Matt Bell wants you to write the best novel possible, and in his new craft book, Refuse to Be Done, Bell sets out a three-pronged approach to help you do exactly that. The process starts as an unstructured, free-flowing, creative development intended to get a draft of the novel on the page. Bell recognizes the hard work of drafting and then rewriting a novel but doesn’t shy away from the book’s central theme: “Revision and rewriting are most of what good writing entails: writing a successful book isn’t only making the most of the first burst of inspiration, as pleasurable as that is. It’s also the sustained and often small-scale work of making a promising manuscript better to your imagined ideal.”
To help the writer get to that ideal manuscript, Bell organizes the book into three long chapters, each devoted to one of what he describes as ‘three drafts.’ While the idea of completing a novel in three drafts is a hook all writers can appreciate, the draft references in this book are less about discrete drafts and more about hitting a marker on a continuum from the initial inspiration to the final version of a novel.
The first chapter encourages the writer to engage in creating a generative first draft, a draft that may include sentence and idea fragments, and gaps between the ‘islands’ of significant plot points. The freedom Bell espouses – to experiment, to take risks, to forego a formal outline – is liberating, especially to a first-time novelist. Bell encourages writers to “Always go to where your energy is the highest. Your excitement will generate more excitement – and you will avoid the alternative, where your boredom generates more boredom.”
One of Bell’s best observations is that through the creation of a generative first draft, the writer will learn as much about what the novel is not about, as what it is about. Bell notes novelist Alexis Smith’s comment that she did not regard the several failed openings to her novel, Marrow Island, she had put aside to be a waste of time because “she learned more about what novel she wasn’t writing, sorting through the possibilities of what her book might become by discarding what it shouldn’t.” Bell agrees and reflects on his process: “You start writing one book, and as you write, you realize there’s another, better book you could be writing, one you’ll arrive at not by abandoning your draft but by changing your conception of it.”
Bell also provides a slew of ideas for those inevitable moments where the writer feels stuck, or flat. Writing exercises, including those he’s developed in his monthly newsletter (mattbell.substack.com), can help shake up the story and get the writer out of a rut. A great example is to take a “single scene that is not working as well as you’d like [and] rewriting it from another point of view.” Changing a first-person point of view into a third-person point of view can change the focus from interiority to action, or vis versa. Plus, Bell points out, the writer may discover new thematic elements or developments in the character’s emotional journey.
After the first draft is completed, Bell first offers his heartfelt congratulations and urges the writer to appreciate the accomplishment of writing to the end of the first draft. But he reminds the writer, this draft is the beginning, it is “not the novel itself but an idea of what the novel could be.” He urges the writer to put the draft away for a period of time so that when work on the second draft starts, the writer comes back fresh, with the perspective of time away from the story.
With the second draft, the hard work begins. Bell recommends the writer take the first draft and create an outline of “what already exists,” the main story, the action of the book. From the outline, the writer can develop a plan to strengthen the story’s gaps and weak spots, evaluate the structure, point of view, and shape of the novel.
Then, Bell says, it is time to rewrite the book. A first-time novelist may pause here. Bell is not suggesting a revision, but a complete re-write of the first draft. He knows this is a tall order but insists that in rewriting the book, he transitions “from the mess of the first draft to the tighter, better-made second draft.” After taking a gulp of air and a leap of faith, the writer who follows this recommendation will start from a fresh screen, refrain from cutting and pasting old text, refer to the detailed outline just created, and truly write a novel. This feels daunting, but if the result is a writer’s best work, then as Bell suggests, the time and effort will be well worth it. Bell feels so strongly about rewriting, he states as his first guiding principle of revision: “When in doubt, rewrite instead of revise.”
After the manuscript rewrite is finished, Bell notes there is more work to do. If the novel-writing process could be compared to a marathon, the second draft comes in at about the twenty-mile mark. There are six more miles to go and to help writers get to the proverbial finish line, Bell breaks down a series of detailed tasks into sequential, smaller tasks that are attainable. Only after the writer combs through the manuscript to polish sentences and dialogue, remove thought tags and unnecessary text, is the novel done, with the result being the writer’s best work – a result all writers strive to achieve.
