It didn’t take me long during my vacation to suddenly feel like my novel was going horribly wrong. I wasn’t done writing it. I had yet to read through. I thought: this was not my original vision. I am not writing for the person I was originally writing it for (20 year old me) After hours of the thought bugging my mind, I messaged Jenni. She was used to this by now and accordingly told me I should not give in to brain demons. Anyway, I couldn’t change anything about a novel draft while I was miles away. It was me against my mind. This is a battle I’m long familiar with. I came back to Vienna. I got sick, then watched a load of movies. When I returned to the novel, I realized the plot point I thought was a mistake had never happened.
And that was before I started to revise.
I thought I had grown enough to accept my work as it was. I’ve certainly gotten confident enough to write something exactly as I visualize it in my head. I don’t write, then look at my writing and go “Urgh, I wrote a load of crap.” (That usually happens while writing anyway.) I’m the kind of person that will rewrite after I’m done, which is usually when I “realize” there’s some fundamental problems with the work. And when it’s good the first time, I will never touch it again. Nothing while editing could have prepared me for the question: do I make my work worse by editing it? Or: I’m almost certainly making it worse by editing it. Or: Wow, why am I even writing in the first place? I could just not write. And I, pretty much lying on the couch in the living room, laptop on my lap, was completely serious about that thought.
Once, in German class – I think this was high school, too – our teacher went on one of her diatribes. We were the first year to have our Matura (Austrian A-Levels) centralized, which meant that one of the most difficult classes to properly grade – German – would have to come with a guideline for teachers. To illustrate her point, she mentioned how the people at the seminar received an essay by a student and graded it everything from A (“Sehr Gut”, very good, as it’s known here1) to F (“Nicht Genügend”, not enough). It wholly depended on the teacher, not your own work, what grade you got. I would come to learn this soon enough. Years later, after my A-Levels – I did German written, English orally – she pulled me aside before our grades came out officially and said my essay was not “very good”, which it could’ve been, but just “good”. I received a B, the culmination of five years of high school. I don’t even remember my essay anymore, nor the subject of my finals. Just this one line.2
I was lucky, in a way, to have been nineteen then, having been reborn from the fire that was parental disappointment over grades. If you come from the kind of background I did – a child of immigrants bearing an ethnicity that the ethnic majority considers lesser in every aspect – A is the only acceptable grade. Everything below that is already F. Not enough. But having gone through that consciously does not mean it vanishes from the subconscious. The idea of being good enough remains, a constantly changing metric where the only attainable result is that you are, in fact, not good enough. Not the work by itself, but the personality, the life, is not enough to count as one.
It was, in fact, something a psychiatrist told me, the time I received an official diagnosis for ADHD seven years ago. The idea that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many weeks before I learned for a test, it was still somebody else’s average. I remember hearing that, having already stood up from the couch, coat hugging my body, and tearing up. The illness seemed to explain my last five years at high school, the four years of middle school before that, my time at elementary school, and the bits of my life I no longer remember. I don’t miss it: the brain fog, being almost physically unable to learn and receive information, the stress, the constant deadlines. I don’t miss the part where my head lacked a non-existent impulse control and brain-to-mouth filter. But when you have an illness like this one, one you were born with, one inherited, can you even disentangle your entire personality from it? Would I be a writer if I didn’t have ADHD? I will never know. I cannot be cured of it, only navigate my own life with it.
I compensate (sometimes overcompensate) for the bad sides of ADHD in every aspect of my life, not just writing. But for as much as I lose myself when I write and listen, intently, to my characters’ lives and their suffering, the worst impulses all slosh back into me when I edit, or when it’s near time to edit. The arbitrary deadlines. The idea of being “good enough”, which means being perfect right off the bat, or else it is automatically bad. It would be abundantly clear to everyone reading that I was a high school major, that English was my third language, that I was not as good as any of the authors I read, which meant I had to be better, flawless.
Reading that published work could be anywhere between a second and a fifth-hundredth draft ran through my mind like a sieve. It was all on me. I had the incessant need to be reassured by my friends as soon as I had something written. It wasn’t to just acknowledge that I was, in fact, a writer. It was so somebody could acknowledge that I did a good job. I was chasing As. I was asking for someone to tell me, this is great, which my brain registers as you are good enough. The high lasts until the next work. Then it all begins again.
Starting afresh when you are stuck is something I could no longer afford to do at work. I can’t even imagine it. It is infinitely easier, in my line of work, to add to an already convoluted code than to refactor it. The idea came to me from a classmate at high school. He would take entire chunks of erroneous code, delete them, and start again. He figured that was easier. It’s funny to think I took this to heart when it came to writing. So many times, I started over to diminishing returns. Anything to avoid seeing the work as it is, seeing my own work. Anything to chase a “cooler” idea to avoid the gnarly work of fleshing it out.
I gets manageable when you rewrite two thousand, four thousand words — a week’s work. But now, even my perfectionist brain agreed that doing this with a work of about thirty thousand words was counterproductive. A month’s work couldn’t have all been for shit. This could not be another trunk novel.
After years of self-pity, after so many successful attempts of wallowing with the same old sadness, envy and anger, and coping mechanisms for something that is now confined to my dreams, I decided I didn’t have to do all that. Just being told I can take a break helped. Realizing I can edit my outline if something was going awry, adapting it to what I ended up writing, was a game-changing moment. Stepping back from the thick of my work to just think through what could happen next. It could be easy if I let myself. It could be pleasurable, even, like all the other parts of the process. Knowing now for the present should equip me for future works. A part of me braces for the worst though. No one project is like the other, so I have no doubt the next one will test me just as much. After all, I’ll start from square one. Not a fourth attempt at the same story, but the first draft, a wide arena of endless imperfections.
Currently, this novel of mine is fifty-seven thousand words strong. By the time I was done writing the last new scene, I was staring at it for quite some time. I hadn’t gotten the rush of pride at finishing something (very few things parallel to that feeling, I’ve come to find), but the last two sentences excited me. Compiling it on my Scrivener and reading the document made me think, yes, this is a novel. It even does the thing that John Truby talks about in The Anatomy of Story: it changed my life. The woman beginning the fourth draft of the novel is no longer the woman finishing it. The woman that wrote this could reasonably present it to her past self. This is a broadly applicable truism, but I felt it. It’s a quieter feeling, but no less profound.
Austria goes by a numbers system. A is 1, B is 2, C is 3, etc. F is 5. They also have their… other names, which made more sense to talk about here than the numeric values.
I got an A for English by the way. For completion’s sake.