The length and shape of the chapter go a long way towards determining how your plot will move forward. Maybe an understanding of chapters was one skill that was transferable from my short-story-writing days (which, by the way, were over. As much as I had loved the story, I now loved the novel, loved the huge expanse of space in which to work. I never went back). A chapter isn’t a short story and needn’t be able to stand alone, nor is it just a random break that signifies the novelist is tired of this particular story line and would like to go on to something else. Chapters are like the foot pedals on a piano; they give you another level of control. Short chapters can speed the book along, while long chapters can deepen intensity. Tiny chapters, a lone paragraph or a single sentence, can be irritatingly cute. I like a chapter that has both a certain degree of autonomy and at the same time pushes the reader forward, so that someone who is reading in bed and has vowed to turn off the light at the chapter’s end will instead sit up straighter and keep turning the pages. (If you want to study the master of the well-constructed chapter—and plot and flat-out gorgeous writing—read Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye is my favorite.)
Although my novel was written in three separate first-person sections, I wrote it linearly—that is to say, page two was started after page one was finished. This is one of the very few pieces of advice that I’m passing out, along with not going into debt for your M.F.A., that I implore you to heed. Even if you’re writing a book that jumps around in time, has ten points of view, and is chest deep in flashbacks, do your best to write it in the order in which it will be read, because it will make the writing, and the later editing, incalculably easier. Say you know the girlfriend is going to drown. It’s going to be a powerhouse scene. You’ve thought it through a thousand times and it’s all written out in your head, so you decide to go ahead and drown her in advance, get that out of the way. You have yet to work out why it happens, or what she’s doing in the water in the first place, but at least you know she’s going under, so why not go ahead? Here’s why: because then you have to go back and write the boring parts, the lead-up, but you aren’t letting the scene build logically. Instead, you’re steering the action towards this gem you’ve already written. When you write your story in chronological order, you may in fact decide that this girl shouldn’t drown after all. Maybe the boyfriend jumps in to save her and he drowns instead. You learn things about characters as you write them, so even if you think you know where things are heading, don’t set it in stone; you might change your mind. You have to let the action progress the way it must, not the way you want it to. You create an order for the universe and then you set that universe in motion. No doubt Shakespeare loved King Lear, but it was clear that Cordelia would not survive, and how could Lear go on without Cordelia? The writer cannot go against the tide of logic he himself has established, or, to put it another way, he can—but then the book ceases to be any good.
So if you originally plan to drown the girl and then it turns out the girl doesn’t drown, does that mean the characters are capable of taking over the book? No. And if you’re building a house with a downstairs master bedroom, and then decide to move the bedroom upstairs, the bedroom has not taken over the house. You have simply changed your mind, and your architectural plans, something that is considerably easier to do before the house is completely built/novel is entirely written. No matter what you may have heard, the characters don’t write their story. Oh, people love to believe that, and certain writers love to tell it—I was typing away and then all of a sudden it was as if I had been possessed. The story was unfolding before me. I had been hijacked by my own characters. I was no longer in control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it’s the closest thing to being God you’re ever going to get. All of the decisions are yours. You decide when the sun comes up. You decide who gets to fall in love and who gets hit by a car. You have to make all the trees and all the leaves and then sew the leaves onto the trees. You make the entire world. As much as I might wish for it to happen, my characters no more write the book than the puppets take over the puppet show. (Many books later, I was giving a talk in Texas and a woman raised her hand and said that her minister had told the congregation that they should never read novels with omniscient narrators because the writer was trying to imitate God. “Really?” I said. “No Tolstoy? No Dickens?” The woman shook her head. I have to say it thrilled me to think that narrative structure was dangerous enough to rate its own Sunday sermon.)
One more thing to think about when putting a novel together: make it hard. Set your sights on something that you aren’t quite capable of doing, whether artistically, emotionally, or intellectually. You can also go for broke and take on all three. I raise the bar with every book I write, making sure I’m doing something that is uncomfortably beyond what I can manage. It’s the only way I know to improve over time, and going back to Russell Banks’s advice, I’m the only person who can make myself do better work.
Meanwhile, back in Provincetown, winter had set in. The ice cream shop closed. The few bars that hadn’t closed for the season stayed open later. I holed up in my apartment and wrote, and plenty of times I got stuck. Despite all the good plans I had made while waiting tables, I could see now that my strokes had been broad and there were plenty of details that had yet to be devised. Occasionally I panicked. I did not, however, get writer’s block, because as far as I’m concerned, writer’s block is a myth.
Writer’s block is a topic of great discussion, especially among young writers and people who think I should write their book for them. I understand being stuck. It can take a very long time to figure something out, and sometimes, no matter how much time you put in, the problem cannot be solved. To put it another way, if it were a complicated math proof you were wrestling with, instead of, say, the unknowable ending of chapter seven, would you consider yourself “blocked” if you couldn’t figure it out right away, or would you think that the proof was difficult and required more consideration? The many months (and sometimes years) I put into thinking about a novel before I start to write it saves me considerable time while I’m writing, but as Elizabeth McCracken likes to point out, it’s all a trick of accounting. There may be no tangible evidence of the work I do in my head, but I’ve done it nevertheless.