CONVERSATION WITH MATT BELL:
Rebecca Thompson:
Thank you so much for making the time to meet with me. I really appreciate it. I have read and enjoyed thoroughly, your book Refuse to Be Done. As I mentioned before we started, I'm working on my own first draft, so these ideas are very helpful. And, by the way, I'm an avid reader of your blog. I really enjoy it -- once a month with a great writing exercise.
Matt Bell:
Good. I appreciate that.
Rebecca Thompson:
So, your book subtitle, I want to say, is a little bit of a misnomer in that there are really not three drafts, right?
Matt Bell:
No, absolutely. But I feel like it retracts that in the first two pages.
Rebecca Thompson:
Yes, you’re right.
Matt Bell:
Thanks for buying this. That was a trick.
Rebecca Thompson:
Exactly. That's the hook, right? That got us to pick it up off the shelf, absolutely. So, you divide the book more into three phases, and the first phase you call a generative first draft. What I took from this part of your book is that you get the first draft done by doing it, by getting those words on the page. Could talk a little bit more about what that process looks like for you?
Matt Bell:
I really like the word exploratory, like I'm writing an exploratory draft. I'm sort of looking for the story, I’m chasing the sort of ideas or things that seem interesting and character arcs. I don't always know what I'm looking for, how it's all going to work. You get a sense of the story you're trying to tell pretty early, or a story you could tell, and you start going after that.
I'm teaching a novel writing class right now that I teach maybe every 18 months where students start from scratch all together. So, on day one, they all have zero words, and they write. They have to write so many words a week and they all progress together. One of the things we see over and over is first chapters don't look like first chapters, partly because they're usually full of exploration. So, a scene in the book will start three times in a chapter or there will be a person who will say one thing and then they’ll have a two-page memory. Well, you know that's probably not how it's going to work unless you're like Virginia Wolf, right? But most people aren't trying to write Virginia Wolf books, even though they're great. What I'm seeing is the exploration they're doing. They're explaining why a character is the way they are to themselves or they're learning the backstory – why is this happening? So, they go backwards instead of forwards.
All that sort of explanation is probably not really in the book, but it's part of the iceberg of the book. It's the hidden part of the iceberg. So later, all that early exploration comes out or goes somewhere else, or it gets transformed into a better form. But it’s part of finding out what you're doing. So, that’s one way forward.
Another way is you are a person like Christine Schutt or Garielle Lutz, who talk about following the book, sentence by sentence. What does the sentence you've just written tell you about the next sentence? That kind of recursive writing. Then, you're not planning that, you're paying attention to the language and following it forward, which is another kind of exploration.
But there's that Lucy Corin quote in the book, where she talks about looking at your material to find your material. And I think that's kind of the game. When you're stuck, you can go backwards to go forward, and that ends up making the book feel like a whole, as opposed to endless novelty to the end, right? Which is not really how most books work.
Rebecca Thompson:
Right. One of the things I liked when I was reading this section is that it was almost like you were granting a writer the freedom to play, to explore, to even put thoughts on the page that were fragments. Not to complete a scene to get it going and move on. Writing to the islands was another approach I loved, and I've used myself.
Matt Bell:
It's so useful. I feel like that's the most freeing idea. Natalie Bakopoulos told me that in a bar in Ann Arbor, about 10 years ago. And I was like, oh, that's the game!
Rebecca Thompson:
That's what I felt too! I thought that might be one of the most valuable ideas in this first part of the book. Just having the freedom to not have the plot all worked out is helpful to so many of us, especially those of us with prior careers where a completed project was driven by knowing where the project should end up. And your process encourages writers to not prejudge the ending and to let the characters and the plot go whichever way they go.
