Writing and surviving your first novel, by G. Neri

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One question I always get at school visits is: what's it like being a writer?

First off, I do have a difficult time calling myself a writer. I like the term storyteller better because I started as a visual storyteller: painter, filmmaker, animator, illustrator. The writing came by accident. As a filmmaker and animator, I needed scripts and ended up doing them because nobody else would. The idea that I would someday be a novelist? Fugehdaboudit! Me writing a 320 page book was not in the cards.

But strange things happen and unexpected doors of opportunity open when you least expect them to.

Believe me when I say that I am an accidental novelist. I was tricked into it, bamboozled, flim-flammed. There I was writing a short story-and my writer's group liked it. Only they had questions. And they wanted more answers.

Fine, fine. I could dig deeper. Sure thing, some back story here, an extra scene there... Great stuff they said. Keep going! Keep going? Why? Its good they said. We want more. Alright, so I kept writing. The short story became a longer piece and still they wanted more! What about this? And what happens when-

Before I knew it, I had a really, really long short story in hand. They started calling it a novella and said it had the legs to become a novel. I realized I was in too deep, and I couldn't turn back. Suddenly, it was a different ballgame. A novel?

Luckily, those very same people in my writer's group had been writing novels for years. I saw how they went through it, page by page, chapter by chapter, week by week. Then all over again. Watching them made it seem possible for the first time. Was that something I could do? Surely, they were mortals like me. Maybe, just maybe I could do it too...

 

 

Then I stumbled upon the technique that I've used ever since. I don't outline but I have a list of very broad signposts: a beginning, an end, a few key moments. I'll have a list of words that represent the signposts of the story. Accident. Death. Grieving. Reprieve.  

 

Then I take a guess: this book is going to be ___ pages.

 

I'll give myself a deadline. I want a first draft in __ months. Do the math, 6 days a week over __ months = __ days. Usually, I end up doing 2-3 single spaced pages a day under that formula.

 

The beauty of this system is it relieves the suffering. How? I used to sit down and write myself out. Meaning write until I had nothing left. Problem with that was, I had nothing left. It would take me days or weeks to figure out what to do next.

 

This way, I force myself to stop. Even if I could write 10 pages, I stop at 2. Then what happens? Those extra 8 pages percolate in my head overnight, writing and rewriting themselves in my sleep. When I get up in the morning, that pre-written text comes tumbling out. After awhile, it gets easier and easier and sometimes, I'll sit down and those pages will come out in under 30 minutes. Then, as a reward, the rest of the day is mine. I don't have to think about it, suffer over it or put any pressure on myself.

 

 

The other big thing I learned for the first draft? Give yourself permission to suck. Just assume those pages are going to be terrible. Don't worry about finding the perfect word, sentence or paragraph. Just get it down, fast. Even if it doesn't make sense or it seems illogical. Just let go and let it roll. Even if you end up cutting it, you'll have discovered something vital you wouldn't have know about unless you'd taken that alternate path.

 

So I wrote my novel, now called Surf Mules, slowly but surely, and reworked it many, many times until it seemed to make sense. But I had last minute doubts. I kept reworking it until I couldn't tell if it was good or not. At one point, I was going to shelve it, convinced it wasn't working. But my writers' group literally forced me to send it out. Without them, it wouldn't exist today. Plus they threatened physical harm if I didn't.

 

I gave it to agent Edward Necarsulmer before Christmas and he read it right away and I got my Christmas present: an agent. So the book went out and after several false starts, we found ourselves at Putnam, were the real work began.

 

The first two revision rounds were fairly straight forward and easy. No plot, character or story changes, these were all scene specific tweaks and I found myself thinking, this is easy.

 

But Putnam has this tradition of showing nearly finished works to all the editors as a final stop gap measure. And they all loved it only...they had one simple request.

 

The road trip with the two main characters Logan and Z-boy, plays a prominent role in the story. But it didn't kick in till p.170. Their request: move it up. Like to page 100. I could see their point. It's a big selling point, the roadtrip, so it was kind of like doing King Kong and not having the ape show up until an hour fifteen in (wait a sec, that's why I didn't like the first half of that movie...)

The only problem was, they weren't going to tell me how to do it! There wasn't anything bad to cut out, certainly not 70 pages worth. It was up to me to figure out how to make it work.

 

There I was, stuck on a remote island in the North Sea having my Barton Fink moment. Trying to rework a novel in some sort of Tarantino time trip would require a major overhaul...and we had no time. The book was due in 3 weeks!

Suddenly, I didn't know what this book was about! I lost the main character, lost my sense as a writer and was thinking about disappearing into the choppy seas outside my window.

 

Luckily, my wife rescued me. She told me to go back to my original edit list, cutting anything I couldn't remember about the story off the top of my head. That bought me 20 pages but more importantly, freed me up to get moving again. Then, just going through and tightening every scene got me another 10 pages. I moved a couple of scenes to later in the book and that got me another10 pages. My editor had suggestions for another few pages.

 

Then I had a moment of clarity: I wrote a prologue that introduced the road trip right up front. I used the classic bank heist movie gimmick: start off with the scene where everything is falling apart and have the main character wondering how he got into this mess, then cut to a flashback to a few weeks before and start the story.

 

 

So we didn't cut 70 pages but we got close enough and now book was tight. It was relentless in fact, all the fat cut out and the story streamlined. I learned a lot from this, even if it nearly killed me.

 

So what's it like being a writer? Well, it can be a lot of fun but mostly its hard work. But what doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger.

 

G. Neri, Surf Mules, Putnam Juvenile, Penguin Books