Even if I don’t believe in writer’s block, I certainly believe in procrastination. Writing can be frustrating and demoralizing, and so it’s only natural that we try to put it off. But don’t give “putting it off” a magic label. Writer’s block is out of our control, like a blocked kidney. We are not responsible. We are, however, entirely responsible for procrastination and, in the best of all possible worlds, should also be responsible for being honest with ourselves about what’s really going on. I have a habit of ranking everything in my life that needs doing. The thing I least want to do is number one on the list, and that is almost always writing fiction. The second thing on the list may be calling Verizon to dispute a charge on my bill, or cleaning the oven. Below that, there is mail to answer, an article to write for a newspaper in Australia about the five most influential books in my life and why. What this means is that I will zoom through a whole host of unpleasant tasks in an attempt to avoid item number one—writing fiction. (I admit this is complicated, that I can simultaneously profess to love writing and to hate it, but if you’ve read this far you must be pretty interested in writing yourself, and if you are, well, you know what I’m talking about.)
The beautiful thing about living in Provincetown in the winter, and having no money and no place to spend it even if I did, was that there was rarely anything in the number-two spot on my to-do list. There was really nothing to distract me from the work I was there to do, and so the work got done. The lesson is this: the more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page. If you want to write and can’t figure out how to do
it, try picking an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day. During that time, you don’t have to write, but you must stay at your desk without distraction: no phone, no Internet, no books. Sit still quietly. Do this for a week, for two weeks. Do not nap or check your e-mail. Keep on sitting for as long as you remain interested in writing. Sooner or later you will write because you will no longer be able to stand not writing, or you’ll get up and turn the television on because you will no longer be able to stand all the sitting. Either way, you’ll have your answer.
I once gave this entire explanation to an earnest group of college freshmen who had all suffered cruelly from writer’s block. When I finished, one girl raised her hand. “Clearly, you’ve just never had it,” she said, and the other students nodded in relieved agreement. Maybe not.
I finished my novel at the beginning of April 1991. I printed it out and then I stood on the pages. There were about four hundred of them, and I felt considerably taller. I went out and found Elizabeth in the yard hanging her laundry on the clothesline, and I told her I was done and we hugged and made a lot of noise and went off for a drink in the middle of the day. Because Elizabeth had read every chapter as I wrote it, and because I took all of her suggestions and did my revisions along the way, I was able to straighten up the manuscript fairly quickly. Writers handle the process of revision in as many different ways as they handle the writing itself. I do a great deal of tinkering, but I never make any structural changes—putting in a different narrator, say, or giving the main character a sister. Elizabeth will do such major rewrites from draft to draft that every version could exist as a separate book. We both get to the same place in the end. One method of revision that I find both loathsome and indispensable is reading my work aloud when I’m finished. There are things I can hear—the repetition of words, a particularly flat sentence—that I don’t otherwise catch. My friend Jane Hamilton, who is a paragon of patience, has me read my novels to her once I finish. She’ll lie across the sofa, eyes closed, listening, and from time to time she’ll raise her hand. “Bad metaphor,” she’ll say, or, “You’ve already used the word inculcate.” She’s never wrong.
Back in Provincetown, that April, I finally had my book but was missing a title to go with it. I had had a title while I was writing it, and it was so bad that lo these many years later I still cringe to admit to it: The Luck You Make. Not long before I finished the book I was talking to my mother on the phone one night and she asked me to tell her again what my title was. And so I did. “What?” she said, long distance. “The Lucky Mink?” Once your own mother has called your book The Lucky Mink, you pretty much have to throw the title out.
After that I was at a complete loss, and then a friend told me to come up with ten titles. “Do it fast,” she said. “Don’t think about it too much.” She said to type each title on a separate sheet of paper, and underneath type, a novel by Ann Patchett. I was then to tape them all to the wall. Every evening, in those last weeks at the Work Center, I invited the other fellows over to pull a single title from the wall and throw it away. It was my one attempt at participatory installation art. At the end of the ten days the only title left was The Patron Saint of Liars, a novel by Ann Patchett, so I went with that.
When the fellowship was over on the first of May, I packed up my manuscript and drove away. I cried all the way to the Sagamore Bridge. I knew I was leaving behind one of the greatest experiences of my life. I will forever miss what I had there: the endless quiet days, the joy of living a hundred feet from my new best friend, the privilege of getting to stay inside the fog of my own imagination for as long as I could stand it without anyone asking me to come out. It might not have been a realistic life, but dear God, it was a beautiful one.
