A Bag Full of Trouble: How I Found My Way Into My Debut Novel

Some time ago–a decade at least, but it feels longer–a literary agent read a manuscript that I’d written and told me that she loved it, loved my style, but the book felt too calculated, too much like a math problem. It didn’t lack heart per se, she said, but it felt too much like a clocked thing, too neat.

I carried this criticism around with me for a long time. I did not sell the book that she read, despite a lot of trying, which was disappointing but not all that unusual in the long arc of my writing career to that point.

I had reached a moment as a writer where it was obvious I needed to adjust something, to change my approach in order to get a different outcome. But how does someone whose work is marked by its meditative qualities shed the sense that those qualities are at work without losing, well, everything that makes his voice feel like his own?

I didn’t start a new novel for six years—the longest fallow period of my fiction-writing life. I flirted with and abandoned a few projects, always early in the gameplay of composition. This wasn’t traditional writer’s block. I knew what I wanted to write and how to do it, but that was sort of the problem. The clarity of my intention was a bright sun that burnt off all but what I intended–and I needed something unexpected to take root.

In the spring of 2018 I was on garden leave—a fancy euphemism for laid-off—from my job as a digital strategist at a bank, and I needed to figure out my next professional move. All I really wanted to do was take one more go at novel writing. I was pretty sure that I’d never write a book that got published; still, old habits (and aspirations) don’t go into the night quietly.

On a rainy afternoon I wrote a page, a strange little scene involving a man whose boss meets him at Grand Central and tells him they’ve accidentally broken reality. This is kind of weird, I thought, and I put it away while it still felt like I had more to say, before I strangled the idea with intentions, answers.

The next day, I re-read what I wrote and thought, well, not terrible; and I added a few more words, more character interactions. I quit after I had just over two pages. Still pretty good, I decided.

On the morning of the third day I was genuinely excited about this idea. I opened the laptop and waited for the display to fire up—but all I heard was click click click. Each time I booted the laptop. Total hard drive failure.

I brought the laptop to a recovery center; the recovery guy was pessimistic. We can spend a lot of time and money to extract some of the data, he said, but it won’t necessarily turn up much. Thus was the new novel wiped out before I really knew what it was or where it was going.

In retrospect, this hard drive failure is what drove me to begin in earnest another novel, after years of not writing fiction. The loss of those first pages triggered an urgency that I otherwise wouldn’t have felt. Suddenly, I was trying to recapture an idea and a set of words that I’d almost but not quite been able to recall. I had to get back something that was lost. That was taken from me. That I believed was mine to grab for—even if I was unsure what it was, where I was going.

I reproduced a version of what I lost within days. But I kept at the writing for weeks, never writing more than a few pages a day, never quite knowing what would happen next. All I wanted to do was to keep the tension alive. If I ran out of energy in a scene, it ended; if I ran out of conflict, I introduced a new character and let that new person wreak their own havoc on the narrative—I was no longer in control and I was fine with that.

Mostly, I wrote in the mornings each day. Afternoons were for job hunting: I emailed cover letters and went to interviews. I had coffee with tech founders, I had calls with start-up leaders. As prep for meetings, I researched the latest use cases for blockchain, neural networks, password managers, chatbots. It’s not surprising that similar concepts appeared in the book that I was working on at the same time. Initial coin offerings? Great for a one-liner. Non-fungible tokens that people pay real money for? A joke that tells itself.

When I was a workshop student long ago, Philip Roth came to read from a work in progress (I believe it was The Human Stain) and also to engage in Q&A on the practice of novel writing, a thing that he knew how to do better than almost anyone else alive at the time. A novel, he said, is a bag. You fill it up with everything that you can find that is interesting enough to include.

I was pretty far along with the manuscript when I decided to start allowing technology in my fictional world to do things that it couldn’t in the real world. Once upon a time this would have brought me up short—but now I didn’t care. It was just another form of trouble that I let the book get itself into. A novel should be interesting. Beyond that, how true it is or is not, that’s beside the point. Eventually, I left realism behind. It occurred to me one afternoon that all the books I really truly adore have glimmers of magic to their stories, sometimes as a literary device, sometimes in the form of coincidence or freak turns of events.

I finished the first draft of the manuscript after about six months of work. At that point, I had to revise, and revision did require that I start to bend the narrative to my intentions. But by that point, the novel had an energy of its own. I had scoped out a story universe that was far larger, stranger and more vivid than anything I’d done before. It would survive multiple drafts, that feeling, and grow stronger with every turn.

That manuscript would eventually become a novel—In Our Likeness—that came out this September. It remains, in its final form, a book shaped by its own chaotic energies. I am so pleased to send it forth into the world, but I feel like it was only partly my doing, as if the story was already there and I just followed words where they led.

To tweak Philip Roth’s metaphor a little, I would say—a novel is a bag full of trouble. You put in it all the concepts and characters that bother you, that poke, threaten, prick, and otherwise surprise you, and if you stick at it long enough, it takes on a life of its own—full of surprises, sudden reversals, grand reveals. The best stories are often the ones that elude frameworks, that come at you with a force all their own.

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In Our Likeness by Bryan VanDyke is available from Little A.