from that, I feel it in my chest. The scenes drift, they feel flat, the characters speak in nonsense tones, they act bored, they do things they don’t understand. That’s when I know I’ve got something wrong.

So I go back. I read over. I find the scenes where the feeling starts. I try to write the end of the work so I know what I’m working towards, then I start over immediately before the derailing scenes and work forward. Sometimes I swap narrators, change settings, discard whole themes and so on. All this requires a fine sense of alignment between me and the work: I write by feel.

Developing that sense has taken years. To know what’s wrong in your writing you have to know what you dislike in other people’s writing. To do that you have to read. Not just fiction, but criticism. You have to develop and train the critical faculty to recognize the extra clause, the dishonest note, the incongruous scene, the sentimental pap.

Good fiction is hard to write. It is painful, not because of some generative wound artists possess, but because you have to exercise an extremely strict control and awareness of your own body and own feelings. Fiction requires extreme empathetic work—you are after all creating the lives of other people. You have to be able to imagine how things feel physically and emotionally, including things you’ll never experience. That is a psychological sort of labor, but it is not magic. You can train yourself to do it.

This is why I think it’s dangerous to romanticize or obfuscate fiction production. It’s work. All work is painful. Like all skilled craftsmen, we have our traditions, our ways, our individual foibles, but our labor power is all we have. The novel is a series of rhetorical and technical problems that can be solved by the judicious application of skilled labor.

All my fiction works build towards a single image or feeling at the end. What precedes the end of the work is an extended argument to force the audience to feel how I want them to feel on that final page.

One good thing about being a journalist—I have written for publication since I was 14—is that you develop a sense for the coherence and direction of a piece of writing. I don’t know how to explain it other than this: I can tell you within a few sentences of starting a piece whether it will ever be worth finishing, and I can tell you when I have lost the thread of an argument.

The other good thing about journalism is that it trains you to get the words down. I’ve had to write 800 word stories during the middle of a newsworthy event, I’ve spent 12 hour days collecting interviews and, once the basic work is done, writing up a 1,400 word piece. I’ve covered elections, CEO changes, union campaigns, corporate bankruptcy and municipal policy. Speed and economy are the journalist’s tools. Economy, in this instance, means the ability to say as much as possible, as accurately as possible in as few words as possible. On deadline, I’ve never met a writing problem I couldn’t noun-verb-object my way out of. If you can’t write a fairly clean 350-500 word piece in half an hour you’re going to have some problems as a reporter.

If you want to replicate the production advantages journalistic training gives to a writer, I suggest the following exercise, especially if you’re stuck on a project:

Pick an arbitrary length of time, say 10 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes and set a timer. Turn off your cellphone or silence it, turn off your wifi. Write as much as you possibly can in that timespan. Don’t think about bigger questions, don’t think about the work as a whole, don’t think about anything. Just write the facts of the scene in your head as fast as you can. When the timer goes off, check your wordcount. Try the same exercise again the next day, but aim to beat your wordcount by one word. Even if you only manage one word on the first day, if you repeat that exercise every day for 100 days you’ll crack 5,000 words—that’s a whole short story. The words may not meet your personal style standards, necessarily, but at least you’re getting faster, at least there’s something there for you to work with.

So when it comes to fiction, I rarely have trouble turning out the basics of a piece. What matters in the first draft is not purely quality; good stories are the product of long thought, delicate feeling and aggressive revision. What matters is getting the bare facts down in a rough order—the right emotional tone, the right images, the right cascade of feeling can come later, in the first rewrite or the second. But without the skeletal form of a story you have nothing.

However, it is much easier to rewrite a piece if it is, at the sentence level, elegant. This is what journalistic writers mean when they describe something as clean: writing that fills its purpose with a minimum of interference. It’s much easier to alter the arrangement of facts and feelings when the word choice, sentence structure and thinking are already strong. A book is, after all, the accretion of thousands of sentences each building on or complicating the one before. “Dirty” copy, meaning the unclear, the sloppy, the hesitant, the dishonest, the confused, makes that construction much harder in revision. You can’t build a house with rotten wood.

This is not to say that prose shouldn’t be digressive: digression, aesthetic excess and formal experimentation are key purposes of fiction, and prose should serve those purposes at the basic level.

At the end of the day it’s all copy. And if you’re lucky, it’s pretty clean.

-30-

Note: Next week I’ll be up north for my first MFA residency. I plan to publish either an essay arguing that Generative AI is a religious phenomenon (the first in a long series of cultural polemics that I will use to bridge gap weeks for this blog), or an essay on the importance of research in writing socially critical fiction (sci-fi, fantasy and historical fiction).

In terms of writing, editing, promotion and analysis, I have now put about 40 hours of work into this blog. I would appreciate it if new and existing subscribers would pledge any amount. I don’t plan to turn on paid subscriptions until I finish one semester of my program while sustaining this newsletter. So if you pledge, you won’t have to pay until June, that’s six months of uncompensated labor. I will not put the core of this project behind a paywall so long as it remains economically feasible.

More than that, it would mean the world to me if you shared this blog with the people in your life who like books and writing.

*If we do not oppose what the United States and Israel are doing in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, or what the United Arab Emirates’ proxies are doing in Sudan, we will find these forms of statecraft becoming the dominant tools of international politics for the next century. I am not willing to live in a world where the slaughter of defenseless refugees from the air is considered “self-defense.”