A Beautiful Dumpster Fire

A love letter to the terrible novel that made me a writer

I spent many years writing my first novel.  To be honest, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I just had a grab bag of grandiose ideas and a bookshelf full of inspiration.  My methodology was simple — I just slogged through page after page of meandering mush trying to figure out how it worked.

The end result of this was, naturally, an absolute dumpster fire of a book that nobody in their right mind would read.  It’s too long.  It meanders for page after page.  It’s got too many points of view, too many themes, too many failed attempts at capturing the poetry of everyday life.

And it’s beautiful.

The Characters Emerging

See, in that first novel, the characters emerge on the page as they emerged to me, awkward and fumbling through pointless exploratory scenes. The characters are all launching out into a new part of their lives, and trying to figure out what it means to be in love, or to lose a parent, or to become a parent themselves.  We watch as they flounder, trying to figure out how to even feel about these things.  Which is apt, because I was trying to figure that out, too.  I didn’t know who they really were until I was fifty thousand words into the story.

The end result is a mess, because I was trying to figure out how to be a writer.  How to craft a scene, how to capture a sense of place.  How to capture on paper what it feels like to be the person you are.  You can see me searching for the right way to phrase an idea, and what is left on the page is a word soup that reads like a top five list of what I should have written.

A Writer Emerging

By the end of the book, I made a few important discoveries.

First of all, I found that I loved it even when I wasn’t very good at it.

The characters I created were real to me.  Real in a way I hadn’t expected.  I had created people out of nothingness, people who exist to this day in my mind.  Their lives, their struggles are palpable and poignant even if the structure and plot are a mess.  I know what their apartments look like.  I know what they’d say in a given situation.  It was a wondrous new power, this sublime act of creation.

The second thing I discovered was… me.  Somewhere along the way I had created a new version of myself.  One that was more curious about the lives of others, more empathetic to the people around me.  Spending time in somebody else’s head and trying to really understand them will do that to you.  But it spilled over into how I approached others in the real world.  What started as me just digging for inspiration in my everyday life turned into me being a more genuine friend.  A better listener.  I became a student of the human condition, a collector of stories — not to steal them for a book, but because the stories of the people around me mattered.

At some point I also discovered that I was actually capable of writing.  I learned that being a reader doesn’t automatically translate into creation, and through a lot of practice and study things started to click.  I learned to slog through what Jim Butcher calls the Great Swampy Middle.  I wrote a whole book, and even though giant swaths of it suck, not all of it does.  The last chapter I wrote, which is now the first chapter of the novel, is pretty well written.

I Can Fix Him

I like to say that first novel was me getting all the wrong words out of my system.

I’ve written three novels since then (1 published, 2 in the process).  They are much better, and now I actually have an idea of what I’m doing when plotting a story, structuring a scene, matching promise to payoff.  You know, craft.

So now, armed with tools and experience, you’d think I could go and fix up that first novel.

But I can’t.  And, believe me, I’ve tried.  Several times.

It feels like I should be able to fix it.  Tighten those floundering scenes.  Go through and kill all my darlings, excavate what is true, polish what is essential.  I should be able to throw away whole swaths of it and turn it into a plot that works and finally have something to show for all those years of effort.  But after several attempts, it just hasn’t worked.  Each attempt has ended in frustration.

Forever a First Draft

For a while I thought maybe it’s just not a good idea for a book. Or that maybe the story is just too ambitious for my level of talent.  But now I’m starting to think it’s something else.

I think it’s just because it was my first.  That mess of a novel is precious to me, a beautifully tragic dumpster fire.  I love those messy meandering scenes, the way a father loves his child in the midst of their mistakes.  Maybe those darlings aren’t meant to be killed.  After all, they’re the evidence of my transformation from dreamer to novelist.  That mess of a book is my journey.  It’s the path I had to walk to get me here.  Fixing it would be like trying to rewrite my own history.  Undoing any of the mistakes I made would be an erasure of my own story.  Those meandering explorations made me, in a way.  The first glimmers of decent writing are what made me want to keep going.  The failures are what taught me to be better.

There was no other way to get here without them.

So I guess that first novel was just for me.  I think I can live with that.