Your Life, the Opera: How to Use Journaling Prompts to Revise Your Novel
In order to write a novel, you must also become its first reader. And like any other reader, you begin the book not knowing how it's going to end.
Even if you plot with a meticulous wall of index cards or work backwards from a final scene, you are still casting your eyes forward, not totally certain how you'll get there.
I've noticed that during the revision process for my first two novels that there comes a point of bleak mood and terrible dejection. The beginning of the book is strong, it makes sense, and I like it. The end of the book is strong, it makes sense, and I like it. But somewhere in the middle, the novel turns from a light, intelligent machine to a bucket of noodles. Nothing quite connects. Characters do things without conviction, or act senselessly. And yet I know that both parts of the book are as they should be. I know that the story starts in the right place and ends in the right place. But I don't know how my characters get from one place to another convincingly.
Maybe other writers don't have this problem. I certainly hope you don't. But if you do, I've learned something that might help you: It's been true for me that when I don't know how my characters change, it's because I haven't yet figured out how to change.
I have a theory that writing a novel can be a way of asking a question that doesn’t yet have an obvious answer, one we don’t know how to ask any other way. After all, it takes so so long to write a book. It requires so much focus and marination. How would you possibly be able to return to the page day after day and year after year unless you were searching for something there?
So, if a novel is a scale model of our own cosmos, it would follow that the problems in that novel are scale models of our own, even if the characters are superficially unlike ourselves. Let's say you wrote a historical novel about miners in California during the gold rush. You probably haven't personally traversed a desert with only a mule for company. You've probably never starved while mining the same barren rock day after day. The book might look absolutely nothing like your life. Except: If you wrote a book about the gold rush, you probably have a deep quandary about how to persist when it looks like you should give up, or how the exploitation of earth's resources brings out the worst in people, or something else related, on a much deeper level, to a matter of huge importance to you personally.
No matter the character, the nature of the emotional problem is probably familiar. It’s possible that what I'm suggesting will not be useful for those novelists who are capable of looking past their own noses for narrative conflict, although I think that our taste for conflict, whatever seems interesting and worth pursuing over the course of hundreds of pages and thousands of hours, bears some impression of our own struggles.
So far, I have written two novels, both with first-person narration. In both, the main character is, to some extent autobiographical. This is not true literally—as in Marilou Is Everywhere, I don't have siblings, for example, and some specific incidents are imagined rather than copied from life—but the character's orientation toward the world, and the fundamental nature of her problems, are very much mine. In Kerosene, I am not an alcoholic substitute teacher and failed poet frozen by professional jealousy and an anger about the emperor's new clothes aspects of the art world—but I am an alcoholic who doesn't drink anymore, and I would be lying if I pretended the character’s problems of resentment and jealousy were not essentially modeled on my own.
Fittingly enough, it was during a therapy session that I made the connection between my recent emotional quandary and my novel’s plot. Not to be one of those people who goes on and on about what they talked about in therapy, but I’ve been addressing suppressed anger, tracing the ways that suppressing it was creating problems in my relationships, and unearthing it. I started noticing that I had used the phrase “burn it down” multiple times that day, and it hit me like a flash: My angry alcoholic substitute teacher was, just like me, completely immobilized by the effort it took to keep resentment from showing itself. I knew exactly what the character had to do.
When I started looking at the revision process through this lens, I realized why my confusion about how to get my characters from one side of the book to the other felt so bleak: It mimicked my own confusion about how to get from one side of my life to the other. I was encountering a Life Problem in my scale model, and it felt just as shaky and uncertain and difficult to figure out how to heal my character's envy and resentment as it felt to heal my own.
This is why I'm convinced that some amount of deep work, in somatics, in memory, or in past problems, is a part of the novel revision process, whether we see it that way or not. Everything I had learned about revision left out this personal element. I've found that institutional wisdom about creative writing can be downright squeamish about acknowledging the ways fiction relates to our lived realities and—cripes!--our feelings. Maybe the introduction of formal workshops required some degree of separation to protect the writer from essentially being psychoanalyzed and possibly pathologized by committee, although I think that's somewhat unavoidable anyway.
So, how to solve for X, where X = some amount of personal growth, some shift in perspective for both yourself and your character? Here are a few perspectives I've found helpful, in the form of journaling questions. It's like that Einstein quote: "Problems cannot be solved by the same mind that created them."
What was going on in your life when you started writing your novel? Where were you? What were the prevailing issues in your personal life? What were you reacting to in the world? Record these whether you think they have anything to do with your book or not; you're taking an inventory of the conflicts in your life. What were your conflicts in relationships, at work, with your body, with politics, with your idea of yourself? Where were you being challenged?
Write a “because” map of your character's actions through the plot. Start with the first scene, and write down what happens, followed by the motivation. Are there any blank spots where you don't quite know why the character does what they do? What are these? Do these blank spots relate to any parts of your own life where you are similarly not sure why you do what you do?
Write your life as a fairy tale: What I mean by this is write a version of everything that's happened in your life up to date seeing yourself as a dramatic character. It might be strange to think of yourself this way if you've never done it before because it changes the way conflict appears. Instead of seeming like something that's just plainly bad and difficult, conflict becomes the reason the story is being told.
What would you change if you could magically alter one area of your life with no effort or struggle? Would you change your relationship to food or stop procrastinating? Would you change your relationships with your family or rewire your brain to be less critical? What about your main character?
What have you been talking with your friends about the most lately? Starting businesses, nostalgia, politics? Write it all down whether you think it’s relevant or not. If you see a therapist, what has been the most prominent topic?
Ideally, you’ll write out your answers to these questions and put them aside for a few days or weeks. Sometimes the connections aren’t obvious at first but they clobber you over the head later. When you reread your answers to the prompts, look for subconscious connections like similar phrasing, parallels, symbols, or metaphors.
I hope some of these questions provide a refreshing angle through which to see your book. I will leave you with one little caveat: Too much introspection is bad for your mind. Analyzing the self and its problems and its traumas can become a delicious and never-ending journey through dark places and self-invented significance. And it can strengthen the illusion that there is some healed arrival point, some perfection of the self, which will reveal itself if you just peel the onion a little bit further. As I go along, I become more and more aware that engaging with the idea of a heroic self can bear a strong inflection of the culture of whiteness; focus on the self can become an illusory way of looking away from the world and our engagement in it.
Make no mistake, I still think it's a very useful tool, but any tool can become harmful if used carelessly.
So I suggest you ground yourself after working with or thinking deeply about your novel as a miniature version of your life, and specifically that you ground yourself in the reality of community and life outside yourself, preferably through some act of anonymous service. I know that’s a little bit difficult lately, given that we can’t be face to face with each other, but you can nevertheless shovel a neighbor’s sidewalk or pick up trash along the highway. Just as in life, personal growth doesn’t mean much if it’s carried out in isolation.
