Dear Not Even Close: In The Middle of the Writing, Our Minds Play Tricks On Us

Lit Salon on what is "real" & what's love got to do with it + the hidden life of trees, and how seeing that secret world more clearly can help us see all worlds more clearly, including story worlds

Dear Jeannine,

Do you remember Calvin and Hobbes? That hyper-imaginative little boy and his stuffed tiger who was actually real? Or wasn’t real, depending? Sure, it was a little derivative of another beloved classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, but all good things are inspired by something, and Calvin and Hobbes made the premise feel unique. God, I loved those stories so much as a kid. Better than pretty much any other stories. And to me, they were stories, even though told in the form of a comic strip. I mean, the one about the baby raccoon that died? Calvin tells his dad, “Out there he’s gone, but he’s not gone inside me.” That still slays me.

I saw myself so clearly in that little boy that his world was completely real. But I understood, even as a little boy, that someone was out there making these magical stories, making these books that brought me so many hours of transcendent joy. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do for someone else someday.

Fast forward a few decades, and you could say I’ve been lucky. I’ve built a sustainable writing career that pays quite well in the context of what writers earn. Granted, that’s partly because I hold down a full-time academic job and do other things on the side of that, including coaching writers, developmental editing, and so forth. I’ve published a handful of books, too—mainly academic, but my literary debut, a sort of hybrid narrative, came out a couple of years ago from a small press and attracted great critical reviews, a smattering of attention, and halfway decent sales, considering the size of the press. The problem is … I haven’t built my Calvin and Hobbes.

Not even close.

I haven’t written the anything on the order of what what made me want to be a writer in the first place: the kinds of stories that a person can fall into and disappear for an hour or a day or more and forget who they think they are in order to discover who they might become.

My failure is not for want of trying. I’ve been working on a novel for several long years. But the more I work on it, the less I seem to believe in it. For a while, I thought I could revise my way out of trouble. But now, I’m starting to think the problem is simply that the novel just isn’t  … real.  

What should I do?

Signed,

Not Even Close

Dear Not Even Close,

You know that part in The Velveteen Rabbit where the Skin Horse is explaining about “real” to the Rabbit?

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.

Such a great passage—no wonder it’s famous. And it holds, I think, a bit of coded wisdom for us writers, too. You see, I think the problem might be that you do not love your novel enough to make it real.

The question is, can you?

It might be hard to know, because in the middle of novel writing, our minds play tricks on us. If you want, you can read all about those tricks here in this past post, The Truest Laws of Writing, because I have wrestled through long stretches of tricks myself, and, in fact, am still coming through the other side of the match with my manuscript right now, which is why your question is of special interest to me.

I, too, need to take my manuscript by its face, hold it up to my own, and see if I want to love it, REALLY love it, enough to make it real.

But first, an idea.

This might sound unconventional, but we both know that thinking about these things logically only takes a person so far, and generally not very, at that. And so while I do have at least one concrete suggestion for you, which is also a suggestion for me—a writing strategy that could help us, at minimum, produce some interesting new work—I first have a question.

Can you name the various trees you see?

Are you sure?

It might seem like knowing the names of trees is irrelevant to this discussion. But philosopher Christian Diehm argues that “distinguishing species may offer a different way of seeing ‘nature’ that could transform our view of the world around us. That world, I would argue, includes our novels.

Yes, our novels. Which also require seeing.

“‘To many of us in the modern West, Diehm suggests, ‘nature’ is a more or less’