An Offering of Incomprehensible Abundance: Matt Bell’s “Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts”
I found Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts in my mailbox when I returned from a residency in March. I’d preordered it months prior, and like pre-orders so often are, it was a perfectly-timed gift to myself from the past.
My task at said residency had been to fully overhaul my debut novel, and I’d been overwhelmed by the prospect — the novel, untouched for so long, had calcified in my mind. The scope was part of the overwhelm, but most overwhelming to me was the series of decisions I knew I’d need to make: tonal decisions, character decisions, plot decisions, syntactical decisions. Revision, after all, is a kind of deepening of commitment.
But the wide open space of a residency can be generative and magical even for the commitment-phobic, and once there, I worked diligently and daily on the novel revision — turning the manuscript inside out page by page, transforming it line by line. Making those little decisions that would ultimately amount to bigger ones.
Every day around noon, I’d meet my fellow residents in the kitchen for lunch, and would try to explain what the cumulative process of this kind of work felt like. It’s like painting every inch of a new house, I said. It’s meditative, it’s like squeezing out a towel, twisting and wringing it from each corner.
It was funny, how eager I was to find metaphors to describe the experience of such a thorough and painstaking process. I think, at least in part, this was because while I’ve been revising as long as I’ve been writing, this time felt different: a deeper dive, a more thorough combing, an experience I didn’t yet have language for. A decision-making so drastic it felt irreversible, alongside the consistent sensation that there was no way out but through. The experience of drafting a novel had felt singular, but the task of revising that draft to make it better, deeper, stronger; that felt more singular still.
Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts understands just how singular a task it is to revise a novel so wholly. It is a book that aims to affirm the very specific challenges and contours of writing and revising an entire novel, and intends to be less a guidebook and more a guide as in tour guide; a knowledgeable companion for the journey. It is not a prescriptive how-to, because for this work, there is no such thing. Instead, it’s a small but highly-concentrated and conversational craft book that offers a real framework for approaching the enormity of novel-writing, replete with antidotes for the creative inertia sometimes wrought by indecision.
I once heard a brilliant friend give a talk in which they pointed out that if you trace it back to its Latin roots, the word decide is closely related to the phrase to kill. This made great sense to me. As someone who has always been indecisive — not in the waffling neither/nor way, but in the maximalist both/and way — I could intuitively understand the connection between making a decision and killing off other possibilities. To move toward one thing is necessarily to abandon another. And, of course, as a writer, deciding is essential. At a certain point, you can’t, for example, have both beginnings or both endings. The decision part of being a writer is a discipline I’m drawn to, but it also fills me with a low key dread every time I face it on the page.
But maybe there is also a different way to think of decision-making: a kind of moving-toward. A subtle shift to a paradigm permissive enough to not feel limiting, and abundant enough to accommodate multiple options at once. Focusing less on the away from, and more on the toward. Refuse to Be Done, while lean and focused, is — in both its tone and its content — also very much a book whose orientation is toward. A book that roots the entire process of writing and rewriting in both abundance and permission.
Permission can sometimes evoke luxury or coddling, but Refuse opens with the assertion that a radical kind of permission is essential to writing and revising a novel. In his opening lines, Bell writes: “You are writing a novel. You are writing a book. Go ahead and tell yourself. And then tell yourself again… Don’t diminish, don’t equivocate, don’t find some way to keep from claiming the work.”
This sense of permission continues, especially throughout the first of the book’s three sections — the section about the first and most exploratory draft of the novel. Permission to write a novel and say you are writing a novel. Permission to want it all and then some. Permission to pursue every option at once, not only one at a time. Permission for hunger and chaos, permission to give your novel a name it will not keep, permission to give your not-yet-novel the trappings of an already-novel, permission to write messily and imperfectly for hundreds of pages, permission to sprawl. Permission, I notice, not to make decisions; or, not just yet, anyway.
Permission is a balm for the indecisive writer. Sometimes, mid-drafting, I’ll stand in my kitchen while waiting for the microwave to reheat my coffee for a fifth time and bemoan my predicament to anyone who will listen (okay, really just my partner and both cats): I can’t decide, is the visiting stranger spectral or actual? Both? Neither? Does the lover’s unexplained late arrival to the long-planned trip result in punitive betrayal or surprising opportunities for connection? And, of course, the decisions that stretch far beyond these either/or binaries: What story will I tell? In what place and in what time? At what scale and in whose voice? As every writer knows, a novel can go in quite literally millions of directions. You have permission, Bell says, to go in all of them.
