Your words, warm from the printer

A handwritten table of contents, making a "Why" file, and words of encouragement from Ta-Nehisi Coates

Earlier this week I sent my book in progress to two trusted readers and as soon as I did I reread the document on my phone and could suddenly see so many issues! And typos! Nothing like an editor’s eye once it is sent, right? So then I sent emails titled “this one instead!” and “no really this one!” with revised versions. I always do this even as I try and try to revise it better before hitting send. I do it after publishing these letters, too, and go back and add things, like this sentence you are reading now and other title taxonomies from Monday’s letter.

Yesterday, I made this long handwritten table of contents [seen above], tracking when the two main narrative timelines in the novel appear and braid, which led me to see so much more I could add, and remember scenes I’d left in another document, and and and. I want to say “alas” here but I won’t because this is all part of the process.

Ta-Nehisi Coates talked with The Atlantic about his writing a while back, saying that his drafts go from really bad, to not so bad, to OKAY, but they never quite get to what he’d imagined in his mind. I see this as comforting, though others might see this as pessimistic. At first, the draft feels amazing and then sometime in the middle it feels terrible (What am I doing??) and by the end it becomes better, but never perfect, you know?

He also shares the best tip he received as a writer. Summary in my own words: at some point, a seasoned editor told him, if you keep at it, you’ll look around and see that the number of people still doing what you are doing [writing] is much smaller. The reason for this is not all sunshine: it can feel brutal to keep doing it—all that rejection, right?—so people quit doing it. But if you don’t give up, this editor said, you’ll have these skills that others do not. I’d add here that you’ll have this growing garden of yourself and your understanding of your world, and those beautiful things you’ve made, and the weirdo community you become a part of, for being a weirdo who, instead of doing things that might make more money, keeps making art.

A Revision Exercise for Those Who Write Beautifully Wallpapered Staircases That [Might Not] Lead to Nowhere*

Print out your project. I know, it is a lot of pages maybe. You still have more revisions to fix before you print? Let’s just see what you can learn in your revision process by printing it out. Make sure to add page numbers if you have not already.

Hold the draft. Feel that warmth of your words fresh from the printer. Turn the pages. Love it a little, even though, perhaps especially because, it is only half-formed. I look at this printed version softly, make little handwritten revisions in ink, if I find a few, and circle the page number on those pages to help me find them later.

Then, make a handwritten table of contents for each chapter or for each paragraph, if you are working in a shorter form. Handwritten, I think, helps us to be gentler with ourselves and the story. It takes us out of the associations with the laptop—work, productivity, perfection, striving. Make little symbols or ways of notating plot moves, or setting moves, or timeline changes—whatever things you are concerned about in your project, try to visually track them in this handwritten table.

As you go, make a “Why” handwritten note page and a “Questions” note page and a “To Add” note page on separate pieces of paper, letting in what questions you have for yourself or for readers, what you want to add, and an affirming “why you are writing this and why it is important” as your “why” note to look at when the revision feels low on hope. Then, in the future, you can keep coming back to why the project matters to you.

*This is a title playing on a line from Zadie Smith’s “That Crafty Feeling”

If you are a plotter and outliner instead or if you want a generative writing prompt

Write today without a plan about something seemingly unrelated to your story. What is something that delighted you recently?

Or: What is a song you remember from childhood? Listen to it again as you write about it and that time in your life.

May your words skid across the water of your mind like a pink flamingo floatie on a pool in summer.

Love,

TS