Colson Whitehead on Making Novels Half-Asleep
I deleted my Substack because, you know, its founders are evil. But this post I wrote last October feels relevant for writers going into the New Year. If it's TLDR, skip down to the "What Meant Everything to Me" heading.
Writing with Chronic Fatigue
I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival last weekend! It was pure magic after so many years of being away from the English-speaking book world. I felt like someone on rations finally allowed to eat my fill, gulping down book panels and author talks.
Colson Whitehead Goes to Church
One of my favorite festival events was a talk with Colson Whitehead in the St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church. I’m a big fan of hosting cultural events in places of worship.
Colson Whitehead imparted insights that felt like gospel for writers. For those unfamiliar, Whitehead has published nine novels, two nonfiction books, and won two Pulitzer prizes. His book The Underground Railroad is one of my favorites of all time.
But I did not always like Whitehead’s work. I first had to read his 2003 essay collection The Colossus of New York in university, and it struck me as self-obsessed, MFA-brand New York nonsense. Like, he romanticized Port Authority, the dirty hellhole bus station where, in 2003, I was an elementary schooler waiting nervously for buses that were always late while getting continuously harassed by grown-man casino gamblers dressed like lumberjacks.
I really hated Whitehead’s cheery romanticizations. I wouldn’t pick up another Whitehead book until 2017.
(^just an HD image of Colson Whitehead)
Add Whitehead to the list of authors who wrote some of my most detested 1-star reads before they published the 5-star books of my heart: NK Jemisin, Maggie Stiefvater, Jeff Vandermeer, Colson Whitehead—almost all of my favorite contemporary writers put out messy, uncompelling books before they entered the realm of the virtuoso.
“I wrote a book called The Intuitionist,” Whitehead said at the church, referring to his debut, “and everyone hated it. So I thought, ‘Okay, I need to do better next time.’”*
It was surreal to hear a writer speak with such open eyes about the trajectory of their own career. Like, I knew I hated Whitehead’s early work. I didn’t realize that he knew it, too.
(It’s worth mentioning that someone who came up to ask Whitehead a question during the Q&A said, “The Intuitionist is my favorite book of all time.”)
But that wasn’t the insight that meant the most to me.
Nothing Is a Joke
Whitehead made joke after joke about chronic fatigue. He never used the words “chronic fatigue”; he never referred to his own health. But he repeatedly described scenarios that resonated with me as someone who lives with fatigue and hypersomnia:
“I spend most of my day just sleeping,” he said. “I mean, coming out here [to the book event]? Really big deal for me. Glad I could make it.”
And everyone laughed, but I don’t think that’s the kind of joke you make unless you mean it. I don’t think it would even dawn on a non-fatigued individual to make it.
What Meant Everything to Me
When Whitehead described his writing process, he said he writes about eight pages a week.
Eight pages a week.
Estimating 250 words/page, that’s 2,000 words per week. Or as he said, “32 pages per month, 320 pages after ten months. I find it adds up.”
He writes, he said, about three days each week. So that’s a little over 600 words each time he sits down to write.
To put this into perspective: If I write fewer than 2,000 words in a single writing session, I don’t consider it to have been a proper session. In less than a month, hundreds of thousands of people will join in NaNoWriMo and try to write at least 1,666 words every day for a month straight.
We live in a world where writers are encouraged to crank it way, way up, sacrificing what writing actually is in an attempt to maximize monetization of a craft that is not easily monetized. Romance writers give advice online for how to write just one draft of a book, no revision needed. Self-publishing writers crank out novella after novella to feed to the Kindle Unlimited machine. Everyone wants to be done with their book in a month. Memes proliferate in which writers scold themselves for daydreaming, plotting, outlining—for doing anything at all that isn’t literal putting words to the page, as if those other things weren’t integral to novel-making.
I thought I was immune to that hustle-and-grind mindset, because I know what writing a book actually entails for me and I have no intention of cranking out a first-draft story for KDP.
But I had never once considered giving myself the patient grace that Colson Whitehead shows himself.
“I don’t push myself,” he said. “Writing is hard work. On days when I’m not up to it, I revise instead. Just tinker with my last paragraphs.”
