How The Short Story Saved My Novel
Some call it procrastination. I call it process.
By all accounts, I was supposed to be working on my novel. After my story collection, Doll Palace, came out, this was the agreement, brokered by my spouse, in the form of a contract hand-drafted, signed and locked in the safe, a sentiment echoed by my infinitely more patient and less punitive agent. I would try to write something, um, sellable. (Cue: the cackle track.) (Stay tuned for a future installment of my life as a flop.)
To be fair: outside pressure aside, I desperately wanted to write this novel. For myself. To try to sustain a book-length narrative after years of focusing on flash and short fiction felt daunting, enormous, reeked of a hubris piss-soaked in doubt.
So, of course, I wrote another story collection.
It goes without saying: I am a writer of poor discipline. A great abandoner of projects (hence the contract: to finish what I started), I can talk myself out of every idea before committing to any. I have the impulse control of a fifteen year old boy. Programs like Freedom only result in elaborate hijinks to circumvent the system. As I type I have 42 tabs open. A part of me feeds off the flit, the random connections, startling discoveries, and juxtapositions that spring from being a colossal browser slut, as if I’m taking Martha Graham’s advice to keep the channel open to the nth degree. Sure, serendipity happens. But I am fooling no one. For whatever cheap thrill I get from eavesdropping on social media as an antidote to some of the loneliness and isolation that is our occupational hazard, it’s all a lousy rationalization.
The truth: I procrastinate. I procrastinate out of existential fear, from Grover level dread, to psych myself out, but also to give my brain a chance to catch up to my reckless and relentlessly churning gut. So I’ll dive into other, better writers’ work, or fall down some esoteric internet hole in the name of “research” or become utterly derailed by the news that when I look up it’s time to teach class or get groceries or round up the kids. My focus is so fractured (thanks to years of raising small children) that the only way for me to concentrate is to get up at an ungodly hour, before the monkey mind wakes, before the critical voices start barking, before the gossip mongers tweet. But again, I digress.
I had the seedlings of a novel, rooted in a central image: an aging lech rents out his Catskills home to a young woman who’s fled the city with a heap of her own personal shit. I wanted to talk about the things we carry and how to move through the good bad ugly while humping the ever warty past. I got out my legal pad and vomited a draft before realizing the project was bigger than a reclusive creeper, than ambivalent motherhood; that what I wanted to say about predation — about parasitism — about human transgression, demanded a wider social/historical/cultural lens. As each character vied for their own point of view, straining my structural scaffolding, I became more and more intimidated. What the hell was I doing? Who did I think I was?
A fraud. Imposter. Every bodily cell screamed: Abort mission! And so I started cheating.
If my work-in-progress hinged on transgression, what better way to explore transgression than to transgress with short stories that transgress their own norms and bounds? It felt glorious. Illicit. No one was looking for or awaiting these pages. Suddenly, I was free.
All writers have their sweet spot. Some are natural novelists. I am, and likely always will be, a hapless story writer. It’s how my mind works, how I see the world and conceive of narrative beats. One of the reasons my novel was taking so damn long was because it suffered from what my friend lovingly, brutally diagnosed as “storyitis.” (If I pocketed a dollar every time I heard “ratchet up the plot,” I’d finally have that six figure advance.) Novel writing required muscle and skill I hadn’t yet developed. And so, returning to the short story felt like a coming home.
With a story, I could get in, get out. I could say what I wanted to say and use the construct of a form I knew well enough to guide me. Then I could send that sucker out and hope it would find an editor, a handful of readers. Stories gave me a dopamine kick. Stories dished a bit of accomplishment from within the belly of the novel, making it seem like I was still modestly feeding Jean Rhys’s proverbial lake, while feeling utterly swallowed at sea.
Maybe — truly — I had no clue. Maybe I’d never finish. Maybe if I did finish, my book would suck ass and never see the light of day. Years ticked by. Stories, meanwhile, continued to offer breath, a burst of gratification, and made me remember the joy. (Writing, kids: it’s actually fun.) So I took my fix where I could, and used that fuel to fire up the unwieldy novel doc, expanding and compressing (then cutting and compressing) even when I felt like giving up.
Why did I have to keep running interference with my novel progress? Would I ever meet the monster at the end of the book? Every time I took another story detour, I thought of our lovable furry pal Grover. I was writing these shorter pieces largely in secret because a part of me felt ashamed to admit how lost, stalled, and unsure I felt. All the while, the stories accrued. Perhaps JERKS, my forthcoming collection, is nothing more than a masturbatory self-doubting work of procrastination. It definitely tacked on time. On the other hand, there would be no novel without it. Of this I’m certain. Those ideas needed to marinate, to be tested on smaller canvases. I needed to look inward, to deepen my own understanding, to muster the courage to confront that beastly mirror. To do the necessary work. I wasn’t ready then for what I set out to write.
Only now does my chaos make sense. In the way that children may snuggle a security blanket when in unfamiliar places, I clung to stories as a way of coping with feeling squarely outside my comfort zone. (Which isn’t to say these stories are warm or fuzzy or particularly safe.) It may not have been the fastest or most linear approach, but I never would have finished my novel, LECH, if I hadn’t hadn’t had another preoccupation with which to transgress.
If you feel like you’re getting sidetracked, try not to skewer yourself. (I know: we’re adept at this.) Let go of whatever arbitrary timeline you’ve assigned your project. Sometimes, these things take as long as they take. Grace Paley took baths. Trust that whatever you’re doing — scribbling sonnets or bingeing on Mare of Easttown — it’s all part of the process.
