Word After Word

Mel lost 126 pages in September and she hasn’t written a word since.

Last summer B. lost his novel. Earlier this fall, Elle lost everything—her mother board become vehemently unmotherly and imploded. Here’s the thing. Every writer loses work.

Every writer feels like its her fault. A punishment for stepping out, for committing. Who did you think you were? A writer? Come on! Especially if you live in a world where you are the only one doing this work, this kind of work—when you lose precious pages it can feel like exactly the indictment you deserved.

This has to be changed.

Every writer loses work. It’s part of work. Every roofer falls (and then learns more about the nature of the edges). Every actor bombs. Every job in the world has a Bad Part to it and this is our bad part and no one can avoid it. It’s not your fault you are magical but not so magical you can control computers and mother boards and actually make things disappear. You’re just a writer. Get over yourself.

And get back to work. (Easy to say, I know and incredibly hard to do.)

But here is the thing, which I learned from a beautiful writer named Elizabeth and later from one of my best teachers, ever: When you start again, it will come out, easily, all of it, just as you had it before OR EVEN BETTER. It sounds to good be too true. But this wild thing happens. I have tried this multiple times, in the wake of a loss and just to test it out and I promise, this works. Try it.

You just sit down at your writing desk (maybe you will choose paper and pencil this time, it’s very relaxing, maybe you aren’t ready to face the machine that ate your soul just yet—that’s good!). You physically transport yourself to the opening scene of your book. Start writing. Don’t try to recreate it (see Leaning, below), just lean into it gently and every time you are worried it was better before, you’ll never recreate all those glorious turns of phrase, those luminous images!, just realize you are trying too hard. Pull back and gently let the book come back out. This is called drafting.

I have tested it accidentally and on purpose. Last year, I lost a short (brilliant) essay on my computer. After freaking out for way longer than was appropriate, I finally got back to work and just wrote it again, using this method. A friend found a copy of my story at her house, and mailed it to me. When I compared the two versions. Not one thing great was missing. Not one! And here’s the coolest, coolest, coolest part of all: some bad parts were improved! The essay was published. This method works so well, I would recommend regularly destroying all your work and redoing it but it would be too painful and horrible—

I call this the Starfish Method because it’s as dramatic as losing and then regenerating a fifth limb. Because it’s such a fantastic way of improving the work, I have tried it on purpose. A magazine accepted an essay of mine recently and then sent it back with revisions. I studied the editor’s notes, and then put the essay down and just rewrote it. You can’t think of new stuff as easily as you can rewrite something you wrote before. It’s hardwired into your brain. What’s so amazing is when I’m rewriting like this, I feel as though it’s all fresh, completely original. I’m stunned when I compare the two versions—how much of the original is there, in the new one, without my having even thought about it at all.

When we lose work, I doubt we will become overjoyed and instantly shout Starfish Method! Yee Haw! But less freaking out would be good. It feels like starting over, but it’s not. It’s going to feel that way though. Don’t think about it. When you write, it should feel like you are reading. Not thinking, not working, not making it up, but reading something that is already there. In starfish, it already is. That limb is more powerful than any other kind of memory there is (you just aren’t aware of it. Hence the freaking.)

Triple Redundancy. You should still practice, like all novelists and small business owners, triple redundancy, backing everything up every day in three places. No one does this but we should. However: even the triple redundancy people will still lose work! It’s part of what writing is about. Writers have been losing work since the beginning of time. Stone tablets were stolen, pulverized. Manuscripts were left in horse carriages and on trains and they blew away in east winds. Fire has eaten art along with forests and cities and men. There’s no immunity.

But remember: It’s not your fault. You are just a little baby writer and you don’t get to keep your manuscript immortal, you only get to work with it. And when it slips away from you, which it will, in small ways and large ways, you can conjure it back in an even more pure, improved version.

The trick is to get calm, ignore the horrible annihilating fears (super hard to do), and pretend like it’s there, all along, which it is. It’s not really lost. It’s still in you. Absolutely intact.

Assignment: Set your timer for ten minutes. Write something beautiful and important. Write a secret, start a sonnet, anything. Hide it from yourself. Don’t look at it. Next week, or next year, without having looked at the “lost” version, write the same thing again. Compare. Ta da! Isn’t that incredibly cool? Practicing the art of destruction can help you build up some calluses that are useful when it’s your turn to tithe to the muse.