I’m starting to understand how it could take ten years to write a novel. I wrote Drowning Practice in two years, but it was a straightforward narrative with a single point-of-view character (told in extremely close third person). I followed the story as it came in first draft and then revisions were a matter of shaping, clarifying, etc.

Adverse Possession? Uh…yeah. I’m having a slightly different experience with this one. I started it in October 2005. Then I thought I’d finished it in June 2009. I was wrong. I worked through two more drafts. Recently I declared it finished to the best of my current abilities. Well, good thing those abilities are constantly growing and developing, because now I see clearly that it is far from finished, and luckily I know what needs doing. The book I set out to write in 2005 is much more complex than Drowning Practice, but I hadn’t shifted my approach much from the first book. I wrote it with two POV characters in close third person. As a result, the expansive novel I’d wanted to write that explored certain political, social, and economic realities of New York’s Lower East Side in the mid-nineties got constricted. It became about the relationship of those two POV characters, with the political, social, and economic as little more than backdrop and plot device. I did a damn good job exploring their relationship, if I do say so myself, but the resulting book was smaller, slighter, and way less resonant than what I’d envisioned. Our actual books never match up to the books in our head–or so my Dear Teacher assured me–but now that I see what needs doing to at least get closer to that ideal book in my head, I have to do it.

I realized it when I re-read Anna Karenina this summer, but I guess it took me a season to get up the guts to dive back in and DO it, rather than just wish I’d already done so. Tolstoy’s book is titled Anna Karenina, but it’s not just about her affair. It’s also (actually, MORE so) about Levin and Kitty, about Dolly and Anna’s brother whose name is escaping me at the moment (Stepan? Is that it). It’s about a certain strata of Russian society at the time. It’s about farming. It’s about the freeing of the serfs and all the implications of that… It’s about…everything. If Tolstoy had told the story just from the povs of Anna and Vronsky, that “everything” would have been lost.

The task now at hand: get into the heads of three more of the existing characters. Give them voice, let them explore their story arcs as directly as my two “main” characters got to. And through their arcs, their experiences in this world I’ve built for them, we will (hopefully) see that world much more fully and truly.

That’s the plan, anyway. And I’m kind of terrified. Excited, too, though. Excited and terrified. Sounds about right. Wish me luck!