The Long Road to My Third Novel

My third novel comes out this spring (a fictional book for this demo). It almost didn’t exist. For a long stretch of the last four years, I was fairly sure it never would. There were mornings I sat at my desk with a cold cup of coffee and a document I could no longer stand to open, and evenings I told friends the book was “coming along” in a voice that convinced nobody, least of all me. Here’s the honest story of how it got finished: four years, two abandoned drafts, one finished book.

I am writing this partly for myself, because I already feel the memory softening into something neater than it was. But I am mostly writing it for anyone in the middle of a book that refuses to cooperate. If that is you, I hope this helps a little. The book you are fighting with may simply be telling you that it isn’t finished becoming itself.

Where it started

The idea arrived the way most of mine do, as an image rather than a plot. I saw two sisters standing in a flooded kitchen in a river town in Iowa, both refusing to be the first to leave. I didn’t know who they were or why the water was rising. I only knew that the older sister was angry and the younger one was holding a jar of something she wouldn’t put down.

I wrote forty pages in a rush that first winter. They were good pages, or at least they felt that way. I had a title, a rough sense of the ending and the kind of confidence that only comes before you realize how much you don’t know. My editor liked the opening. My agent liked the opening. I liked the opening. Then I spent the next eighteen months discovering that an opening is not a book.

The drafts I threw away

Two complete drafts went into a drawer. They taught me what the book wasn’t.

The first draft was told by the older sister, Margaret, looking back from thirty years later. It was careful and elegant and almost completely lifeless. Margaret knew too much. Because she was narrating from the far side of everything, there was no suspense, only regret, and regret is hard to sustain across three hundred pages. I finished that draft, read it in one long weekend and felt nothing. That was the worst part. Not that it was bad, but that it was polite.

The second draft swung hard the other way. I split the book among four narrators, including the sisters’ father and a neighbor who ran the hardware store. I thought more voices would mean more life. Instead the book became a crowded room where everyone talked and nobody listened. It had energy, but it had lost its center. I gave it to two trusted readers, and both of them, separately and very kindly, asked me whose story it was. I didn’t have an answer.

Some books have to be written three times before they tell you what they are.

Elliot

What the failures taught me

I don’t regret those drafts anymore, though I did at the time. Looking back, each one solved a problem I couldn’t have solved any other way:

• The first draft taught me the shape of the plot, including the ending I would eventually keep.
• It also showed me that hindsight was killing the tension.
• The second draft gave me the town, its people and its weather, most of which survived.
• It taught me that a book can have many voices but needs one heart.
• Both drafts proved that I could finish something, which mattered more than I expected.

The breakthrough

A new narrator — the younger sister — changed everything.

It happened almost by accident. I was teaching a summer workshop and gave my students an exercise: rewrite a scene from the point of view of the character who speaks the least. That night, tired and a little restless, I did the exercise myself with the flooded kitchen scene. The younger sister, June, had barely spoken in either draft. She was always in the room, always holding that jar, always watching.

When I let June tell it, she was funny. She was nineteen, impatient and wrong about almost everything, including her sister. She didn’t know how the story ended, so the reader didn’t either. And the jar, which I had never explained, turned out to hold her mother’s buttons, the one thing June had taken when they cleaned out the house. I wrote twelve pages that night and knew, for the first time in two years, that I was finally writing the right book.

Writing the third draft

The third draft took about fourteen months. That still felt slow, but it was a different kind of slow. I wasn’t searching anymore. I was building. Most mornings I worked from seven until about ten, before teaching or errands took over. I kept a simple log in a spiral notebook: the date, the scene I worked on and one sentence about how it went. Some entries just say “bad.” Others say “June surprised me again.”

Here is roughly how that year broke down:

1. Rewriting the opening chapters in June’s voice, which took about four months.
2. Carrying over the town and side characters from the second draft, trimming most of them.
3. Reworking the middle, where the sisters stop speaking for nearly a year.
4. Writing the ending three times until it felt earned instead of tidy.
5. Reading the whole thing aloud, start to finish, over nine evenings.

Margaret, the older sister, became far more interesting once I saw her through June’s eyes. Seen from the outside, her anger looked like fear, and her silence looked like love that didn’t know how to speak. I would never have found that if I had stayed inside her head.

Key takeaway: If a book feels dead, try changing who is telling it before you change what happens.

What I would tell myself four years ago

I would tell myself that a drawer full of drafts isn’t a failure. It is a quarry. I would say that the scenes you love most may not survive, and that is fine, because they did their job by getting you to the next one. I would say to trust your quiet characters, since they are often the ones who have been paying the most attention.

I would also tell myself to rest more. Some of my best decisions came on long walks along the river near my house, not at the desk. A tired writer makes small, timid choices. A rested one is braver.

Coming this spring

The finished novel is shorter than either of the abandoned drafts, and it is the only one of the three I would want a stranger to read. I will be reading from it at bookshops this spring, and the dates are on the readings calendar here on the site. If you come, I will probably read the flooded kitchen scene, since that is where everything began, twice.

Thank you to everyone who asked how the book was going and didn’t flinch when I changed the subject. It is finished now. June finally got to tell her story, and I am grateful I lived long enough in the wrong drafts to hear her.