Matt Bell:
There is a little bit of this in the book. Richard Hugo’s essay, The Triggering Town, is about poetry, but he is talking about how the poem has a triggering subject. There's something that makes you want to write the poem. And then at some point, the poem turns toward its real subject. And if you refuse to turn, you ruin the poem, right? There's clearly a similar thing in scenes and in stories and in novels where you set out to write a kind of book and the book starts revealing what it is. And if you won't go, you end up in this kind of dead space. It's interesting to watch students make that turn over the years or not make it. I have a student right now, a thesis student who thought he was setting out to write a mystery thriller kind of novel, and it's becoming supernatural in a very sincere way. And even in conversation, he’s like, I just didn't feel like I was going to be writing this supernatural book and I feel a little mad about it. And I’m like, but it's going really well. He hasn't mentally come to the book his book wants to be. It's interesting, as he's turning toward it, the book's getting better, but he has this idea of the book in his head that's different than where he's ending up. He’ll eventually bridge those two things. It is really fascinating to watch people when the story they told themselves about the book is in the way of writing the book.
Rebecca Thompson:
Yes, that absolutely happened to me. I had a very concrete view of how this book was going to layout and I got stuck and had to restart it a couple of times before I could get into what it's become, and there is a ton of work still to do.
Matt Bell:
The same thing happens to me every time. You think the distance between the starting place and the final place is so immense. And it seems impossible. Of course, when you start out to actually bridge that gap it's both farther than you usually think it is, and it's more doable than you think it is at the same time. You really can cross the distance, it's just distance.
Rebecca Thompson:
So, one of the things you talked about, and I wanted you to comment on is the persistent presence of habitual action in the first draft. You talk about how changing habitual actions from exposition to scene can move the plot forward. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Matt Bell:
Sure. I think I think we all write a lot of habitual action. I've read tons of it. It's partly like I'm trying to imagine the character's life, so it’s ‘we sometimes do this,’ ‘we always do this.’ I actually think we talk that way a lot. And we tell stories like ‘my family always goes here on Sundays’ or something. We talk in these ways, so it feels very natural to build a person that way. But habitual by its nature is static, right? It's a bunch of things, and they don't progress, and they don't create new agency. If they were active, they wouldn't continue in the same way. They would change.
I think scenes that don't change aren't scenes to some extent. Change could just be discovery of information; I didn’t know this information and now I know it. That’s a change, right? So, it doesn't have to be a big dramatic, but habitual action tends not to create change. That’s the whole purpose of it, it's habitual, it's something that continues. And so, when you take a, a piece of habitual action and you make an individual scene of it, the change that occurs in that scene will make another scene necessary. The habitual almost never makes a next thing necessary.
In my second novel Scraper, I was trying to figure out the character and I wrote all this habitual action. And the book was 30,000 words and it was just stuck because nothing was changing. I'd written his pre-inciting incident life. I've written all the stuff he was doing, and I needed a thing to happen, so he'd be in action. Some of that text got converted; not the ‘I play basketball on Sundays,’ but ‘a time I played basketball on a Sunday.’ And it, it creates that like, what’s next-ness that a novel needs.
Rebecca Thompson:
One of my faculty advisors has reminded me that novel writing is about heightened reality, not reality. And I think that's a similar concept -- that you have to zero in on the big moments because the everyday stuff readers don't care about.
Matt Bell:
No, and even when you are writing a book that seems like it's about the mundane, it is the heightened mundane. Everything is a little a glow, you are putting things closer together. Milan Kundera talks about the beauty of a sudden density of event, when a lot of things are happening at once that feels exciting. Real life is usually kind of chaotic when that's happening, but in a novel that's good.
I don't know what the time span for your book is, but my students also often design novels that take place over these enormous spans of time, or they're four years of middle school. And I ask, what if it was the summer before ninth grade or something, right? Or the week of the spring formal or find someplace to have it all take place. I grew up in rural Michigan and we had sawdust days in my town. Everybody has a small-town festival. Put the thing in that, have three days where the events and things are happening and there's a backdrop because middle school is like a phase, right? It's this long amorphous sort of shape full of urgent things, but it by itself is not urgent.
Rebecca Thompson:
You talk about at the end of the first draft, to basically throw yourself a party, and then put the draft away for a while. So why put it away? Why not get right onto the second draft?
