Augustine Harper

“Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It’s discouraging, but necessary to write those pages.”

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Admittedly, I wasn’t thrilled when, in Junior year of high school, my English teacher assigned us to read a collection of essays in Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. After reading classical works of fiction such as The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby, I wasn’t looking forward to the foray into non-fiction. I’d adored reading and writing fiction my whole life, so I was expecting Kingsolver’s collection of essays to be a laboring read. Boy, was I wrong.

Kingsolver writes about real-life, mundane things in a way that makes them feel incredibly significant. As a kid who had moved to California in my last year of middle school, her titular essay High Tide in Tucson spoke to me. I found an immense amount of comfort in the way she described the feeling of leaving home, even if it was from the perspective of a tiny crustacean. I’d always felt a bit alone in school, being an out-of-state transplant. The way she discusses love and belonging in her essays brought me great comfort as an awkward high schooler. The voice she uses in her writing makes her work as readable and enjoyable as any work of fiction, which set my expectations for all nonfiction I’ve read since. I will say, I do read quite a lot of nonfiction now, and I definitely have Kingsolver to thank for opening my eyes to the “other side” of reading.

Now, about the quote. For anyone who has embarked on the journey to write a novel (or anything, really) the most difficult part is just getting initial thoughts on paper. One of the most daunting tasks is taking the outline and characters you have created and turning it into real prose. If you’re anything like me, you absolutely love the process of coming up with unique characters and fun story arcs. You probably daydream story ideas and scenes for your current WIP on a daily basis. It’s easy to dream up ideas. but it’s hard to put them into writing. Many writers will often tell you that when the writing doesn’t feel good you should just keep on writing. Sometimes, this can feel counter-intuitive. I’ve found myself writing pages for my current novel where I was thinking the entire time, Wow, this is bad. This doesn’t flow. This is horrible. It’s a common feeling. Sometimes I’ll feel so discouraged with my own prose that I even ponder if I’ve lost my ‘writing gene’, or wonder if I ever had it to begin with. In moments like this, I consider Kingsolver’s words. Truly, the only way to get a story going is to write. It doesn’t need to be final-draft quality. It doesn’t even have to be good. It just has to be. There will be time for revision and rewrites and overhauls later, but to get there you have to write first. Yes, it can be discouraging when it’s not clicking, but what you’ll ultimately get is a foundation from which you can build your novel. And you’ll thank yourself for those initial, rough chapters later!