He joked about how, during the pandemic, he had to write his novels while his young son was at home. Whitehead said he usually writes a paragraph or two, and then sleeps for a few hours.
Daddy, why are you always in the dark? his son asked during the lockdown.
It’s part of my process! he joked. But I think he also meant it.
Novel Advice
He’s not the first writer to give this advice; this isn’t the first time I’ve heard it. Maggie Stiefvater wrote her first book only on Wednesday evenings, raising her children and working the rest of the time. Terry Pratchett wrote 400 words each day before he became a full-time writer.
But these are stories of pre-success, the ways we need to struggle when our creative lives are stuffed into the spare corners of our weeks. And when your week doesn’t have spare corners because you’re barely trudging on as it is, that advice doesn’t feel encouraging.
But Colson Whitehead is already successful. And this is still how he allots his writing time: In low-pressure, long-term, sustainable accumulations.
2,000 words a week.
I’ve known for a long time that I can no longer wait for healthy, clearheaded days to write. I don’t have them anymore. But it sort of sounds like Colson Whitehead doesn’t have many of them to spare, either, and yet he wrote the most energetic Harlem heist book I could ever want (Harlem Shuffle). He wrote the most literary zombie apocalypse book imaginable (Zone One). He has an oeuvre that brought enough readers to fill church pews, the line to see him wrapping all around the block. And he built this work, according to him, in between long naps.
In fact, his writing style probably hinges on his method. He’d be writing very different kinds of books if he wrote quickly. His just-a-few-paragraphs-a-day approach*** is probably how he writes descriptions with so many precise details, like these images of a party-supply store after the apocalypse hits:
The unit had completed a sweep of a party-supply store, a narrow nook on Reade that had been washed off Broadway into a low-rent eddy. Dusty costumes hung from the ceiling as if on meat hooks: cowboys and robots from chart-busting sci-fi trilogies, ethnically obscure kiddie-show mascots, jungle beasts with long tails intended for the flirty tickling of faces. Kingdoms’ worth of princesses and their plastic accoutrements, stamped out on the royal assembly line, and the requisite Naughty Nurse suspended in the dead air, tilting in her rounds. Do Not Expose to Open Flame. For Amusement Only. The masks had been made in Korea, delivering back to the West the faces they had given the rest of the globe: presidents, screen stars, and mass murderers. The rubber filament inevitably snapped from the staple after five minutes. The graft wouldn’t take.
I used to imagine Colson Whitehead as just being so impossibly brilliant that he spit this stuff out on the fly, leagues beyond the rest of us mere mortals. Now I see it differently: It happened laboriously, made by a tired, human brain full of faith in its own accumulative productivity.
Going Forward
No more for me, I think, of harsh deadlines and crank-it-out word counts. Instead: I need to provide accommodations for my own writing life. I must consciously factor in my own fatigue and stop demanding that I strain myself in ways unsustainable for a long and fulfilling creative life. Instead: Crank it down. Way down. And take naps between the paragraphs.
2,000 words a week.
Thanks, Colson Whitehead, for being honest about the work. We need more of that in the book world.
----
*None of these quotes are verbatim, just based on memory.
**This is similar to how both Donna Tartt and Nabokov have described their own writing processes. Maybe we spend so much time screaming at new writers to “just write” that we don’t talk about how slowness and care may enhance the quality of our prose.
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Q: Who is poetry supposed to be interpreted for, or is it intended for a specific audience?
I can only speak for myself but when I started all this I assumed I was writing for the rest of you, “all the world's a stage,” and similar nonsense. It mattered, I thought, if The Reader (that vague, ghostly figure) liked what I had to say. So I fretted and published and rewrote and published and fretted some more … which was fine, since I was in my Glam rock phase, back when Poetry as Performance was pivotal.
[flowers of my youth: alejandra, ziggy, robert, patti, federico.]
Oscar Wilde's cosmic spectacle was fine; as motivations to write went it served me well … right up until my first crisis of the soul, when I discovered to my frustration that Extravaganza, in and of itself, could not speak the truths that I suddenly needed to say.
I think (though there’s no way to prove it) that when poets, first starting out, suddenly stop writing and go off and do something else it’s usually because they find that their whole reason for writing suddenly no longer pleases. What readers I had at the time didn’t enjoy my new poems about dying orphans in Armenia, which led to my botched suicide attempt. “Being sad for a while was one thing, but where was the humor? the erotic? the excess?” Therein lies the tension, I suppose, in the end who am I writing for?
