I just finished writing a gigantic psychological thriller that kind of freaked me out.
At nearly 600 pages, it’s a door-stopper. I usually write shorter novels, and I generally prefer reading short novels, but for some reason, this one just needed more space. It’s a psychological thriller with a lot of twists and turns. Some terrible things happen to some decent people, who do their best to get out of the mess; in the process, they make some very dangerous mistakes. There were moments during the writing of that novel when it went to such weird places, I got kind of uncomfortable. I mean, it really freaked me out. My husband said, “I can’t believe you wrote that scene. That is messed up.”
“Should I take it out?” I asked.
“Definitely not,” he said.
A few chapters later, he said, “This is making me uncomfortable.”
“Me too!” I said. “Should I take it out?”
“No. 100 percent no.”
Discomfort can be good, because it means you’re pushing your own boundaries.
What to do with this state of limbo, between the moment when you submit your novel and the moment when you learn its fate?
In fact, the limbo (update: happily, the fate of this novel is no longer in limbo:) has given me time to do some things I’ve been neglecting, things that I enjoy but that I normally don’t have much time for. I’ve just written a short story to launch CNET’s Technically Literate series, curated by Janis Cooke Newman. The story, titled The Last Taco Truck in Silicon Valley, is a loving send-up of Northern California tech culture, featuring a kidnapping and a killer habanero sauce. I’m revising a collection of essays about the strange months I spent living in Beijing in my twenties. I’m teaching a class, The Art of Plot, for Stanford Continuing Studies, and an 8-Week email course, Writing Fiction.
I also signed on with a speaking agent, because if there is one place that I feel even more comfortable than at my desk, writing, it is on a stage, telling stories. I am reading everything I can get my hands on about F. Scott Fitzgerald (again), because he is one of those writers whom I return to in fascination every few years. I’ve also become a little obsessed with William Gibson after a book he signed for me in Berkeley a couple of years ago, Distrust That Particular Favor, resurfaced while I was doing some holiday cleaning. I had the opportunity to have dinner with Gibson and some other writers after the reading that night. Reading Gibson’s essays and novels, one has the feeling of being in the presence of someone who knows something the rest of us haven’t quite figured out, something essential and somewhat frightening about the way our world is going to turn out. One gets the feeling he figured these things out a long time ago, and we ought to have all been listening a little more attentively, because this shit is about to get serious.
From the age of 13 or so, I have thought of myself as “a writer.” Which is to say that I considered myself a writer long before I ever published anything. That takes some chutzpah, probably, or perhaps a dose of delusional thinking. But writing is the one thing that has come naturally for as long as I remember, and when you have one thing like that, you hold on to it, you nourish it, you plan a path that will always, in some way, lead back to it.
While most of us do not have the luxury of divorcing our work, creative or otherwise, from the practical realities of financial necessity, we do have the ability to shift our perspective, to reconsider what makes our work valuable and meaningful. What do you bring to your field, your family, your friends, your network? What do you offer to the world? What brings you joy in your work, and how can you create more of it?
What to do with the limbo? Embrace it. Branch out. Let your distractions and your passions guide you.
Do you want to see how this story turned out? Read Writing Through the Ups and Downs. (Hint: there’s a happy ending).
Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog, Golden State, and four other novels and story collections. She lives between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Visit her website. Get $30 off her email course, Writing Fiction, when you use the code MEDIUM.
