The novelist Edith Wharton once wrote in her diary: ‘What is writing a novel like?”
She answered her own question with:

-The beginning: A ride through a spring wood
-The middle: The Gobi Desert
-The end: A night with a lover

Because when you start writing a novel, everything is wonderful and fabulous and the characters are simply speaking through you. You are their vessel and the words flow.

spring_woods_19qi

Isn’t life grand? And then, wham…You’re parched, you’re panting, gasping for breath. And all you want is to just turn around, crawl back and make the damn thing write itself while you sleep for days.

gobi

But if you can make it through, what’s waiting on the other side is WELL WORTH IT.

lovers

Last week I found myself in the middle of the Gobi desert, hungry, tired, dying of thirst. I was berating myself for not writing more, not doing more, not pushing my characters forward in my current work-in-progress, which we will affectionately henceforth call WHIP! I got so mad at myself I couldn’t sleep one night. Frustration clinging to every inch of me, I got out of bed at five a.m. and I showed WHIP who was the boss! I wrote 3500 words that day, then 1200 the next, then 1800,  and so on and on until I found myself five days later with a finished rough draft.

Let me caveat now by saying WHIP is a novel for third and fourth graders so it’s weighing in at a trim 30,000 words. But it’s still a novel and still a full story with characters and plot and story arcs. And so the writing of it followed that same familiar three-step process Wharton so elegantly described.

Which brings me to my point. What do you do when you’re in the Gobi desert? How do you get out? I’ve reached a night with a lover with five novels so far (first three are unpubbed), but I did abandon one novel in the desert, though those character still haunt me and cry out for water late at night.

To get through, I remind myself of Wharton’s words — that they are true and that the desert phase won’t last forever and that if I do write, write, write I will make it out of the desert. (My friend Victoria Schwab would call it the fire swamp.)

So in the end, the secret to finishing a novel is that there is no secret. You just have to keep writing especially when you don’t think you can.

And now I suppose that means it’s time for me to revise, revise, revise!