How to write a novel, by a novelist writing a novel

A novice writer dissects the slow act of creating a book in a world accustomed to doing everything quickly James Gregor

Jorge Luis Borges once advised that, in lieu of writing a long book, one should pretend it already exists and write the summary of the book instead. If sufficiently detailed, the summary would in a sense become the intended book. This cryptic suggestion may seem more a wink — a piece of metaphysical mischief from the blind sage of Buenos Aires — than a useful strategy to offer a writing workshop, yet it articulates an alchemical trick of the trade: in order to overcome what Marguerite Duras called the terror of the blank page, it can be helpful to pretend that the book you’re writing is already written.

My first novel, called Going Dutch, the story of a feckless graduate student in New York City with a taste for expensive restaurants, was published in August 2019. His academic career stymied by writer’s block, the protagonist, a young man named Richard, undertakes a deceptive scheme that has the potential to ruin his life. It’s a novel partly about the lengths one might go to get words on paper. During the five-plus years I worked on it, I would often picture the finished object, released in the style of different publishing houses: New York Review of Books Classics, for example, with a dark plum spine, or the stark black and white Rodchenko-like collages of New Directions Paperbacks, or else carried in a tote bag, in the window of a bookstore, as a gift exchanged between loved ones. This Instagram-stimulated desire masked a yearning for completion. Form would summon content. The writing could come later. It was spurring to imagine a concrete thing to hold in my hand, and not simply the morass of accumulating sentences that I was trying, with what often felt like limited success, to wrestle into a semblance of coherence.

Writers often talk about how they love having written, but not the writing itself. That’s because writing is lonely, boring and repetitive. It follows accordingly that a novel, usually upwards of 200 pages, is a masochistic, quixotic prolongation of a lonely, boring and repetitive situation. Why do it? Sure, once in a while, if you’re lucky, a kind of ecstatic inspiration descends. The words seem to flow of their own accord, and a sense of inevitability takes you by the hand. But a more reliable visitation is the voice of doubt: this is garbage.

In art as in life, misery loves company. What sustained me through years of reasonable indifference and skepticism — “I’m writing a novel,” “That’s nice,” — was a network of interested friends engaged in the conversation: the desultory, meandering exchanges by phone, email, text or in person, from which sympathy and useful ideas sometimes emerge. When the writing ground to a halt, a friend might offer a thought or an observation, perhaps not even about the book, which would dislodge me from my rut. The myth of the solitary artist is an invention of the Romantics. In Martin Scorsese’s documentary Public Speaking, Fran Leibowitz says that the history of art is people sitting around in coffee shops talking and doing nothing. Indeed. Or texting. Or emailing back and forth about a partial manuscript that still has no ending.

Yet even with friends on the phone, eventually you end up back at your desk, alone. There was a young man in my MFA program who wrote 1,000 words a day and was famous in the department for the ritual that preceded his writing: he would sit down at his desk, turn to his reflection in the window, flex a muscular arm and declare, “You’re fucking awesome.” I often thought of him while writing Going Dutch, the exhortation to self-confidence, the physical gesture invoking strength and mastery, the propulsive slingshot of the mantra. As with exercise or artillery, there’s physics to writing. A habit kept up is a habit more easily kept: 80,000 words becomes less daunting when chopped up into daily bits of 250 or so words, which was Ernest Hemingway’s morning routine. Depending on life circumstances — I moved several times during the writing of Going Dutch, first from Brooklyn to Montreal, then to Halifax, with an interregnum at an Italian artist colony — my own regime fluctuated, but getting in at least a few lines every day was the imperative. In a year or so, following Hemingway’s example — and barring the inevitable sluggish delays of selfdoubt — you’ve got something like a first draft of a book. And then begins the interminable edits and rewrites.

Of course, once the book is done, you face the question, lamentably pertinent in 2020: Will anyone read it? Bombarded with depressing statistics about the declining sales of novels, the fiction writer is liable to throw up his hands. More than a few times I found myself describing to friends or acquaintances the seemingly endless hours at my desk — “it feels like wrestling a beast” — all to have them nod and say, “I can’t remember the last time I read a novel.”

As someone drawn to the tragicomic, there was something delicious in this to me: like the twitch of a tectonic plate reducing an arrogant civilization to ashes. I had to laugh. I didn’t — I don’t — blame them. Even novelists don’t read as many novels as they used to. There are so many articles to read (like this one). A lust for metrics, information and facts dominates our ever-busier lives. As a certain Bennington College professor once said, we live in an age that values prose over poetry, and photography over painting.

In any case, if you’re trying to write a book, it’s clear there’s a lot to block out. But if you block out the world, how do you write about it? “The challenge of presenting oneself onscreen, widely considered a prerequisite for a full life in the twentyfirst century, flustered many,” says the narrator of Going Dutch. The fact that we live in a society in which few people can summon the will, interest or time to read a novel — smartphones and social media being the usual culprit — is a fact worth recording in a novel, even if no one will read it (I still hope they will). There probably comes a decadent moment in all genres when the form begins to chronicle its own demise. Are we there yet?

Richard, the idle protagonist spends much of Going Dutch on his phone, scrolling through Grindr or checking Ok Cupid. As he walks the streets of New York City, glimpsing strangers encountered online and recalling their profiles, his perception is flecked by scintillas of recognition, bytes of intimacy in the colossal anonymity of the city. Going Dutch was initially inspired by my experiences online dating in New York City, so I can’t begrudge the technologies their inspirational qualities. Cunning and parasitic as social media technologies may be, there’s a kind of magic and mystery in the experiences they foster. Certainly, they are central to our culture now, and demand acknowledgement in fiction. At the same time, engaging with them presents a similar challenge to a writer as it does to a reader, i.e. falling victim to them, i.e. checking Facebook or Grindr instead of writing (or reading). If you look too long into the abyss of social media, the abyss of social media might look back at you.

So was Borges right when he said that writing a book was “a long and impoverishing act of foolishness,” or does the novel remain, even in the Internet age, one of the best ways to capture what Marshall McLuhan called “our electric involvement in one another’s lives”? Perhaps it goes without saying that I fall on a certain side of this question. For now, at least, the novel, that adaptable, humane form, continues its inimitable mission to record, describe and preserve. If, in the oft-quoted words of Joan Didion, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, this will always be — we can hope — the case.

‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’

— Ernest Hemingway

WRITING A BOOK WAS ‘A LONG AND IMPOVERISHING

ACT OF FOOLISHNESS’

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