Novel Island
Picture me on a small boat. "Ahoy!"
The day after I sent my novel draft to my first batch of readers, I told my husband: “I’m going to spend the next two months reading and watching shows and having fun and not even thinking about writing!!!”
The day after that I said: “I need to start a new novel.”
I wouldn’t say I’m feeling lost…but, adrift, maybe. The shore of my island is in sight, but I’m not on it anymore, at least not for the time being. There is a lot of work left to do on the novel, but I need to take a self-imposed break so I can see more clearly what needs to be done. I want to feel a healthy detachment from the book when I get my first round of feedback.
But I miss it there, on Novel Island. It was a place I could tune into like a radio frequency. My body was still here, washing dishes, pushing monster trucks, running laps around the couch with my toddler, but my brain was with my novel, contemplating the characters, picturing the shape of my plots, playing “what would happen if…?”
Of course, I still visit Novel Island sometimes. I already have a list of things I want to change and cut and expand when I touch down for the third draft. I’m addicted to the work of writing.
Somewhere in the midst of Draft 2, I wrote in my journal: “I feel stirred up inside. Need a still moment to let everything crashing around in me settle enough so I can sift through it and pick out the pieces I can use to make something. When I’m not creating, I cannot as easily find the True North inside of me. I need the stillness that making art requires.”
In short: I like myself best when I’m writing. That version of me is quiet and calm and, at the same time, revved up about possibilities on both the page and in life. She can think expansively while finessing fine details. She can see the good in the most unlikeable of characters. So, not only do I miss working on that particular novel, I miss the feeling of being immersed in the drafting process.
Do I have ideas for my next novel? Yeah. Are they ready to dive into? No, no, absolutely not. As one of my writing teachers, Ben Percy, said to us in our college fiction seminar, “Novels are like tattoos. You’ve got to think about it long and hard before you commit to the ink.”
The first inklings of character and plot for this novel came to me in August 2024. Before that, I had written barely a word since my son was born in 2022. (I wrote more about this period of my life in my post “Trust that it will come back to you.”) But, I was not doing nothing. First of all, I was caring for a tiny human that I had created. I was also trying to heal my body after a traumatic birth that resulted in a birth injury. (More about that here.)
But I was also filling the well. In her book, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron, describes it like this:
“In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do—spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.”
For those first two years of my son’s life, I read voraciously. I have always loved to read, and books have always comforted and sustained me, but in my postpartum period, they were a lifeline in a way they hadn’t been before. So much of a new mother’s time is spent holding a little one in a dark room. I held Gummy Bear in one arm and my new Kindle in the other. I read and read and read.
Writing felt far away, and so reading didn’t take on feelings of “should,” as in, “I should read this or this in order to be better able to write that or that.” I read for pleasure. I read for fun. I read wildly, recklessly, careening from Edith Wharton and E.M. Forster to mass market paperback romances to obscure translated works to book club bangers. I DNF’d any time I pleased. I filled myself with words and images that fed me something nourishing. I got off Facebook and Instagram with their bite-sized captions, their capitalist-bent algorithms that flattened thought and creativity. I craved long sentences that tacked like switchbacks, descriptions that brought me up to peaks I’d never seen, new ways of seeing character that plunged me, breathless and suspended in a deep ocean of shock.
By reading so much and so wildly with so little judgement about what was “good” or “bad,” I started thinking more creatively about my own writing and what I was capable of. Maybe I really could write a novel, I thought in the dark, something I had always wanted to do. Reading so many sentences––sentences and sentences and sentences––retaught me a lesson that I was learning in every other aspect of my life. Like parenting, like making a sandwich, like being a person on this earth, there is no one right way to write a sentence and another one, and then to stack those sentences up into a novel.
I saw it so clearly in the way that my son and I existed together. He was my baby and I was his mother. No one else could parent him the way that I could, just as no one could parent my friends’ babies they way that they could. We were all just so different and forging connections that were singular to us. No one else parented my child exactly as I did. No one laughed exactly like I did. And no one wrote exactly like I did, either. Maybe I could write a novel that no one else could write.
Maybe reading so many amazing books should have overwhelmed me, or intimidated me, but instead it excited me. Novels showed me so many possibilities. Certainly the ideas for a novel pinging around in my head were possible, too.
And so I set forth in my small boat, searching for a place where I could build my own personal Novel Island.
And now I’m back in my boat again, adrift in the ocean. I will keep my first Novel Island in my sights because I’m not done with it yet, and I’ll start collecting images and words and ideas to build my next Novel Island. Who knows where it will be or what it will be like? Anything is possible.
What do you do to fill your well? What do you do in the space between projects? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for reading.
With love from my kitchen table,
Kaia