I ALWAYS THOUGHT I was the kind of writer who could write under any circumstances. That’s not delusion, by the way. I just know myself. I’m one of those writers who stopped going out on the weekends during my MFA so I could write a five-hundred-page novel in one year for my thesis that eventually became The Amnesia of June Bugs. I’m one of those writers that wrote a 750-page dissertation in three and a half years. One year ahead of schedule. And to be honest, it would have been two and a half years if I hadn’t moved back to Chicago in 2012. Because of how my mind works and because of how creative I am by nature, I never get writer’s block. This doesn’t mean I’m always writing new material though because I’m definitely not. Sometimes, for example, I’m just too tired for the invention phase of writing so I’ll cut, revise, rewrite, & recreate a chapter instead but revision is still a form of writing. Regardless of whether I’m creating new text or whether I’m removing old text or whether I’m modulating current text to make the old new, as Ezra Pound once said, in every scenario, I’m deciding what the reader reads. This is why I wear different hats at different phases of my book’s trajectory: when I’m in the invention phase, I’ll try anything once in my writing. I don’t stop myself. I don’t judge myself. I don’t criticize myself and I rarely erase anything. I do this because I need the space to dream big and fail big. I think failure is so important as an artist and I think writers who try to avoid failing are often the ones who avoid succeeding.
If failure doesn’t become your sensei, then you’re not failing enough in my book of life.
In the earliest stages of a draft, I need emotional and creative space to experiment with my own metaphors and motifs, character tics, language, vocalization, & flow, character and narrative arcs, & of course flashbacks. I need space to develop and protect my own artistic intentionality. Above all else, I respect the artistic division of labor. I never conflate the role of writer and editor. But when I’m in the revision process, I wear my critic’s hat and I wear it really tight. In that paradigm I can be absolutely relentless. I can shoot down everything that tries to fly. I can remove entire paragraphs. I can retain a single sentence in a chapter. I can scratch my head in disbelief at my own hubris. I can be a cold and quiet assassin of perfectly good sentences. And my artistic intentions don’t mean shit when I’m critiquing my own work. It’s because my writing process is hybrid by nature that I can always write, even if I’m only creating new text part of the time.
But something is different about my current novel.1 My prodigy novel, that is. I actually got stuck at a pivotal scene where Moto, the acting genius and narrator, finds a trail of bread crumbs his prospective girlfriend left him in a suspicious email attachment from a chess club in Osaka he’s not a member of. I had to pause this novel for like six years while I was working on other manuscripts, teaching at UC Irvine and Bowling Green, copyediting Counterfactual Love Stories, Amnesia of June Bugs, & Dream Pop Origami, and going on my tour, all of which pushed me back even further. But for some strange reason, I kept coming back to this novel because it had one of the most interesting premises of any of my books—a family of mixed-race Nisei prodigies from Chicago—and I couldn’t let it go. Or said another way, I kept wanting to come back to this novel because there was something about it that felt both exciting and comforting. Maybe that’s because it reminds me a lot of Franny & Zooey. What was also unique to this book was that I didn’t use an outline for the first time in my life. I wanted this novel to tell me where it wanted me to go and … drum roll … I kept getting lost. My experiment didn’t fucking work! I kept getting stuck at the same watershed moment. Like I said, I think failure is so important for an artist. I tried, I failed, and I learned something invaluable about the kind of writer I am: I can write under almost any circumstances because I have phenomenal discipline, a million ideas, and talent to burn, but I can’t wander aimlessly in the darkness. That’s just not how I roll evidently.
So last week, I jotted down a couple notes about this novel while in bed. The finance book I was reading was boring the hell out of me anyway and I wanted to think about my novel for a second. Like really think about it like I would any other complex work of art that deserved my full attention. All it took was just a few minutes of plot ideation & suddenly I knew exactly where to go in my book. Suddenly I understood what my novel was really about. Where I wanted it to go. How I might possibly end it too. This is what I call a book map. And I didn’t realize this until I tried to drive blind into the wilderness, but I’m one of those writers that needs a book map to arrive at his destination.
Book Map
For me, this is the artistic metaphor I find most helpful RN but you might come up with another one that just makes more sense in your writing life. At the end of the day, pick the metaphor that helps you write your best work. That’s what I did.
For me, a book map is traveler’s guide you write to yourself for yourself to help you navigate, understand, make sense of, & remember the fictional space of your manuscript because let’s be honest, without a map you will get lost, walk in circles, ask strangers for information you might not trust, & end up right back where you started. While it can be a source of joy and discovery to walk around a new city without a map, doing the same thing when you have a destination you need to find or even worse, a destination with a deadline, will be an absolute nightmare. You can’t afford not to use some type of navigation when there are places you need to go and books all have their destination points.
If you’re like me and you have an affinity for Gen X movies, I think a perfect cinematic metaphor of my book map theory is Memento, which is basically a backwards amnesia narrative where the narrator tattoos clues on his body to remind him of everything he’s figured out so far so that he’s not starting from zero then next time he returns to the story with his memory vaporized.
That’s very similar to the role that book maps play in my own books. Many times, a book map will be similar to an outline at first. You might jot down where the plot lines seem to be going (or where you want them to go) but eventually, you can add other details that will help you enormously like character profiles for all your major characters, motifs you want to remember and continue, pivotal scenes that feel like organic sites of plot structure momentum, cities or specific foods or other significant items that need to appear in your text. Even key words you want to incorporate into your writing, including foreign language vocabulary if you’re like me and you tend to write transnational narratives. After a while, your book map will be one of the most important documents you create, telling you how to get to your short-term and final destinations. Without it, you will get lost even when you don’t want to be. With it, you will write understanding where you’re going. You’ll understand why certain scenes are so important. You’ll understand your own characters, which is essential, I think, to develop them but more importantly, to free them.
The only caveat I have with my book map theory is that you don’t want to treat your book map like a contract because it’s not and it shouldn’t be. In other words, just because you wrote that your minor character likes to drink champagne after she goes for runs in Venice, for example, doesn’t obligate you to keep that detail in your story if it doesn’t make sense five drafts later. And likewise, while it might have made sense months or even years ago to have the pivotal scene in the middle of Times Square when you were writing your book map, that doesn’t mean that you’re obligated to keep that scene or idea later on as you work more on your novel. I for one believe that there will be moments as you’re writing where your books will make different decisions than you’d planned or expected and their decisions will be almost always right because they occur organically within the book, not before you’d started writing it. So rules are useful in giving us the constraints we need to focus on specific artistic considerations while ignoring others but so, too, is the artistic rebellion that takes places in your work when you start to really understand the kind of book you’re writing and also when your book has enough artistic autonomy to start changing the play on the field.
Ultimately, your manuscript should always have the final say in all of the major and minor decisions that are made. The irony is that you might not create a manuscript that is strong enough to stand on its own feet to rebel if you don’t use a book map for a good part of your journey to get your manuscript to literary selfhood first. Your book only starts speaking up once it has a deep understanding of what it is and to get to that place, ironically you’ll probably need a map!
I will probably change the title like twenty more times before I publish it but for the time being, this is what I’ve got, and yes, for some reason, I’m currently into really long titles. I don’t know why:
When The Stars Come Crashing Down, The Sky Sings For No One
Right now I love it but I rarely love my titles for long. In fact, the way I know I’ve found the title of my next book is when I still love it even after a lot of time has passed. That’s what happened with all of my published books so far.