Millions of directions, after all, can also be the thrill of it. Yes, decisions will need to be made; but not yet. For now, Bell says, it is about generating options. Generating joy, and getting everything on the page and then some: “Move toward pleasure, excitement, joy. Save nothing for later. Spend your excitement and inspiration as soon as it appears, trusting that there’s more where that came from.”
In this way, Refuse also quickly establishes an abundance framework; resistance to scarcity, and encouragement to explore all the options, not just one or two or even just a handful. It is about cultivating an orientation that isn’t worried about running out, but that is lavish and spendy, growing increasingly curious by the line.
Bell quotes Jane Smiley, who says that “…every great novel offers incomprehensible abundance.” From the yes/and approach so often employed in improv comedy that Bell suggests can be central to generative writing; to the craving of more creative influence as opposed the vigilant avoidance of it; to the George Saunders quote about “steer[ing] toward the rapids” — sending your characters toward trouble, and not away from it, which means juicier story and more of it — Refuse is filled with ways to feel plentiful about the writing process. To feel a sense of moving toward incomprehensible abundance, of gathering treasure and speed.
And my indecision as a writer certainly comes from a fear of scarcity — I must choose only option a or option b, and as I commit these choices to the page, the path ahead of me narrows. I fear foreclosure; that irreversible murder of option b. No, Bell gently insists. Even choosing wrong — the worst case scenario — and writing the wrong novel, will eventually draw you closer to writing the right one. And even finally committing to one choice — moving toward the undeniable draw of option a — will not narrow so much as widen into the kind of entire universe that comes from moving toward joy and whatever promises to grow from it.
Of course the book’s first section — the one most squarely about generative work — feels connected to permission and abundance in the most obvious ways. Early in the book, Bell quotes Rachel Kushner, who says “I’m keen on the type of writing where I can feel the pleasure of the author.” That first section reads like Bell is having the most fun, displaying his glittering trove of playful and affirming ways for a writer get to the heart of what it is that they’re writing. He spends the most time here, and to me, it feels like the book’s heart.
But perhaps that’s the point. I feel so rich with options, so pointing toward, that by the time I reach that second section — Second Draft: Rewrite, Don’t Revise — I’m ready to hear about winnowing down. Even here, the approach is less a narrowing, and more a recreating. Use the amplitude of all you’ve generated, suggests Bell, to fully rewrite the novel, now suffused with the cumulative energy of getting to this very point, and with the wisdom of perspective. And by the time I get to Third Draft: Refuse to Be Done, I am fully ready to fine tune. Even the title’s refusal is about more, not less — done means you’ve run out, and we haven’t run out, not by a long shot.
And clearly, a craft book with any integrity (and Bell’s has much) can’t only be a book of boundless yes. At some point, Bell says, nonlinear must become linear, the earlier and more exploratory draft must “diminish,” and yes, one must make those killer decisions that eliminate one possibility as much as they open the door on another. But this is actually just movement toward the heart of one’s novel; the novel becoming ever more itself. And I think maybe my favorite thing about Refuse is that it is just the right balance of permission and good boundaries. Dream big, Bell says, and dream wild, but at a certain point, switch gears. Rein it in. Permission is always sweeter against the backdrop of good boundaries. Abundance needs a container.
I’m not yet done revising my first novel. And yet recently, since my return from that revision-heavy residency, I’ve been flirting more and more seriously with an idea for my second. I have fits and starts, I have notes. And with this guide, I feel more like I have a game plan. I don’t need to decide anything just yet, but I can start moving toward it.
Writing toward may not exactly be earth-shaking as an orientation — after all, what other direction can writing be but toward — but this book, in its particular generosity, its gentle but disciplined kind of yes, has shifted the ground underneath me slightly as I start to draft. I still feel the weight of decisions, yes, but deciding toward feels more joyous than simply deciding. Not killing one option, perhaps, but bringing the other emphatically to life.
