The ghost novel

The spookiness of process

Halfway through writing my last novel, Cursed Bread, I threw it out. That is too dramatic, maybe. I didn’t even delete it; it still lives on my computer, called CURSED BREAD V2 or V3, maybe, for I go through at least 20 drafts and maybe more. When it comes to writing novels I am careless until the point where I become very precise. Words are thrown, cut, but always saved.

The only way I can write is by stripping any notion of preciousness from the words I write with, to completely squander them and tell myself every one is provisional, every one can be changed, if it has to be and if I will it. Otherwise I will just sit there and terrify myself with the idea of perfection. I know not everyone else writes like this, that for some writers a good writing day is five flawless sentences, thought over carefully before committed to the page. For me a good writing day, at least with early drafts, would be 2000 pages of dross.

Every novel I write has its own ghost novel: the words that were discarded but filed away in one document, in the hope of reuse. I never do reuse mine, really, though I do revisit the document from time to time. Sometimes I revisit out of curiosity, sometimes to orient myself. They are documents not of failure, but of proof of moving and trying. I say sometimes that I know that the novel is finished when the ghost novel becomes longer than the real novel, the words I have thrown out cut and pasted into this alternative collection of echoes and previous descriptions, of non-linearity and plot-points no longer needed, sometimes entire characters. The ghost novel has a substantiality of visible process that is strangely comforting. Paths not taken; paths attempted.

When people ask me why I threw out the first half of Cursed Bread, my only answer is that the novel didn’t feel alive to me. This notion of life in a book is embarrassingly vague and breathless, but I don’t have any other way to describe it. I just knew when I was reading through that 25,000 words that there was a flatness, an emptiness. I started it from the point of view of another character (the baker’s wife), and from there it worked, somehow, in a way it hadn’t before.

But – three months of work, wasted. But then what is a waste, really? I understood the character better whose voice I had been writing through, a character whose voice wasn’t the right narrative voice, and I understood why her voice wasn’t the right narrative voice. I understood that there was an intrinsic coldness within this character that I didn’t want to inform the overarching story, and maybe that was where the flatness had come from. I understood that she had not wanted in the same fevered, desperate way that the new narrator had spent her life wanting, had not lived her life in service to the process of wanting. In every narrative there are smaller narratives about the story a character tells of themselves to the world, to others, to themselves, to us as the reader. In Cursed Bread these narratives needed to conflict rather than cohere, to be obscured even to the narrator herself, to lend themselves to ambiguity and uncertainty and to portray a person who wanted and wanted and wanted without ever truly, really understanding what they wanted, why they wanted, or who they were.

It's all very well to say the above in retrospect, months after publication. You can see what you’re doing when you have space from the novel, finally, when it’s taking shape, finally, but actually when you’re swimming through those early drafts and you can barely sense anything except for glimpses of epiphanies, coalescing (hopefully) into larger breakthroughs, all I have to go on is the sense of whether it is pulsing, whether it’s learning to speak in its own voice, whether it intuitively feels right. Writing a novel, at its best, is a feverish process of symbiosis. I am giving it something of myself and it is giving me a new thing back, and we are in conversation, and it is unlocking something in me. I am tricking myself into the exploration and articulation of the things I didn’t know how to approach any other way. I didn’t know.

I’m a little over halfway through yet another later draft of a new novel, a stage which, having known how I threw out Cursed Bread, will now always feel like a milestone to get through, though I did write a first draft of this one already - six weeks of constant work last summer where the words came in a rush of joy, early mornings in the sun until the first draft was finished, and then I stopped and put it away and tried to get back into it months later, only to discover I couldn’t find the way back into it I needed somehow, only succeeding in pecking at it, starting and restarting.

I’ve been revisiting already the ghost novel of this novel, the wordcount of which is not quite at the heels of the visible novel (yet), reminding me that I haven’t tried enough new things yet, haven’t cut enough yet, haven’t been ruthless enough yet. And then when I go from this to Cursed Bread’s ghost novel and see how different it is from the real one, it’s illuminating. At the time it seemed like there were a million overwhelming paths for the story to take, but really in the end, despite all the voices and the images, it really only came down to one.