Matt Bell:
There's that Hillary Mantel quote in the book that talks about pausing in holy fear at what you've done before progressing. I like that a lot, I think that sounds right. One reason is that I'm usually whipped. I am a little done in, so that can be part of it too. It's hard to immediately go back to the draft.
I think if you make something else, and I talk about ‘art time’ and ‘lived time,’ you make something else between them. It just makes your brain move in a different track. Even doing edits, my final edits were done on my novel Appleseed after I'd already written 50,000 words of a new book. So, you're coming back at it with this whole other set of fictional concerns in your head, and you see things you couldn't see in that particular space. So that's part of it.
I would say write a short story or something between drafts. I don't write a lot of stories anymore, but what I've done between novels is write short non-fiction books. So, I wrote, after my second novel, I wrote a short book, a book of video game criticism, and between drafts of Appleseed, I wrote, Refuse to Be Done. It's been interesting to be in that totally different mode. My non-fiction is much more conversational than my fiction is, and I think there is something about that, that makes you come back in a very sort of fresh way. In this particular case of course, writing a book on revision between the drafts of revising a novel was helpful in both directions.
Rebecca Thompson:
Sure, of course.
Matt Bell:
Yeah, I know how to do this. These are the things I'll do when I go back. I was writing myself another plan, and as I was revising the novel, I was finding new material for Refuse to Be Done. So, they can be done in combination in a certain way.
I think it's pretty hard to just write on a deadline, even though I’ve occasionally written on deadline; you wrote on deadline as a lawyer. It just has to get done and you do it, but there can be diminishing returns of doing three drafts of a short story in a week or something. It's not the best way to write a short story
Rebecca Thompson:
Yes, you're right. I do live a more deadline driven life.
Matt Bell:
This book is a little anti-efficiency, as you can see. On one hand, here are these very practical actions or of things you can do. And then also it's okay if this takes a long time. The goal is not to write a novel as fast as you can, but to write the best novel you can.
Rebecca Thompson:
Exactly.
So, another thing that you talk about is writing an outline when you return to the second draft, to outline the book you’ve written. I thought the way you were approaching an outline was interesting because it was pulling out what happens from what's going on beneath the surface. So, you're not talking about interiority, you're talking about the action of the novel. Why should we approach it in that way?
Matt Bell:
I think the things that happen on the surface are what causes the stuff under the surface to happen. I mean, those are the prompts for the thought, or the prompts for the changing emotions. You don't fall in love by just sitting there and falling in love, right? Something happened to you and you fall in love, or you do things and you fall in love with somebody. I think finding the action is a way of studying the surface of the story. I also think the surface of the story is a lot of what people remember. That's the part that is the plot. The interiority offers richness to the plot, the backstory offers richness to the plot, but the actions and the time narrated are the plot. So, in some ways you're studying plot in that way.
I think it's also really easy to write ten beautiful pages of interiority that do not produce change in the surface world of the story. And, of course, there are books where that’s the point, but I think most of us are trying to write books in which actions are taken in the physical world and produce change. Again, not the only kind of novel, but I think the one most of us are trying to write.
It's interesting to outline something that does feel really interior. I was talking about Virginia Wolf, and I started thinking about some of this in an Anna Keesey essay where she talks about the space between the beats of time, the story time versus discourse time. In the first ten pages of To The Lighthouse, there are eight beats of forward time. Sometimes they're just like, hello, would you like to go to the lighthouse or whatever they're talking about there. Then the book would like tunnel backward into time for ten minutes or remember all these things from childhood. It's a very Proustian kind of movement. But it's interesting to take the lighthouse scene and highlight what happens in the present and see how that scaffold of the action still produces – all those memories are prompted by an action in real time, and characters interacting with each other in real time produces that rich interior life of that book.
It helps you see the story. I tend to find the actions are a little far apart sometimes. Like there will be a lot of description or a lot of meditative stuff where nothing happens, like a beautiful chapter of nature writing, but without any plot happening and it will feel slow. There’s a way to take that same material and attach it to action in a second draft that will make it feel urgent in a certain way.
Rebecca Thompson:
So when you do your outline, are you actually marking where the action stops? You'll say, this happened, this happened, oh, there's a break and there’s a lot of description?
