Thursday, August 29, 2013

Don’t Ask What I’m Writing



Roman Muradov
Draft
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
No stage of the writing process — not the editor’s first response to the manuscript, not the review gauntlet — is as fraught for writers as those first few months of uncertainty: that miserable time when we think, believe, know with absolute assurance that we’ve found the key to the novel in our heads, though maybe, probably, definitely not.

Want to lose a friend who’s a writer? Ask her, a month in, how it’s going. Better still, ask her to describe what she’s working on. She’ll try, because she has to (“Well, it’s about this friendship between these two, um, friends . . . ”) all the while listening to the magic leaking out of the balloon, and she’ll hate you for it.

If writers agree on anything — which is unlikely — it’s that nothing can damage a novel in embryo as quickly and effectively as trying to describe it before it’s ready. Unfortunately, because we’re writers, aka bipedal nests of contradictions, avoiding the temptation to share is never as easy as simply keeping our mouths shut.

Why? Because we’re unsure — about very nearly everything. Because in our hearts we’re only as good as our last paragraph, and if the new book isn’t going anywhere, maybe we’re no good at all. Because we’re running on faith and fumes. In the early stages, before that magic moment when the voice of the story begins to speak, we want — no, crave — validation, someone on the outside who will say, preferably with godlike authority and timbre: “It’s brilliant. You’re on the right track. Just keep going.”
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1 comment:

Mark Hubbard said...

Strange. Same thing happened to me trying to open any of these links as to another article linked on Twitter yesterday.

I can't open any link to The New York Times. All three of these links (plus the unrelated one yesterday) show as 'Problem - Server Not Found'.

Wondering if it is some switch in my browser, or has NYT instituted a geo-block? Can anyone else in NZ get into NYT?