By Eric Sasson
My story collection, “Margins
of Tolerance” came out in May, and for pretty much the entire year preceding
its release I was consumed with the seemingly endless list of things one has to
do when one has a book coming out with a small, independent press—revising the
stories, begging for blurbs, obsessing over the book cover and lay out, securing
the perfect author photo, creating a website, joining Twitter, etc—not to
mention the endless amount of publicity one has to generate, a full time job in
and of itself. Translation: pretty much no new writing done, at all.
By June, after several
readings and parties, things had settled down a bit and I was excited to get
back to writing. Specifically, novel writing. I had two completely different
novels that I’d started the year before I found out about the book deal, and
was lucky enough to have two residencies ahead of me to work on them. Two
seemed like a safer bet—I wasn’t sure which one would captivate me, but surely if
one didn’t speak to me the other would. I saw myself finishing fifty, maybe
even a hundred pages over the summer and being well on my way towards a first
draft.
What I didn’t plan on was
how hard it would be to transition from story-writing mode back to novel writing
mode. Novels are entirely
different beasts, and they require a great deal more patience, a willingness to
sit and stew in your thoughts, to think about your characters lives and how to
gradually unfold these lives across the span of a book.
I’m not sure who made this
analogy about the difference between short stories and novels, but it goes something
like this. Imagine as a writer you’re a real estate broker taking people on a
tour. Novelists take people on a tour of the entire house: Here is the bedroom.
Here is the living room. Here is the kitchen, isn’t it lovely? They take their
time, and let people get a full appreciation of every nook and cranny. The
short story writer, on the other hand, takes readers to a single room and asks
them to linger there. Let’s really get to know this room, he says. The doors to
the other rooms are open, and you can catch a glimpse, but we’re not going to
go inside of them. Let’s stay here and let this room tell us all we need to
know about the house.
It’s hard, when you get
into the habit of lingering in one room and offering only glimpses of others,
to allow yourself to explore so many other rooms. I found myself getting
impatient and frustrated with the pacing of the pages I was writing. Nothing
exciting is happening, I’d tell myself. This is all so slow and boring. I was
seeking immediate gratification, something that’s a whole lot easier to achieve
in a short story, where the conflict must be immediate and visceral and there
is little time for build-up.
Several of my novelist
friends have told me that at the beginning stages, a novelist has to get used
to writing pages and pages of crap. That you have to “write your way through” a
lot of material that will not end up in the book, because this process is the
only way you get to really know your characters and story well enough to
understand what the novel is about. But after a couple of years of writing
short stories, my brain was hard-wired against writing twenty five pages of “useless”
material. Twenty five pages! That’s longer than my average story. Even though I
knew that the material wasn’t exactly useless, that it was exactly what I
needed to do to make headway, I was still resisting and feeling dejected and
paranoid.
After days of what I
thought were false starts, I gave up briefly and returned to story writing. And
for a while I felt better, more in control. Yet this is precisely what the
dilemma boils down to: for a long while, especially at the beginning, you are
NOT in control as a novelist. You have to be okay with that, with plunging into
the unknown and failing.
So have I learned my
lesson? I’m not sure. I’ve put aside those two other novels for now, but
something inspired me at my last residency and it looks like I’ve started
another. The interesting this is, this potential novel started out as a short
story. As I began outlining it, though, I realized it was going to be a very long
story. Maybe even a novella. The longer I thought about it, I realized it could
almost certainly be long enough for a novel. Here, then, was my “solution” to
this problem, one that may just work for other short story writers turned
novelists as well: You may just have to trick your brain into thinking you’re
just writing a story. A 250 page story, but still a story. And maybe once you
do, all those doubts about whether you can write a novel will start to
diminish.
Eric
Sasson is an MFA graduate of NYU and has taught fiction writing at the
Sackett Street Writers Workshop in Brooklyn. His short story collection,
“Margins of Tolerance,” was the 2011 Tartt Award runner-up and was
published by Livingston Press in May. This summer he was named a
Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writers Conference, and was
granted residency fellowships to Ragdale and The Hambidge Center. His
story “Floating” was named a finalist for the Robert Olen Butler prize.
Other credits include pieces forthcoming in Explosion Proof as well as recently published in The Wall Street Journal Online, BLOOM, Nashville Review, Connotation Press,The Puritan, Liquid Imagination, The Ledge, MARY magazine and THE2NDHAND, among others. www.ericsassonnow.com