Matt Bell:
What I try to do is lift the action out of the book. I often write mine in paragraph form because it feels more like writing as opposed to bullet points or something else. But I'll try to write what happened in each chapter, a summary of the book summarizing just the action, which mostly means not summarizing how people felt about the action, which is interesting. The main things I’m looking for now when I do that summary are the big turns in the book, the places where the action is really propelled, like the break between -- if it's a three-act structure -- between act one act two has to be a choice.
Characters can't fall into the second act. There has to be this inciting incident that happened, that I've been reacting to and now I'm going to choose to do this to go forward. That choice is often missing in a first draft. It's just fuzzy, like the book keeps happening. But there's got to be that place where a Frodo goes, I'm going to take the ring to Mordor. He has to choose that. He can't be wandering around with the ring and end up at the Cracks of Doom. So, that's really often missing, the place where a character makes it their story and shows why they're the protagonist, because they're the one who chose to have the story.
Rebecca Thompson:
That's interesting. Okay, after the outline, we get to tough love, the part where you have to retype, you have to rewrite the whole thing and, you say you physically retype your entire novel.
Matt Bell:
Yeah. Every time. Stories, essays, pretty much everything now. The results are so good that I wouldn't trust something I didn't do it to. I think the results are better every time, which is also the interesting thing. I use less of the first draft every time and there may be some time in the future I don't use any of it. I know in the novel I'm writing right now, when I've lazily imported something from the old draft, I eventually regret it, and I really should have been harder on myself about rewriting that more fully, or not looking at the original. The proof for me always is this point where what I call the diminishing draft is unusable. It looks like it's written by like a child version of yourself because you keep getting better at the voice of your book as you write it. Trying to tweak the first stuff you wrote to be as good as the last stuff you write seems to me almost impossible.
Rebecca Thompson:
I don't disagree with you. But when I read that, it was the one jaw dropping moment in the book.
Matt Bell:
Oh yeah, when I give it as a craft talk, people gasp. People run from the room. It's great. It's like running from the church, you don't want to hear this part of the sermon. But a lot of the writers I know do this, an enormous proportion of writers I know do. And it's that thing you can't see when you're reading published books because you only see whatever they ended up with. I don't know if you know Lauren Groff’s work, but she's one of my favorite writers. I love Groff’s novels. I think she's just a beautiful sentence writer. And I think her books, like Arcadia and Matrix, are both perfectly structured novels. They're just so mechanical and they don't feel like it. I know Groff writes first drafts by hand to figure out the story and then she sticks them in a drawer, and she never looks at them again. And she says, she can't start at the computer because once she's on the computer, then things start feeling very permanent. And I can only type, my handwriting too bad to handwrite anything.
Rebecca Thompson:
Yes, same.
Matt Bell:
Yeah, yeah, probably for similar reasons. I think I ruined mind bartending and writing fast and waiting tables. And you ruined yours being a lawyer writing fast. But she says she figures out the story there without having to worry about the sentences. Then, she uses the computer, knowing what the story is and how it's built, and writes the best sentences she can. That makes a lot of sense to me -- that those two activities are not quite the same. And it probably keeps her as someone who cares about her prose from getting stuck on making a sentence perfect before she can go forward doing this other activity.
Rebecca Thompson:
Yeah, and this approach feeds into your recommendation to keep the first draft focused on keeping that story going, keeping those characters developing, and then really zooming in on the details and the structure and writing it more linearly the second time around.
Matt Bell:
Right, you really want that change to work.
Rebecca Thompson:
Do you, do you find, as you write more and more books, that your first draft doesn't take as long because it's not going to be as important?
Matt Bell:
No, it’s exactly the same amount of time, every time.
I will say, I think they're more partial. For my novel Appleseed, at some point I'd written like 80,000 words, but not the novel. I discovered what the novel is about in the three time periods, who the characters were and, and some of how their story worked. And I knew what the concerns of the book were. I'd written all these very different versions of how it might work, including some that were very experimental looking, like maybe I'm going to switch time periods mid paragraph and stuff. I wrote these kind of crazy, kind of fun things, but that book could have been read by like ten people.