Again, I can only speak for myself but, these days, if I’m not writing for an audience of 1 then I’m probably not writing at all.
In French, the whiskers of the Weird Sisters,
les Bacchantes, meant plush pubes; or so said
Sarah Bernhardt, saint of Sapphic pleasures.
It was Belle Époque slang, “a lush spread;”
back when Lady Macbeth was still called Camp.
Sex starved starlets chewed more than scenery
with, “shrew'd deceiver,” and, “outrageous vamp/
un'sex me here.” Débauchées. Gay Parée.
Quaint old terms. Like me. You, dear Sarah,
shook your head, though. “Aphrodite's cloven
fern? That's fra Leeds. It's daft innuendoa.
French? Theur wri' porn: schmaltzy, sad, maudlin.”
Schmaltzy? Trust me the dead know. Here Hell's curse
roils each time we poets say, “Damn, new verse!”
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Stars Collided || Twenty
Previous
Lovisa, dressed in a new and clean pale pink dress, with a skirt that was puffy, but still kept her frame visible, it had no sleeves, and so she had paired it with a pair of matching gloves. She wore her hair in a half up, half down, braided bun, style, with two small braids flowing down it, leaving the rest of her curls to air dry, a tiara sat on top of her hair, for the first time in a week.
"I'll make sure to speak to Obi-Wan, soon enough, Snips" Lovisa told Ahsoka, as she stared into her mirror, running her hands down her dress.
"Lovey, there is no need to, I will stay here, as your handmaiden, and then we do not have to be separated from one another."
"Nonsense, you are to be a Jedi, you have the gift, there is no use of it here, or at least, untrained." She took her friends hands in hers. "Ahsoka, you have so much potential, and I believe in you, I will miss you terribly, but knowing what I know about you, and holding you back from it, I would hate myself, and I care more about you and what you can offer the universe, than what you can offer my image."
"Lovey." Ahsoka groaned, wrapping her arms around the Princess's neck, hugging her tightly, and Lovisa followed suit, hugging the girl back, tightly.
Eventually, Lovisa and Ahsoka had made it down to the lunch room, with Threepio walking alongside them both, where everyone had been waiting for her, including Obi-Wan, and Anakin.
"Lovisa, are you done throwing your tantrum?" Her mother asked, linking her fingers together, and resting her chin on them. “There are also to be no dogs, in the dining room.”
"Jobal, my love." Ruwee sighed.
Lovisa didn't reply, as she headed towards her seat, choosing the one next to Anakin.
He got up quickly, to pull it out for her, just as Colo had stepped forward.
But Anakin had been quicker, with a little help from the force, due to only having one arm, but he made sure to look smugly, at the Palace guard, as he pushed her chair back in.
"Thank you, Ani." Lovisa smiled kindly, at the boy, as he sat back down, Threepio had decided to lay down, underneath his owners chair, taking a nap, during their meal.
"Well, it is divine, to have our family united, again, and with two special guests, who helped save my daughter." Ruwee raised his glass, at the two Jedi, and Lovisa's brows had deepened.
"Thank you, your highness, but I fear I could not take any credit, on that, as it was the Princess, who fought bravely, in the arena, and took a stand, during the battle, for she had bested us all, with her skill, and even helped Miss Tano, from danger."
"Ahsoka, is this true?" Jobal faced the handmaiden, that was stationed to the wall, with the two others, waiting to be needed.
"It is, your majesty, if it weren't for Lovisa, I fear I would have been turned into beast chow." Ahsoka bowed her head, taking a step back, after addressing the queen.
"That is wonderful news, Lovey!" Ruwee applauded.
"That was very brave of you, my darling, and I am proud of you, I hope you know that." Jobal told her, earnestly.
Lovisa ignored both her parents, choosing to look away, her arms folded over her chest.
"Master Kenobi, I was hoping to speak to you about a matter of importance, when you have a moment." Lovisa turned to the man.
"Uhm... of course, your highness, perhaps after lunch?" He offered.
"Yes, that will work."
"What's this about, Lovey?" Ruwee asked.
