NaNoWriMo 2009: On First Drafts and Perfect Prose

5th November, 2009 2 Comments

Total word count so far: 12,185–so far so good!  I love being ahead of schedule.

In my first NaNo post I mentioned French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s maxim that the best way to critique a movie is to make one of your own.  That’s true in books too.  Over the last year I’ve had the opportunity to read passages of beautifully heartbreaking prose in a variety of styles from many different authors.  Being an author has changed how I read.  I find myself constantly examining those books as the result of a writing process that I too have experienced, and I ruminate about how much work it took to get to that perfect passage.  There’s also a lot of jealousy involved, especially towards Douglas Coupland, who always seems to write the single most perfect passages even when his books are uneven–check out his wake-up scene in Girlfriend in a Coma for the prime example of a pitch-perfect passage in an otherwise uneven book.

Cormac McCarthy is another great example.  I’m a big fan of The Road and No Country For Old Men, I think they’re both fantastic novels and I love his austere no-quotation-marks style.  It works perfectly–completely seamless.  I can’t imagine The Road with quotation marks. I n my book I’m writing right now I’m trying to shamelessly rip it off because I love the tone that it provides.  But damn that’s hard to do.  It’s absolutely not effortless at all; it’s a really difficult construction.  I find myself twisting sentences around to get them to work.  In some cases it helps me out because the device forces me to find a new avenue to the scene, which opens up the book to new explorations.  In other situations it’s quite dastardly and I wonder if people will find it too pretentious or derivative.  Overall I think the effect works; it’s helping me get in the headspace of the characters more, which I like.

I had a similar situation last year with my novel, which featured a blatant imitation of Haruki Murakami’s first person detective story missing girl thing he always does (as a side note, I do look forward to the day I don’t have to imitate my favorite authors to write my own material, but I imagine that’s another thing that happens over time after endless work at finding my own voice).  Murakami never once mentioned the name of his narrator in the Trilogy of the Rat or its fourth continuation Dance Dance Dance and it was never awkward.  And yet when I tried to do the same thing I found myself really obviously bending over backwards not to reveal my main character’s name.  It’s a tough device to use, and while reading Murakami’s version feels effortless and elegant, the fact that my attempt is clunky and difficult makes it clear just how carefully constructed that kind of device has to be, how much work at the exact phrasing has to happen to pull that sort of thing off.  You can’t just decide to do it and wing it.

It makes me wish I had first drafts of some of my favorite books, just to see how different they were.  The closest I have to that is Max Barry’s Machine Man serial novel that he’s publishing online in real time as he writes it.  I love Barry’s voice, and I see bits and pieces of it in the first draft, but I don’t see the kind of cohesive touch that he had in his complete novels like Syrup.  I also see a number of constructions that Barry relies on all the time (primarily his narrator saying “I know I should have done X like a normal person, but instead I did Y like an idiot.”), which I know he’ll probably reshape so that it doesn’t seem so repetitive.  But the building blocks are there, even if they’re incomplete.  What would a Coupland or McCarthy first draft look like, I wonder?  Would it have that kind of admirable poetry and beautiful construction built in?  Would certain passages be right the first time and the hard stuff gets slogged through over and over?  I never wondered any of this before I started writing.

In short, I’ve learned that a lot of the stylistic touches that I love in certain authors aren’t just the payoff for having tons of talent, but rather the result of years of hard work, false starts, draft after draft of material.  Cory Doctorow says that hacks believe in talent and writers believe in perseverance.  After trying it myself I definitely believe that.

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