Everclear is one of those bands that, for me, belongs very specifically to the texture of growing up in southern California in the 90′s. (Also: Bad Religion, Sublime, No Doubt, that one King Missile song.) When I first started writing A Song to Take the World Apart it was set in the 90′s– well, technically, first it was set in the present day and it was about Lorelei in her early 30′s and it was going to be narrated by her bartender boyfriend and then, thank god, I brought it into a writing class where someone said, “yeah, okay, but if this story is about this girl, why isn’t she the one telling it?”
I went home and wrote a scene that’s still in the book almost verbatim, though the first line has since been excised. Lorelei grows up in a quiet house.
I didn’t think I was writing a novel at that point. The idea was that it was going to one in a series of interlinked short stories. That was why I had started with the bartender– he appeared in one I’d already written. So even when I flipped the perspective, I set the early scenes, the ones about her being a teenager, in the 90′s, figuring I’d sketch what turned out to be a novel’s worth of plot in two pages and then get to the part of the story that mattered.
A couple of things happened between those first few thousand words and tens of them it eventually became. Mostly it was that I had no idea what I was doing and nothing but time on my hands, so I just kept letting the thing sprawl out; I let myself discover what interested me about the story, and let myself write it as it came clear.
I don’t have a lot of formal training as a writer (though I do have a bachelor’s in reading novels, which some days I think amounts to the same thing). So when I saw this post from @sarahmccarry of course it struck a chord with me, particularly:
I read an interview a little while ago with someone who has a new book—I can’t remember who, honestly, or what MFA program he had gone to, but in the interview he said something about bringing his (also male) professor bits of beginnings of things, and his professor told him over and over again Not that one, that won’t make a novel—until, presumably, he came up with the idea that became his new book.
The interviewer described that process as a gift—how lucky to be told from the outset that what you are doing will never go anywhere, before you’ve put years of your life and sweat and blood and tears into some monster that will never even go loping off on its own across the cold ice of the far north but will just lie inert and gangrenous until finally you give it up of your own volition.
I don’t know how you know whether a bit will make a novel or not.
I’ve written three at this point– two good, one unreadable– and I’m starting to hack away at a fourth one now, and all I think, every day, is: I don’t know how you know whether this will make a novel or not. I mean, let me tell you, there is nothing like being sixty thousand words into a project and realizing that it is unsalvageable. It puts the fear of god in you. Or, more accurately, the fear of your own limitations as a writer, and the limits on your time.
I wrote the beginning of the second book– the bad one– in the same writing class where I’d brought the first one in, where they’d been so helpful. Every week I brought in pieces sure that they would hate it (because I sort of hated it, and couldn’t admit it to myself). And instead they encouraged me about it, so every week I said, “okay, okay, I’ll keep going,” because, like, probably I was wrong? They’d been nice and encouraging before, and they’d been right before, so, like probably I was wrong.
The only thing I’ve learned in the last three years, in which I’ve written more than I’ve ever written in my life, and heard more praise and criticism and critique and questions, is that most of writing is sitting still long enough to hear yourself, and then being brave enough to trust the truth of what you hear. Those people were right, the first time, that the book was good, and I was right to believe them when they said it. They were wrong about the second one, though– which only matters because I let their wrongness tell me where to go. I wanted there to be an easy answer; I wanted someone to know better than me. I wanted answers handed down. Now I know it’s just: struggle, mess, work, work, work.
Anyway, I heard this song on the radio today, and I thought, oh, this is a Lorelei song. And then I thought about trying to explain to someone why that is and I couldn’t– there wasn’t– this song is about how I wrote the book, not how anyone is going to read it. It’s about the things I had to write to write the book you’re going to read, hopefully, soon.
The song starts: I am still living with your ghost / lonely and dreaming of the west coast. And that’s true, for me. That is how it started. It wasn’t an idea for a novel at all. It was just this feeling I had that I wanted someone else to feel. It wasn’t going to happen unless I could find the words in me, and write them down, so that they could give it shape and weight in the world. I didn’t know it was going to be a novel. I just knew that whatever it was, I wanted it very badly to be.
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