So, at some point I realized I needed to do some planning to go forward. But I'd worked on that for a long time, I had a lot of material, and I did my outline from that. A lot of stuff in that outline was not drafted previously. These were new, completely new scenes. That outline took me three months, working nearly four or five days a week. I worked on it a lot. Then I wrote from that outline. So, a lot of the material wasn't in the first draft to use, because I hadn’t drafted it. Of course, because I had not written that version of the book yet, the second storyline I didn't have figured out in the outline, the outline was not right. So, it didn't work for a long time. I think I learned how that storyline worked at the two-thirds mark of the second draft of the book. And I was like, “Oh! it's a heist.” So, I’ll just back that in. So, the last scenes written where we're brand new or rewritten scenes in the second storyline because I was still discovering that part. The other two, I knew, but for the second storyline I was really doing my exploratory draft in the midst of the second draft.
Rebecca Thompson:
So, you were blending the writing phases, right? Appleseed is an interesting book because it does intertwine different storylines and different time periods. I mean, it's about as complicated a structure for a novel as you could come up with.
Matt Bell:
It's really three novels. It was that, and at one point edited them that way, where they were each in their own documents. I edited them, completely trying to make them work without the other ones being involved at all and then re-put them together. That was a pain, but fun and interesting.
I like the problem-solving part of all this. Even though it’s frustrating it’s still interesting. Once you have that first draft in hand, the rest is interesting. The first draft is the one that feels very daunting. Is there enough material here to get a book out of it? I think even halfway through the second draft, I usually feel I'm like writing a novel. I feel much more sure about it, even when it's undone, where a hundred pages of first draft usually feels like, what am I doing? And that’s one of the reasons to focus on play at that level because it's so much harder to be sure that what you're doing is valuable or will work, that you might as well have fun with whatever you're trying to do. Your interest will carry you through enough until you discover a book.
Rebecca Thompson:
You hear all the time that you can write the first a hundred pages because that's the beginning and then that's about where everybody gets stuck.
Matt Bell:
All my, all my dead books are a hundred pages long. Absolutely. And there's a lot of them.
Rebecca Thompson:
Even if it's not going to end up being a dead book, it's the place where some of your exercises really come in handy, because this is where you get stuck in terms of how are you going to push the plot forward and where are these characters going? All those big questions.
At the end of the writing process, you say it's a layered approach. You talk about a layered approach to revision, and you seem to go through each of these tasks independently and separately. When you do your revisions, do you do them together or separately?
Matt Bell:
Inevitably overlap some, right? So, if I say revise all your dialogue, you're also going to be thinking about scene structure. That's part of it. But I think it is making the task small enough to seem doable, which I like. I can work on the dialogue in a chapter a day until I’m through the book. But you inevitably do other things while you're doing the dialogue. And, when you go back and think about scene openings and closings, there's dialogue there. So, you still look at it again. So, there is one and a half of everything as you're going through your draft. It’s like the way you watch something and you're going over the part you just watched.
There are some things you can do at the same time. But I think there are only so many hours in the day I get to write, and some of it is just making tasks that seem doable. They have definite beginnings and ends. At one point I start the dialogue pass and at one point I end it. So even though the work of revising the book might be six months, there're all these times you finish something, which seems really important as you get into the later stages of revision. Because so much of this is open-ended, forever work. That's part of the benefit; it's not about trying to do as much as you can, as much as it is about having things that begin and end and make the book better.
Rebecca Thompson:
I've heard some writers say they know they're done when they start making changes that make the piece worse rather than better, or, or just don't improve it.