When I was twenty, I published my first short story in the Paris Review. An agent had called me soon after and asked to take me on as a client and I said yes, though I didn’t have another story that was any good at all. Now, seven years later, I arrived from Provincetown at her office in New York with my novel in a box. I had borrowed money to make the drive home to Nashville, but I wasn’t in any hurry to get there. My agent told me that the market for first fiction wasn’t what it used to be. (Note: this is what agents say. It’s probably what Scott Fitzgerald’s agent told him when he brought in This Side of Paradise.) “But I’m young!” I said cheerfully. (Note: young is always in fashion for debuting novelists. I was twenty-seven.) “You weren’t exactly packing up your college textbooks yesterday,” my agent said. (Fitzgerald was twenty-three.)
When I arrived home four days later, my mother came out to the driveway to meet me. An editor at Houghton Mifflin had bought The Patron Saint of Liars for $45,000.
For the first time in my life, I was going to have money (paid out over three years in four installments), and the only thing I could think of to spend it on was having the air conditioner in my car fixed. It had been out for two years. Now that I had a book contract and an advance on the way, I went to a mechanic. He said the air conditioner was low on coolant, a problem that was resolved for fifteen bucks. Somehow, that’s the detail of selling my first book I always remember.
The question that aspiring writers are likely to ask me (after I’ve politely declined to write their book for them) is how to get an agent. Obviously, I’m not the best person to address this question, since my agent found me just moments after the end of my childhood and we have been together happily ever since. Still, there are a few things I’ve learned along the way. My best piece of advice is to finish the book you’re writing, especially if it’s your first book, before looking for an agent. Most agents will tell you the same thing, unless you’ve already published half of said unfinished book in The New Yorker. Writers need agents these days. Not only are rights getting more and more complicated in this electronic age, but for the most part publishing houses no longer have slush-pile readers. Agents now do the work of sifting and sorting the unsolicited manuscripts themselves. I was recently doing a book signing when someone came up in the line and asked me how to get an agent. You’d think I’d have a pat answer down for this one but it always stumps me. Fortunately, my friend Niki Castle was standing close by and I turned the question over to her. Niki had worked at International Creative Management in New York for four years and I thought her advice was excellent: she told the woman to go to one of the online sites that list agents who are looking for new clients, and then follow their submission guidelines to the letter. If they ask for a twenty-page writing sample, do not send in twenty-two pages. “The smallest infractions of the guidelines can mean your work may never get read,” Niki said.
Do not assume that finding an agent or getting published is something that automatically happens to well-connected insiders. I have sent my agent countless potential clients over the years, ones I believed were worthy, and I think she’s signed three of them. Publishing is still a market-driven enterprise, so an agent wants to find a great writer as much as the writer wants to find a great agent. But no agent takes on a client as a favor to someone if they really don’t like the book and don’t think they can sell it. Therefore, I suggest focusing your energy on the part of the equation you control—the quality of your work. You can also try to publish your work in general interest or literary magazines in the hope that an agent will find you; it worked for me. If you try that route I have two pieces of advice: first, read the magazine you’re submitting to. If you aren’t willing to read several back issues of Granta or Tin House, then you have no business sending them a story. Magazines really do have personalities, and you should be able to figure out if your story might fit in. Second, if you have one really good, perfectly polished story—wait until you’ve written some more. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a letter from the editor saying they liked this one but it wasn’t quite right and now they’d like to see something
else. That’s a very depressing letter to receive if you don’t have anything else to send.
At every stage of writing a book there is a sense of If only . . . If only I could find the time to write and if only I could figure out the third chapter and if only I could get my book finished. If only I could find an agent. If only some editor would buy my book. If only I had a good publicist. If only the book would get reviewed. If only they would do more promotion. If only it would sell. It goes on like this forever.
After Houghton Mifflin bought my novel, I went to Boston and got dressed up to meet the people at my new publishers. My editor took me to lunch at the Ritz and we ate crab cakes and drank martinis. This was twenty years ago, and at the time it felt like something that must have happened twenty years before. I’ve always thought that book publishing was an old-fashioned business, and Houghton Mifflin, back in their long-gone warren of interconnected houses, seemed one step removed from Leonard Woolf’s Bloomsbury.
I’ve been at this writing job for a long time now, and yet for the most part I still solve my problems in the same ways I first learned to solve them as a college student, a graduate student, a waitress. There are certain indispensable things I came to early, like discipline. But other things, like serious research, I came to later on in my career. I have never subscribed to the notion of “writing what you know,” at least not for myself. I don’t know enough interesting things. I began to see research as both a means of writing more interesting novels and a way to improve my own education. Case in point: I didn’t know a thing about opera, so I figured that writing about an opera singer would force me to learn. Conducting research, which had never even occurred to me when I was young might be part of writing, has turned out to be the greatest perk of the job. I’ve read Darwin and Mayr and Gosse to get a toehold on evolutionary biology. I’ve floated down the Amazon in an open boat just to see the leaves and listen to the birds. I’ve called up the head of malaria research at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland and asked if I could spend the day following him around. He said yes.