The Truest Law of Writing & Thoughts on Who Gets to Claim the Title of Writer

“The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.” —Ann Patchett

The above quote comes from Ann Patchett’s famed essay, “The Getaway Car,” found in her marvelous book This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, which chronicles Patchett’s career as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction (thus the marriage is between two genres). I’ve quoted from “The Getaway Car” so often—in so many classes, workshops, and conversations—that I worry I’ll be boring at least half of you to tears by quoting it again. But I must, because this month I experienced something so staggering, so helpful, and so intimately connected to Patchett’s essay, that I must share it: I’ve come home to my novel.

I’ve come home to my novel!

Let me back up a bit. You know I’ve been struggling with this current novel, which I’ve imagined as a wild, speculative, semi-dystopian and intricately futuristic saga unfolding in a world not too distant from the one we live in now, except that climate change has continued to unravel our infrastructure to a degree that we see the fraying more clearly and experience it more concretely in daily life. Also, population decline in the developed world has begun to exert more palpable negative consequences, including blurring of the boundaries between animal and human habitats—a phenomenon already well underway, despite that we speak of it only rarely. And this novel features coyotes in a big, beautiful way—how I love those coyotes.

But, as I’ve said, this novel has eluded me. For a long time, I’ve attributed the struggle to several obvious reasons, like a year jammed with two bouts of Covid, a hideous influenza A, a handful of other unspecified viral attacks, a root canal, and the existential exhaustion of recovering, time after time, from these episodes. Or maybe it’s been pandemic stress and numbness eroding my creative verve. Or maybe an ongoing failure to wrangle my own schedule into placidity, between my University work, my private teaching and mentoring, and family demands, which are now more boisterous than ever, or at least since my kids were small. Or maybe it’s the sum total of all these factors.

Reasonable, right?

I could tell myself that, but also … my life has always been like this, yet I’ve always written. Back in the late ’90s, when I was full-time editor-in-chief of Minnesota Parent, a monthly magazine, I was also unschooling three kids under the age of six, one of whom was a breastfeeding baby. And when I was editing at the monthly arts & culture mag, The Rake, while also ghostwriting several books for private clients, I was simultaneously working full time as a Waldorf teacher and navigating the emotional and financial aftermath of a terrible divorce and eventual new marriage, all with three kids and three stepkids (in elementary, middle, and high school) living at home. More recently, during and just after grad school, while completing The Part That Burns, I was also working full time at the University of Minnesota, founding and building my independent teaching and mentoring practice through Elephant Rock, and—during my last semester of my MFA—selling and moving from the house where I’d lived for almost twenty years and where my husband and I raised our blended family while purchasing and re-establishing ourselves in a new-to-us 125-year-old house requiring plenty of time-consuming TLC.

My life has simply never had tidy edges or wide-open spaces.

Why then, have I been so stuck when it comes to this novel? I carried that question onto the plane with me earlier this month as I headed to Troncones to teach the Radical Revision Retreat. I had resolved, prior to departure, to sit with my novel and its challenges until something shifted. And that is exactly what I did, throughout that long flight, at the outset of which I opened the Notes app on my phone, typed “Novel 2022,” then tapped out random thoughts until I found two truths that shocked me for their obvious simplicity:

First truth: The novel I was trying to write was simply too hard. It was asking me to do things on the page that I don’t know how to do—things I’ve never done—in multiple genres in which I am not even particularly well read let alone well-practiced at writing. How humbling!

Second truth: The 200 pages of a different novel—one I nearly completed during grad school, one I applied with and wrote and revised (multiple times) and then abandoned in favor of The Part That Burns—are not total crap that nobody would ever want to read, as I told myself when I shelved them a few years ago. The truth is, I liked and still like that novel—let’s call it Novel One—and it has many elements of the newer novel I’ve been trying and failing to write more recently—let’s call that Novel Two. In fact, Novel One even has room for the coyotes! Indeed, it offers them the perfect home, in both its setting and its plot.

The question is, why did I abandon those 200 pages? I didn’t have to think long to find my answer, because I’ve quoted the very same answer so many times to so many other writers in similar predicaments that I know it almost by heart. It’s a distillation of a particularly illuminating passage from Patchett’s “Getaway Car” that perfectly sums up what happened to me, without my having realized it until now. The human mind can be such a strange and inscrutable house. Anyway, in the passage, Ann Patchett writes about her arrival in Provincetown after being awarded a prestigious Fine Arts Work Center residency to complete her first novel:

When I arrived at the work center, I lugged my computer—a mid-eighties behemoth whose parts were packed into many boxes—up the narrow staircase to my tiny apartment. I made my single bed, hung up my towels, and went to the grocery store. The last of the summer tourists were decamping, and I caught a glimpse of what a ghost town Provincetown would be in the winter. The next day I got up, made a cup of tea, and sat down at my desk … That was the moment I remembered that I had never written a novel and had no idea what I was doing.

