Writ Large
On biting off more than you can chew
Take a look at that raggedy-ass collection of books up there. Believe it or not, I’ve been staring at that same assembly of well-worn reference material for over two decades now. It sits on the top shelf of my home office desk, where I toil away at my writing and for-profit drudgework countless hours each day, seven days a week. And before this dust-gathering library occupied its current ominous perch atop my workstation, a smaller version of it slowly metastasized next to me as I earned my MFA in creative writing, and grew to its present size through many years of marriage.
And yet, even though I haven’t cracked most of those tomes for years, I can no more dispose of that cursed collection than I can resist making poop jokes in my college-friends group chat (meaning that it might be possible, but the effort would probably kill me). Working up the resolve to dispose of those books (or even relegate them to a box in the back of a closet) would be an unacceptable admission of defeat — a final, irrevocable confirmation that I’m never going to finish the novel they were collected to feed. And while I’ve been tempted every time I move (which thankfully isn’t very often), I always end up placing them carefully into their own tape-bandaged moving box and reshelving them reverently in my new writing space at the end of the journey.
How did I end up in this sad state of affairs? Well, the answer is complicated, but it all hinges on an escalating series of small decisions and poor life choices that gradually mutated into an insurmountable morass of writer’s block.
It all started innocently enough. By the time I began my MFA studies, I’d already written two novels and was 20,000 words into a third (a sprawling, Richard Price-esque urban crime drama). But, as I was starting my academic life anew after a long period as a rock journalist, I decided to put that book aside and start fresh with a project that I (foolishly) imagined I’d be able to finish by the time I completed the two-year program. After all, each of my previous novels had taken about a year to write, so I didn’t see why this one would be any different.
So that was mistake number one: pure hubris. Don’t ever tempt the gods of creativity by assuming that everything is going to go to plan. The second mistake was my choice of subject matter. I’d been on a bit of a historical fiction kick (in fact, part of the novel I abandoned was set in 1930s Detroit and featured Edsel Ford and W.D. Fard as characters), so I was inclined to set my story in the past, which I thought would present a new challenge and allow me to stretch both my prose and researching expertise farther than I ever had before.
As luck would have it, I’d recently watched a late-night PBS program called “Death at Jamestown” (probably while high off my ass, to be honest), which hypothesized that the infamous “starving time” that killed off most of that English colony wasn’t due solely to disease and lack of food, but was in fact the result of arsenic poisoning, probably at the hands of a Spanish saboteur.
This seemed to me, at the time, as an excellent subject for a novel. I initially envisioned it as something along the lines of The Alienist, with a mysterious serial killer picking off English settlers one by one, and a main character who gradually figures out what’s going on and attempts to stop the killer (and in the process ends up rescuing the entire American experiment, for better or for worse).
So far, so good, right? It’s fun, it’s hooky, and at the time it was extremely topical (the quadricentennial of the founding of Jamestown was, at that point, still a few years away) — what could possibly go wrong? Well, that leads us to mistakes three and four.
The third misstep was a trap that many writers fall into: story bloat. As I slowly developed my protagonist, his backstory expanded exponentially. He went from being a simple, down-on-his-luck Englishman signing on with the Virginia Company to seek a better life in the new world to a mysterious Shakespearean actor with ties to the court of King James VI & I, which of course necessitated bringing in a whole passel of historical figures who I’d have to research and flesh out.
Also, why not throw in the Shakespearean authorship controversy for good measure? Yeah, that will be a hoot! Turns out that the historical William Shakspere was an illiterate dolt, and the plays were actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, with assistance from his son-in-law William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, who continued writing the plays after Oxford’s death.
You can see where all of this is going, right? And to make absolutely certain that the hole I was digging was inescapably deep, I made one last fateful decision that truly sealed the book’s fate: I decided that it would be an excellent idea to write the entire thing as an epistolary novel in Elizabethan English.
Just to give you a taste of how this all turned out, here’s the opening paragraph of the manuscript in all of its flowery glory:
26 April, 1607 – Aboard the Susan Constant
Darling cousin Derby, my dearest companion, at long last have I wrested the time (and ink, and table-book) to scratch out the history you so demanded upon the piers at Blackwall. Though the writing hath taken a few fortnight (eightfold, by my dubious count) longer than desired, know that I did dwell upon it — and you, always you — with every wretched league sailed. Indeed, even as we skirt this nook-shotten New World aboard our o’er-crowded tub (Virginia’s flagship? A fig I say! From my perch, the tottering Company rag flies as filthy and sore abused as the company it covers), I am adrift, wanting your conversation and company. I could surely use a portion of your sailor’s canvas-climbing bravado, as well, for I admit I cower here most fearful, a candle-waster scribbling madly in the dark.
To be fair, I did manage to write at least half of the book while earning my MFA, and completed at least another quarter of it in the years following. But the style made it very slow going indeed, as I meticulously checked each and every word to make sure that it was in use during the time period, and also obsessively reworked the grammar to find that sweet spot between readability and historical accuracy. And even after all of that, I’m sure that I got chunks of it wrong, and in general I was constantly uncertain if I was succeeding at my goal, or if the entire thing was just horribly cringe. In movie terms, I was aiming for Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love, but was often convinced that I was producing Roland Emmerich's Anonymous.
Anyway, after 85,000 words the urge to continue working on the novel just petered out. I was going through a large number of life changes (divorce, co-parenting my awesome son, channeling my creative energy into a superb local band) and the drive to write fiction took a back seat for quite a while. But those ratty old reference books never left my desk, and every once in a while I’d glance at them and think “you know, I could still finish that thing one day!”
And you know what? Now that I’ve written and (indie) published a breezy sci-fi thriller, this might finally be that day. I’ve begun editing the old manuscript again from the beginning, and am finding that I still sort of love it. It’s overly ambitious, and often overwritten, and yes, occasionally cringe, but I still think that it’s a cracking good tale, and worthy of completion. And since I’m also currently working on a (far easier to write) prequel to the thriller, I don’t feel the same pressure to slog through that baroque Shakespearian drama if I’m not in the mood.
So wish me luck — and if you have any opinions about the wisdom of continuing to bang my head against this decades-old monster, please let me know! The only thing I’m sure of is, should I finally decide to give up on this literary white whale for good, that shelf of books is going into the darkest closet I can find, never to be seen again.
Comments