Evenson’s Post #1
This is Brian Evenson: I’m a writer with a few past books out and with a novel, Last Days that’s just come back from the printers. I’m hijacking Jeff’s blog for a post or two…
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Probably because I have a novel just coming out, I’ve been thinking a lot about how you put a novel together. When I wrote The Open Curtain I had a plan going in: I would trick myself into writing a novel by writing three novellas and then putting them together. That worked flawlessly for the first two novellas, but then I got to the third novella and realized it had to be not only a novella but had to complete everything. So, I spent years writing and rewriting that third section and throwing it away until finally I got it right. Then, when I wrote Aliens: No Exit, I had to write a fifteen-page summary of the book so that I could get it approved by Dark Horse and by Fox. Result: everything came together pretty smoothly.
In October I spent two weeks at an artist colony and thought: “Doing an outline worked pretty well, maybe I should do that again.” So I did. Only problem is that I ended up with a 95-page outline of the first third of a projected novel. Maybe a case of too much time on my hands. It’s pretty specific and filled out, but it’s still only a third of the book, and if the outline is 95 pages, how long is the book itself going to be? And when do I find time to sit down to write the 95-page outlines of the other section. Wouldn’t it be easier just to write the book without an outline? But if I do that will I run into the same problem that I ran into with The Open Curtain?
You’d think I’d have written enough by this point to have this figured out, but I think each book has asked for something a little different from me, which is part of what keeps it interesting. There are certain things that get easier and certain things that I have to keep re-teaching myself every time.
February 9, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Hi Brian -
Friend of Jeff’s, here. I like the post, and looking forward to reading more of your stuff. I really appreciate the comments on process – I think the insights are helpful to writers at any level, and are more meaningful when they’re from writers I like.
I’ve been aware of you for a long while (Bryan Waterman is a childhood friend) and I’m thrilled you’ve got some good venues through which to publish your work. Looking forward to more.
Best,
James A. Owen
February 9, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Hi Brian!
Welcome! Looking forward to your posts.
Really enjoyed Last Days.
February 9, 2009 at 4:43 pm
To what extent are novels/stories by other writers useful as structural models? Have you ever had a specific novel (or handful of novels) in mind that provided patterns or guided you in other ways? I can see how having a specific model in mind might eliminate some decision-making by imposing restrictions, freeing the mind to focus on other areas. But it’s hard for me to imagine that the structural model wouldn’t have to be abandoned at some point (since you’re ultimately writing a different novel and not, like Pierre Menard, re-authoring the original)–and so I wonder if having a specific model might actually impose a structure too early, before the material starts to reveal a natural shape (if there is such a thing). A model might make it harder to see other patterns.
Or is it that all the structures of all the novels you’ve read just lurk below the surface while you work, bubbling up when a comparison is useful, fading away when it’s not useful anymore? I guess I’m just curious to know how conscious you were of other novel structures while you searched for an organizing pattern for your own recent novels. (But don’t feel obligated at all to respond to this if you don’t have time).
February 10, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I almost got to the point of treating every chapter of my novel as a short story. Don’t misunderstand – it is a cohesive novel with a linear plot and a cumulative effect. I’m not saying each chapter can literally stand alone, but some do, even as they reference things to come and things already past.
The reason is simple: This being my first novel, I am so intent on keeping the thing moving, I don’t want a single chapter to “drop the ball” and lose the reader. I think a more established author can stretch things out a little more, knowing that the readers will be patient if they hit a dry spell. I don’t want to take any chances.
Brian, I know exactly what you mean when you say, “Wouldn’t it be easier just to write the book without an outline?” In my limited experience of submitting the novel to publishers, some of them want an outline, plus the first couple of chapters. But sometimes an outline doesn’t do the book justice. I am tempted to add more details to the outline, like especially good paragraphs. You know, let them sample the goods. I get to the point where I might as well send the whole novel.
It’s still fun, though.
February 10, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Thanks for all the responses, which I appreciate it–nice to be part of a blog where people talk back in intelligent ways. I’m going to try to respond to everybody in turn below, will try to check back in for follow-ups.
James, thanks for the comments; I’m glad what I said was useful. I think my kneejerk response is to hide/forget the frustrations of the process once the book is done, so I’m glad my going against that response seems helpful. (And if you’re in regular touch, say hello to Bryan Waterman, who I admire.)
Thanks, Charles, and I’m glad you enjoyed Last Days (and even gladder to know that you did and for your blog kindness). I haven’t seen the physical book yet (except for the galleys), but have been assured it exists…. It should be arriving here any moment now. I’m excited too that the final version is coming into the world with an introduction by Peter Straub, a writer I really like and someone who genuinely (and provocatively) blurs the boundaries between literature and horror. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that other readers will feel the same way about the book as you do.
Hi, Christian. For stories, I think that’s definitely the case for me: I often end up borrowing structures from other stories or thinking in response to (and sometimes in opposition to) the shape of things that I read. For novels, I have a handful of books that I go back to frequently, and they’re probably in the back of my head in terms of thinking about models and directing the project forward. On the one hand that might be something like Beckett’s Molloy or Ann Quin’s Berg, on the other hand something like Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. But of course there are so many structures and so many different sorts of books that I admire that it’s hard for me to say “In this book I’m working I’ll be reworking the structure of ‘x’.” And often the most relevant connections to other books and their structures are things I only notice after the fact, things that have been worked out by my subconscious mind without me realizing it.
With Last Days, I was consciously working with the idea of hardboiled and noir, and drew on a lot of sources in doing that. At the same time there turn out to be a lot of different ways to put a noir together, so that was only partly helpful. With The Open Curtain, the novel whose structure took the longest, it turned out to be another writer that did get me out of the rut–reading Steve Erickson’s work and thinking about what it did with alternate realities was finally the thing that brought everything together in my mind and made it all click. The funny thing was as soon as the click came I could see how everything was already set up, that subconsciously I’d been preparing for it in the writing that had come before, but I couldn’t see it until then… I do think I often worry that if I decide in advance what the structure is, things will be limited, but at the same time I don’t feel like that’s what happened with my Aliens novel, that even with the outline in place there was still a lot of wiggle room…
Bill, it’s not a bad idea to treat each chapter as a story, with its own arc, though it can be tricky sometimes to make all those stories add up to a larger whole. When I’m writing a story, even a long story or novella, I seem capable of carrying it all around in my head. And in the first draft of a story I’m trying, above all, to establish a sequence and a structure–lots may change after the first draft, but the basic structure usually doesn’t. With a novel (unless you can stick to an outline) sometimes have to write a lot before the overall structure can be seen, but probably there’s a healthy balance to be struck between outlining (and thinking of the work as a whole) and thinking of each chapter as a separate, dramatic entity.
Thanks again for all the comments.