How to Write a Novel in 33 Days

There’s a popular idea, fueled by countless Hollywood movies, of how writing a novel works. It goes something like this. Author is struck by inspiration. Author sits down and types in a frenzied montage, words flowing directly from the ether onto the page. Within a few hours/days/weeks, a book appears.

I used to think this was (charitably) an exaggeration, or (uncharitably) bullshit. My experience of the writing process always involved much more conscious effort, and much more uncertainty. I spent my time stumbling through first drafts, doubling back, second-guessing everything I wrote. I had accepted that even if the pure-inspiration model was real, it wasn’t something I would ever experience.

But then an image came to me: a young woman in the back seat of a car, returning to the burnt-out ruin of the house where she once lived as a member of a cult. Within a few days, the rest of the story coalesced around her: the charismatic leader she was going back to find; the power he had offered her, to control and manipulate what others perceive as reality; and the community she had lost.

For those thirty-three days, I wasn’t much fun to be around. I lost myself to the world of the cult.

I wrote the whole thing in a little over a month. More precisely, the magic of Scrivener’s Writing History feature tells me, I started the first draft on 23rd July and completed it on 25th August.

Writing whenever I could, on my commute, in evenings and weekends, all the clichés became suddenly true. I was transcribing a story that already existed; I was a conduit, hijacked by something outside myself. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the experience would be scary as well as exciting. I felt possessed. I had vivid dreams and nightmares; I was violently impatient with anything that wasn’t the book. I remember the itchy rage I felt when my regular train was canceled and I ended up standing on a crowded commuter service, unable to take out my laptop and write. I remember going to the cinema with my husband and ignoring anything that was happening on screen, fixating instead on a few key words in an attempt to remember the new scenes I wanted to add to the draft.

For those thirty-three days, I wasn’t much fun to be around. I lost myself to the world of the cult. I fell under the spell of Vervain, the cult leader and supernatural entity whose nature I still didn’t fully understand, but who haunted the manuscript like an evil spirit I was trying to exorcise.

When the draft was finished, I felt wrung out, exhausted, but satisfied. What I didn’t know was what to do next. My usual writing process makes me very aware of each manuscript’s strengths and weaknesses. But Vervain Hollow felt more like some intricate artifact I’d accidentally discovered, whose inner workings were a mystery to me. I was afraid that if I tried to fix it, I risked destroying it.

Chekhov’s guns that hung on the wall but never went off.

On the plus side, the macro structure of the book, the pace of the plot, the tick-tock alternation between present and past in each chapter, was sound. I had let my deluded, obsessive protagonist Laura be her fully unhinged self, without worrying about whether readers would like her. And the manuscript bled with themes I would never have been brave enough to tackle if my conscious mind had been in the driving seat: the ordinary traumas of existing as a woman; my tendency to seek approval from authority figures to cover my insecurities; the sick feeling of complicity I’d had as a white person living on the South Side of Chicago in a neighborhood with its own private police force. Writing with my defenses down had made it obvious what the book was about: the systems that shape us without our consent, and how the desire to wield power within those systems turns us against our friends and against ourselves.

But I could also see the downsides of letting my unconscious take the wheel. Parts of the book made sense on an allegorical level, but not on a literal level. The stakes weren’t well-defined: the vagueness of Vervain and his power meant that Laura lacked a clear way to defeat him. I’d hinted at a lot of avenues that had rich potential for reflecting the themes of the story, the eerie symbiotic relationship between Vervain and the house, the cult members’ divergent reactions to him and his power, but thanks to the urgent rush of the draft, hints were all they were: Chekhov’s guns that hung on the wall but never went off.

The letter I received from my editors outlining their proposed changes brought this all into focus. It was different from any edit letter I’d received before; instead of a list of problems and suggested solutions, it was simply a series of questions. Each pointed me toward something that was unclear in the current draft, or something I needed to push further. As I thought through each question, the intricate artifact of the story started to come apart, and I saw how it could be changed without destroying it.

Using my analytical brain, I rearranged the pieces and made a plan for putting them back together. But I worried that by trying to undergird the dream with logic, I might have killed what gave it power. I sat down with trepidation to start revising. I shouldn’t have worried: the hypnotic pull of the story drew me in again, and I emerged blinking on the other side. From receiving edits to submitting the revised manuscript took four months: quadruple the time of that first headlong draft. In the process, I rewrote around a third of the manuscript. A zoomed-out screenshot of the marked-up revision looks like a city skyline, the red and green lights of changes concentrated in the second half.

One year on, I’m reassured and grateful that early readers, from other authors, to friends who read the first draft and were curious to see how it’s changed, have described the book in words that still reference that original dreamlike quality: haunting, unsettling, all-consuming.

Authors talk about “books of the heart.” Usually, they mean something wholesome: a story that is precious because it features themes they care about. When I use it to describe Vervain Hollow, I mean it in a different sense, closer to what William Butler Yeats talks about in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”: “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” It’s dark, and personal, and in its original version, I didn’t fully understand it. But I brought it out into the light, and with help, I shaped it into something others might.

Today, drafting the first new book I’ve written since Vervain Hollow, I’m back to stumbling, second-guessing, doubling back. I don’t mind: I feel lucky that I got to experience pure inspiration, even if only once. But I also wish that the stories about this kind of urgent, unconscious writing also talked about the work that comes after: the collaborative, tentative, painstaking process of turning a fever dream into something that could pass for reality.

__________________________________

Vervain Hollow by Catriona Silvey is available from Union Square & Co.