Now that I was sitting still in front of a blank screen, I was appalled by all the things I hadn’t considered. Sure, I had some characters, a setting, a sketchy plot, but until that minute I had never considered the actual narrative structure. Who was telling this story? I wanted to write the story in an omniscient third, a big Russian-style narrative in which the point of view moved seamlessly between characters because these were people who were not forthcoming with each other and a single first-person narrative couldn’t possibly tell the whole story. But I didn’t know how to construct an omniscient voice. (I would take a running jump at it in the next two novels I wrote as well, and I always retreated. It wasn’t until my fourth novel, Bel Canto, that I finally figured out how to do it.)

If I hadn’t put together a narrative structure, what the hell had I been doing all that time? From the moment I arrived in Provincetown, I felt the sand slipping through the hourglass. Seven months left me no time to dither. I decided to give each of my three main characters a first-person point of view. The narratives would not move back and forth, everyone would have one shot to tell his or her story, and that was it. Like many decisions, this one was both arbitrary and born of necessity. Would it work? I doubted it, but I couldn’t identify any other options. From my window I saw the occasional writer or painter in the parking lot. They would stop and talk to one another, head off into town. I was upstairs having the revelation that the gorgeous, all-encompassing novel that had been with me for the last year was junk. I had to come up with another idea, fast. I had to hit the delete key and get rid of every trace of the awful work I’d done so far.

I did wind up writing the book I came to write, and a great deal of the credit for that goes to my friend Diane Goodman, who … told me that I was not allowed to throw out anything I’d written. “Calm down,” she said again and again. “Stick it out.” It was life-saving counsel. Without it, I’d have spent the next seven months writing the first chapters of eighteen different novels, all of which I would have ultimately hated as much as I hated this one. … Novel writing, I soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea. If I thought too much about how far I’d come or the distance I had to cover, I’d sink. As it turns out, I have had this same crisis with every novel I have ever written since. I am sure my idea is horrible, and that a new idea is my only hope. But what I’ve realized over the years is that every new idea eventually becomes the old idea. I made a pledge that I wouldn’t start the sexy new novel I imagined until I had finished the tired old warhorse I was dragging myself through at present. Keeping that pledge has always served me well. The part of my brain that makes art and the part of my brain that judges that art had to be separated. While I was writing, I was not allowed to judge. That was the law.

Imagine! Every new idea eventually becomes the old idea. What a staggeringly helpful reminder. This, I now see, is how my big beautiful dystopian pre-apocalyptic feminist masterpiece of a novel was crumbling under the same judging brain that landed my 200 pages of a semi-dystopian quirky subculture feminist novel on the shelf. Neither novel is ready for judgment, but the one in which I invested three years and 200 pages, the one that contains the stand-alone chapter “Family, Family,” which won a short story prize from Masters Review in 2017 and attracted attention from several agents (some of whom might still be interested if I finish it?), the one whose narrative demands are more in keeping with my current skill level and confidence as a first-time novelist (more on that in a bit) … maybe that’s the one I should finish—under the law that I am not allowed to judge it until it’s finished. Because the law is the law.

What I love about Patchett’s law is that it aligns perfectly with my beliefs about what makes a writer a writer—a question I get asked often when I teach or mentor. If a definitive answer exists, I haven’t heard it—but I’m not in the camp that says anyone who writes is a writer. That doesn’t make sense to me. Is anyone who cooks a chef? Is anyone who fixes a faucet a plumber? But then who does get to claim the title writer, versus “someone who writes?” Is it whether you publish, get paid for your work, have a book? What is it? For me it’s not about publication or payment or books, because I was doing all three of those things throughout my twenties and thirties and, though I did sometimes call myself a writer, I felt squeamish about it because I wasn’t writing the things I wanted to be writing, the things I’d dreamed my whole life of writing. Instead, with the exception of one children’s picture book and a few essays I cared about, I was writing magazine articles and textbooks and books for ghostwriting clients and technical stuff like grants and business plans and web content and ad copy and you name it, as long as it paid. And while I had lots of fits and starts at creative writing projects, I never finished any of them until my forties. Which leads me to my core belief about what really makes a person a writer.