Writing a Novel, Part 1

This week, I'm shifting gears — or maybe I should say I'm writing from inside the car instead of merely observing it from the outside.

As an English professor, I have written a lot about books, but always about ones written by someone else.  This time, I'm writing about the experience of writing my new novel, which dropped this week on Substack.

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In his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe claimed to describe the process he used to write "The Raven."  As Poe observed, providing a glimpse of the creative process — or, as he put it, a "peep behind the scenes" — is not a common practice among writers.  (I will have more to say about Poe's interesting essay in a future column here in Mind Travel.)

I believe a work of literature should stand by itself, and I don't require authors to provide any kind of "key" to their symbols and other editorial choices. At the same time, I find the creative process fascinating, and I do enjoy learning about the routes that authors take in crafting their creations.

Lately, I have been reflecting on the route that I myself took in writing my new novel, I'm dead.  Press play., which debuted this week on Substack and YouTube, and I have decided to share some of my reflections here.  Whether you are a writer yourself or just an inquisitive observer, perhaps you will find something interesting here.

Let me be clear. I am no Poe, and this novel is nothing on par with "The Raven." When I share my experience, I'm not holding it up as a model, but rather just observing it as a kind of object of curiosity. In fact, much of what struck me about this process was as much a revelation to me as it might be to anyone else.

Driving at Night

I'm a sucker for suspense. When my wife and I sit down to watch a movie or a series, I almost always gravitate toward the thrillers and mysteries. There's just something about sitting on the edge of my seat, wondering what's coming next, that I love.

Maybe that's why I wound up writing a thriller of my own this time.  When I wrote my first novel, One Wondrous Sum, I had literary aspirations.  This time, I merely wanted to write something fun, and what's more fun — for me and for many other readers — than a thriller?

When I started writing, however, I had a pleasant discovery.

Poe — who, by the way, partly inspired this novel — observed that a writer should start at the end, so to speak. That is, for Poe, it was important to know where he was going before he started heading there. That's not a bad approach to writing fiction, and it certainly seems to have worked well for Poe, who wrote some of the world's greatest short stories. (I say "seems" because we often cannot be sure when to trust Poe, whose proclivity for fiction sometimes extended to claims he made about his life. I can believe that he really did determine an ending and then write toward it, but then he also may have exaggerated or just fabricated this notion.)

There's another way to write fiction, however. I like this metaphor, attributed to the novelist E. L. Doctorow: "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

When I was writing this novel, I'm pretty sure I didn't even have my headlights on much of the time. I started with a crazy scenario: a young man recording his story in the back of a fifth-wheel trailer that belongs to a stranger. I didn't know why he was there, but I kept writing until I found out.

For someone who loves suspense, this kind of writing is a lot of fun — some of the most fun I've ever had. It was like watching or reading a thriller, but I got to decide what would happen next — and I would surprise myself. A scenario, after all, creates a kind of puzzle for the author to solve — and this point leads me to my next observation . . .

A Satisfying Exercise for the Mind

This experience of creating and feeding my own appetite for suspense led to another pleasant experience. If you have ever tried to write a plot, you know that the process can be challenging. To satisfy the reader, you need to make the pieces fit together, so to speak. This can be especially difficult when you are writing a thriller or a mystery novel because you want to surprise the reader, but the plot needs to be believable. One of the best-known literary sins is relying on the deus ex machina. This term, Latin for "God from the machine," refers to the process of resolving a plot in a simplistic way — by bringing in something external to the story to make everything come right, for example. (The phrase goes back to a dramatic device of bringing a supernatural character into a play by literally lowering the actor from a machine above the stage.)

Throughout my experience of writing this novel, I strove to stitch together all the events in a way that seemed believable. Again and again, as I was writing, I would put a character into a situation and then have to move him or her forward, so to speak, while maintaining some believability. Literally or figuratively, I was continually asking myself, "How do I get him into this room?" or "How is she going to escape?”

Each time, I think, I came up with something that allowed me to keep going, and achieving all those little victories was pretty satisfying. It was like solving one puzzle after another — a kind of exercise for the mind.

Ultimately, you will be the judge of whether I succeeded.

Listen to my novel