Matt Bell:
I think so. I think there's two versions of that, right? There's one that you have to be brave enough to let the book get worse while you work on it. There's always a part where you break a scene to fix it, which that's a different thing. But yeah, I agree. I think there's definitely a point where you can feel the changes becoming inconsequential, especially knowing it's going to go through an editorial process, so worrying about this particular word at the five-year mark might be a little silly. But it is hard to know when you're done, done, done. I think some of those things I talk about at the very end, like the like pulling up widows and doing the kind of weasel word searches are things I tend to do once when I've exhausted everything else and I can't imagine doing anything else to it, and then that gets me back in it one more time. And usually, when I'm done with that, I'm like, this is a good time to step away or give to a reader, send to my agent or something. I try to do that final read through. And the final read through does tend to be a little like, it tends to make me like the book again. It's a really nice place to end. Right? And so, you end in love with your book instead of being like, I can't possibly look at this again. That feels like a hugely important part of the process.
Rebecca Thompson:
That's a very interesting way of looking at it because I know several people who have finished their first novels, and their view was, if I have to look at this thing one more time, I'm going to lose it. And you're right. That's not very satisfying in terms of recognizing the amount of effort you’ve put in.
Matt Bell:
It’s not really fair. You put all that work in and at the end, you're just like mad? That doesn’t seem like a very good outcome, you know?
Rebecca Thompson:
No, that's a very good point.
So, I am mindful of your time. I wanted to ask just one other catchall question, which is, that you teach a lot of first-time novelists in your various classes. And so, if you were going to give a good piece of advice to a first-time novelist or a graduate student in creative writing, what would it be?
Matt Bell:
I really think that the most important thing or maybe the two most important things early on is one, not to compare your process to other people's process, not to compare what you're writing to other people as much as you can. I think you see how it always seems like it's easier for other people – even though it's not –it can get in your way. I think that's one of the hard parts about the novel writing workshop. The whole point of it is that we're not comparing each other. We're seeing, getting to learn from each other's process, but there's always a point where someone is basically just in like a panic. Their novel's not working, but everybody else’s is working. But they're all a mess, and it's fine. Mine's a mess. But I think that comparison gets in your head.
I'm going to miss who it is, but there's a French philosopher who says the problem isn't that other people are happier than they are, the problem isn't that we want to be as happy as other people are. We want to be as happy as we think they are. You’re sort of imagining everyone else’s ease and that gets in your way. Like, why can't I do this when everybody else can, which is not the case.
And it’s similar to comparing your draft of progress to published books, which it will not look like until it's ready to be a published book. I mean, it just doesn't – even in the final, final copy editing stage, novels get a lot better. Like it's sort of wild, how much help a book on the shelf has had, compared to where you start. So, I think that's part of it.
And then the other part really is worrying in advance about, will agents like this? Will editors like this? Will my friends like this? Will my partner like this? You really have to write the book for yourself first. I know that's easy to say, but most of the censorship that happens, happens like at the desk, right? Like you do it to yourself long before you show anybody else. You don't write down what you really feel or what you really see about life. You don't write a kind of story you want to because you don't think it'll be marketable or acceptable. Long before anyone else tells you can't do anything; you've usually told yourself that. So, trying to avoid that.
The experience you have at the desk is the one you get to keep. And the rest, even when the books all the way done, other people just decide what it is and talk about it and have their own feelings about it. I really don't look at, like, my Goodreads or something, but if you go on Goodreads and have everybody tell you what your book is, you just drive yourself insane. The experience you have is the only part of it you really get to control. And so, making that a miserable experience for other people first is you're losing twice. Right? Have the experience at your desk that you want to have. Yeah. And then like that part will happen.
I mostly have had pretty good publishing experiences. But they are more emotionally difficult than writing the book is, because it's such a weird kind of thing to be in the public with the kind of work we do. I think you have to do it for yourself for the right reasons and you have to stay close to your play and your pleasure and your delight. And if you do that, it can take as long as it wants because that's a wonderful way to spend your time. But if you're concern is like, what will my agents say in six months or something, then it's awful. So, staying as close as you can to your own delight is a good place to write from.
Rebecca Thompson:
Wonderful. And it's a good place to end. And so, I thank you. I really appreciate your time. It's been wonderful talking to you. It's an inspirational book and very encouraging. I enjoyed it. I've had to read several craft books, and this one was really fun to read, and practical too, which is nice. So, again, thank you.
Matt Bell:
Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it, Rebecca. Best of luck to you and your novel. Hope we'll stay in touch, and we'll talk again.
