The Resurrection of My Dead Novel: A Love Story

With Easter just around the corner, it seems appropriate that I tell the story of a different resurrection. The resurrection of a novel that I started writing before entering my MFA program in 2010, and to which I read its last rites shortly after my graduation in 2012.

"It was a dark and stormy night." Okay, not really, nor is this sentence any kind of narrative opening besides a laughable one. Still, it's a starting place, which is sometimes what are writing projects are. Sometimes initially. Sometimes eternally. Can you feel a moral to the story coming?

Wait--are morals even supposed to be in stories? And even if they are, isn't this one too heavy-handed? Geez, maybe I shouldn't be telling this story in the first place. Maybe I shouldn't be telling any story. Maybe I'm not really a writer at all.

This is basically what life inside my head was like, before and after I abandoned my novel. We artists of any kind of awfully plagued with self-doubt, right?  The thing is, I took on the challenge of writing a novel, found my first draft to be deeply flawed, and kicked it to the curb, focusing on other writing (and sometimes no writing) for a while after that.

Then I went to a weekend of creativity coaching training with Eric Maisel, and I learned two things.

1) That novel (which I referred to that weekend first as my "failed" novel and then as my "dead" novel) was flawed, absolutely. Maybe irrevocably so. But if the novel itself was a hot mess, it was nothing compared to the mess my thinking was.  It was my thinking, in the end, that proved much more problematic than that novel was.

2) The more I had tried before to "fix" the novel, the further away I had moved from why I felt compelled to write it, what it meant to me, what my deep hopes for it were. And in the process, I fell out of love. Certainly with the novel, but in many ways, with writing itself.

As it turned out, the novel was not dead, it was just comatose. I've fallen in love with it again, and am working on it regularly. Which is not to say that it will be publishable, or that I'll want it to be. But I am now on the path of finishing, and I know the "why" of that, and the rest of it has ceased to matter much to me.

As I write this, others who took the weekend with Eric, along with some brave souls who have entered into coaching with me, are honoring and/or trying to find the truth in their relationship to their art form. It is work that not everyone can understand. But it's meaningful and beautiful, and as I return to a novel-writing process that can be difficult as well as valuable, tedious as well as thrilling, and confusing as well as enlightening, I am happy and comforted to know that others are on the same path.

Here's to creating and all that goes with it. May we help one another to stay the course.