A Season in Hell: October 8-13
Second-order feelings and the creeping horror with no name
A Season in Hell is a series of entries from my journal from 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.
October 8
I’m reading Joe Abercrombie (The Trouble with Peace) and Curtis Sittenfeld (Romantic Comedy), both of whom seem to know exactly what their characters are feeling, at all times, down to the micron. Not just the first-order feelings but the second-order feelings—how the characters feel about their feelings—and so on. It’s instructive but also dispiriting because I know I will never, ever write as well as them.
October 13
For me the great enemy of novel-writing is something that I don’t have a name for. It’s the creeping numbness that comes on you after you’ve read your book too many times. When I picture it it’s just a cold grey fungal menace—it’s like a sort of macular degeneration of the creative faculties, where the book’s meaning and urgency leak away into a vast and growing blind spot that soon takes over your entire field of vision. The different elements of the book seem less and less related to one another. The chapters break apart from each other, then the paragraphs within the chapters, then the sentences into words. You might understand a particular passage if you read it, on the most literal level, but you’ll forget what it means, you won’t feel it, you’ll forget that in the previous chapter the character said the exact opposite from what they’re saying now, and you need to either fix it or explain that for whatever reason they changed their mind. But you won’t because you won’t even notice.
Sometimes, having entered this state, I will force myself to keep working anyway, because I am so desperate for whatever neurochemical gets released in my brain when I have written well and completed a task. But it doesn’t work, my fingers type only bad things, and the neurochemicals are withheld.
For me the only reliable cure for the creeping numbness is, unfortunately, time.1 Over time you forget what you’ve written, the grooves it’s worn in your brain fill in again, and you can come at your book the way a reader would, should they happen to take it down from a shelf in bookstore and open it to a random page, where they can instantly see exactly what it means and what’s wrong with it.
But unfortunately time is a very finite resource.
I’ll gratuitously drop in a semi-related quote here from Zadie Smith’s essay “That Crafty Feeling,” which is the best description anywhere of what writing a novel is like: “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go onstage and read from them. It’s an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after it’s published, ten minutes before you go onstage at a literary festival.