I’m Stephanie, a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and personal essays. From the Interstices is my newsletter where you’ll find short stories, lyric essays, and the occasional update on my current novel-in-progress. You can find the rest of the novel update series here. Interested in reading more of my work?
I wrote a short story earlier this year that I like, and I wrote it from the perspective of a truly unlikeable guy. I’ve been working on another short story over the past several weeks and I don’t like this new character either, but I have a lot of compassion for her. I think I’ve been avoiding the more distasteful aspects of who she might be, so my goal for today is to just get into it and not look away. It’s making me think about what we avoid when writing, and why we avoid it. I like “unlikeable” characters — they’re usually more interesting to read. So why am I shying away from the shadow parts of the ones I’m creating?
These stories are a separate project from the novel I’ve been trying to write for an undisclosed amount of time, but I believe all of it is in service of me getting good enough to write the damn book.
My husband hasn’t read any of my novel draft — not a word — and the other day, he mentioned that fact to me. “All this time you’ve been working on it,” he mused. Then he said, “what if one day you left your laptop open and all it said was
all work and no play makes Stephanie a dull girl
all work and no play makes Stephanie a dull girl
all work and no play makes Stephanie a dull girl
all work and no play makes Stephanie a dull girl…?”
Reader, I laughed — in horror! — because while I’ve got about 67,000 words of something, I harbor a nauseating fear that what all those words boil down to is some form of all work and no play makes Stephanie a dull girl ad infinitum. And, I mean, no one’s read any of it, so who’s to say that isn’t exactly all I’ve written…
Jokes aside (who’s joking?!), maybe I have spent all this time and energy on something that I’ll never actually finish, something that isn’t worth finishing. Isn’t that why we avoid taking creative risks? And why, when we do, we tend to take them in secret? A novel requires so much work, so much time and lonely faith — or dogged persistence in spite of the absence of faith — that for it all to amount to nothing, or Not Very Good, or Bad, would be humiliating. Even more so when it’s not like anyone is asking me for this — there’s no deadline or a book contract demanding I hold up my end of the bargain.
Now, since I’m posting this missive on Substack, I may be talking to the wrong people… most of you all are here, writing publicly, asking other people to read your writing. But maybe it took years of writing your stories and poems and songs and dreams in secret, in journals, on laptops and ThinkPads and scraps of paper in stolen hours, before you were brave enough to say I’m doing this thing. I care about it. I hope you like it, but even if you don’t, I’m going to do it anyway.
What I really think is there’s no purpose in a bunch of navel-gazing anguish over whether what I’m writing is worth finishing. That (like this whole post) would be pretty self-indulgent. The thing is, this novel is inside me, at least for now; it whispers and prods, unformed but insistent; it wants to exist, and my mind wants to find out where it leads, and midwife it onto the page. Anything after that is out of my hands and maybe even none of my business.
Maybe it will end up in a drawer. Maybe it’s something that needs to come out only so that I can write the next thing. Maybe it has something to teach me about who I am, what I’m capable of, or what I think about the world. Or maybe I’m just learning how to write a book — a feat that people pay good money to MFA programs and book coaches and ghost writers to learn how to do, and yet here I am, learning it for free, on my own schedule.
R.O. Kwon recently shared in her newsletter that in the midst of a car accident back when she was writing her first novel, she thought:
SAME.
So, while I haven’t kept up the updates that no one asked for but which I’d envisioned as a way to be accountable, and while I’ve only written about 20,000 or so words since May (the time of my last update), I’m still here, still plodding away, still caring enough about whatever it is I’m doing to keep going.
word count
as of Jan 3rd: 67,367
what’s working
showing up to the page; fear of failure
snags
my inability to write chronologically or within any sort of structure; my new baby
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I don’t have any answers on this Stephanie, but I did get to the end of my novel a few years ago and I love it, but have been unable to find an agent for it, so it still sits quietly in my computer. Before that I wrote poems, stories etc etc some of which were published in journals but far more sit in my files. I do think these processes were helpful but I do also regret they haven’t met a wider audience. In the meantime, I am considering rewriting a part of my novel or maybe writing a new one. I can’t tell and I am enjoying having feedback for my writing here, even if it’s quite time consuming and a slow grow process, I do think having those interactions has given me a lot of ideas.