"Hm? Oh, nothing, don't you worry about it, maybe I'll let it slip in the future, but for now, I'd rather keep it from you." She took a sip from her glass.
"Lovisa, you are acting ridiculously childish, there was no ill intention, when we kept Padme and Senator Clovis's blossoming relationship, from you. You're dramatic, you get it from your father, but, being queen won't be awful, I do it, and you don't see me complaining, you will do a wonderful job."
"Except for the small fact, that my parents and sister lied to me! I am not dramatic, and I don't want to be queen!"
"Honey, we're not going anywhere, you won't be queen for a long time, and by then, you may be married, and have your own family, you'll grow mature, and things will change."
"Eurgh, poke my eye out with a fork." Lovisa rolled her eyes, taking another sip from her glass. "Padme, where is your drab of a fiancé?"
"If you must know, he's gone back home, to tell his own family the good news." Padme tried to keep her positive attitude, in front of the guests, instead of snapping at her younger sister, like she wished to.
"What, that they're finally becoming relevant." Lovisa scoffed.
"That's enough." Jobal told her.
"Finally, the food." Ruwee clapped his hands together, as the kitchen staff walked around the table, loading up their plates.
Anakin held his knife in his hand, attempting to cut up his food, with just the one utensil, but had ran into some trouble, though he tried to do it without anyone seeing or noticing.
But of course, Lovisa did.
"Here, let me." She said, in a soft voice, compared to how she had been speaking to her family, since she'd seen them.
"Thank you, Princess." He smiled, as she began to cut up his food.
She smiled back at him, and just the sight of him, seemed to calm down her terrible mood, as she refused to break contact with his eyes, the eyes she could get lost in, for all eternity.
When she had stabbed a piece of steak, he tilted his head, as she fed him, never once looking away from each other.
"The boy can feed himself." Ruwee told his daughter, breaking their silence.
Lovisa dropped her fork, and they both looked away from each other.
The door opened and one of the messengers stormed in.
"I'm sorry to interrupt your lunch, your majesty's." He bowed. "But I was told to bring this to you, as soon as it came."
"Oh, good, bring them here." Jobal, gestured for him to come over, with a hand full of envelopes.
"Whats that, Mother?" Padme asked.
"Just some RSVP's that have been returned, seems it'll be quite the turnout." Jobal said, giddily.
"You're throwing a ball, Jo..." Ruwee asked. "This isn't exactly a time to be throwing a ball, we're in the beginning of a war."
"It's not for a ball, that'll be in a few months, when we announce Lovey as the next heir-"
"Hold on, what?" Lovisa looked back up.
"I'll talk about it, later, when a certain someone, isn't around" She nodded at the obvious.
"I'll figure it out, soon enough." Lovisa raised a brow, poking her food.
After the terrible lunch had finally come to an end, Lovisa had asked Obi-Wan to accompany her on a walk, around the palace gardens.
"What was it that you wanted to discuss, Princess?" Obi-Wan asked, his hands clasped behind his back.
"Well, Master Kenobi, during my "travels" I made a discovery, and I would like to remind you, that one day, I will be your queen, so please keep that in mind, for what I'm about to ask you."
"Will do" He chuckled.
"Uhm... So, I know, typically the Jedi do not recruit anyone over the age of four, in most cases, obviously, Anakin Skywalker was a very different situation. But I have reason to believe that my handmaiden, Ahsoka Tano is strong with the force, and Ani-Anakin supported my claims."
"Hmm, that is curious." He stroked his beard.
"Yes. And I strongly encourage that you take her on, to join the Jedi, or at the very least, train her in the ways, she has all the potential, and I would hate to see it go to waste."
"You care a lot about, Lady Tano, Don't you?"
"I do, Master Kenobi, she's the longest friend I’ve had, and I feel the guilt of her being my handmaiden, a lot, so please."
"I will do what I can, to persuade the council, I promise, your highness" Obi-Wan nodded to her. "Even though you disagree, so openly, I know in time, you will make a wonderful Queen, and leader, I sense it, in the force."
"Just like Anakin is supposed to bring balance to the force." Lovisa joked, side eying him.
"That's what the prophecy says." He sighed, sounding as though he didn't believe it, all too much.
Next
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