Last week, I confessed something. The story of my book thus far. Not a story I’d have created for it, though it’s a roller coaster of disappointed expectations and continual hope, and in that sense not badly plotted. I suppose. This week, I have an addendum that I think is important for all writers. It’s about ambition.
My first plan of action in the face of my agent’s charming certainty that I have the chops to write a “list leader” was to write one—fast. But right away, I entered into a process of learning, and learning is not always fast. Casting about for the next big idea forced me to examine my own writing process.
I didn’t want to come up with a new idea. I wanted to go back to an old one. Why? I am deeply attached to the characters I’ve spent time with in various exploratory drafts. This means that something important happens in those discovery drafts. They give you so much knowledge and information. They are junk writing, really, words on the page, but those words struggle up and become characters and events and stories that begin to engage, begin to matter. This, in turn, taught me that I should always be cranking out stories and taking dictation from my imagination at whatever level, without much concern for preserving the sentence-by-sentence content of these pages.
Since I wanted to move quickly to create that list leader, I decided I’d best go back to one of the manuscripts-in-a-drawer of which I suddenly felt so fond, and start, in essence from scratch, but with those characters, with that rough set of possibilities, with a few favored scenes and many additional ones to toss. I dug in and made a choice. (That sentence is disarmingly simple compared to the struggling and suffering that characterized the days in which I grappled with making that choice, but let’s let it stand for now.)
I started looking hard and deep at the plot, at the pages, at what was working and what was missing. I started doing writing exercises—like making a list of ten books that were similar in some way to the one I hoped to write from this old manuscript in a drawer. Analyzing the structure of these beloved, admired books. Writing out their premises. I’m in the middle of this process as I write this.
And I discovered something else. It hit me early one morning when I was almost still asleep, and everyone around me—partner and the two children who’d somehow made their way across the hall in the dark of the night—was decidedly asleep: my next book was ambitious. It wasn’t going to be easy. It wasn’t going to be fast. It wasn’t going to be “good enough”—especially since “good enough” for this assignment is already defined as exceptional, at the low end of the bar. It was going to be big, and sprawling. A project I’d dreamed of for a long time but been afraid to take on. Something I would have to teach myself to do in the process of doing it.
Between you and me, that ambition is why we got into this torturous and messy writing business in the first place, isn’t it? Writing was the one place we could never cut corners—oh, maybe on a college paper, but not when we were tackling our own ambitious passions. Writing pushed us further, asked more of us than anything ever had. In doing so, it came to seem that writing had a faith in us that nothing else did, to expect so much. It transformed us by asking us to be more than we were to begin with. It called out our ambitions, our need to make a scratch in the surface of the sky or bark or river, knowing even so that nothing sticks, that Shakespeare’s 500 years are a blink of human history, that even Plato depends on college syllabi for high sales.
My artistic ambition counters my lesser ambitions, trumps them. I’m going to go for something that will matter to me, even if it matters to no one else and takes too long to write and makes my children wonder why I’m always hunched over my computer in the little alcove off the living room.
I have to write what matters to me. And you have to do the same for you, don’t you?
Is it a blessing or a curse? It just is.
What are your secret ambitions? What inspires you to reach beyond what you know you can do to what you only hope? What scares you and yet you find you can’t turn away?
The truth is, Elizabeth, that I don’t know what my ambition is, beyond the usual: fame, publication, interviews, to be inspiring, ad infinitum. The first this is to get the thing written. After three years of writing, I’ve come to see, what are essentially morning pages, I’m back at the project I came in with, with an important difference: I know what the ending is. I do have lots of ideas, and I hope some of them might be good. But all I know is, I have this huge thing that needs to be written, or at least looked to as the source for any writing. It’s the kind and time of commitment: looking another way isn’t going to work. I suppose it’s my pet rock. Great post, Elizabeth. Thanks.
Brave and thoughtful and provocative. Ambition’s something I’d argue we’re not encouraged to talk about much. I’m intrigued by your writing, “doing writing exercises—like making a list of ten books that were similar in some way to the one I hoped to write from this old manuscript in a drawer. Analyzing the structure of these beloved, admired books. Writing out their premises.” I actually did something *like* that this past week–made a list of writers I love, whom I’d like to emulate in the novel I’m envisioning. But it’s their voices that draw me–and I’m stumped to see how those very particular voices work. More on this!
Susan — Guess what? We are doing voice (and conflict) in Craft Class this week! So glad you brought that up. And thanks for the suggestion–I will share more about my exercises and explorations.
Melanie–Wonderful. I don’t think you’ve only written morning pages–I’ve read some powerful scenes. Love the Pet Rock image here. Just keep going . . .