I'm finishing and starting again.

When one manuscript closes, another one passes you a blank page.

Dear friends,

I finished my novel manuscript after at least eighteen months, maybe longer, in June. This book started as a flash fiction in 2017, so maybe I’ve been working on it for five years. What was pivotal in the flash never ended up in the novel. A part of me wishes it had; I don’t know if it is for the better that it did not. I think about this with stories—how many, likely excellent, ways they could have gone. Maybe I’ll make a career of rewriting the same novel over and over again with the ideas I tossed out. Would the book always end in the same place?

Then again, we are likely always writing the same book, right? That is what I am told by people who are usually more advanced in the process than I am. I have only written one book, so I have no idea what the second one will be like, let alone the third or the fourth.

My face after I finished my book. I was basically in shock for an hour or two, and then I slowly came out of my blankness to celebrate with my family.

Like many MFA graduates, I am embarking on completing a short story collection now that my novel is “finished” (as we all know, finishing a manuscript does not make anything actually finished). I started and finished many of these short stories in the 2016, 2017, 2018 era of my life (i.e. graduate school), but there are new ones to add. I spent much of my time at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop (note that I am always confused about whether this is Writers, Writer’s, or Writers’ workshop) thinking up what I should include in my collection.

The view from my room at the Kenyon Writers Workshop. Idyllic, yes! Hard to navigate as a chronically ill person among unmasked peers, yes! I ended up Zooming into the workshop for my own safety, but I am grateful I was still able to use that week to “finish” my book.

I’ve been working on a story with a premise I refuse to tell you, seeing as isn’t yet fully excavated. The important part is that I am starting to wonder if this is yet another novel, instead of a story within my collection. Oops. Then again, the idea of starting another novel, a story to revel in and discover for months on months, doesn’t exactly sadden me. Nothing against short stories, but I love the all-consuming obsession of novel writing, the likes of which I have never encountered before, except in romantic love. (Infatuation in romance leads to problems; infatuation in novel writing nicely leads to completed manuscripts, so this is a better use of my obsessive mind, I would say. Though, I have learned that breaks and space are also vital in the shaping and reshaping of the novel too.)

To get to what this letter is about—I’m thinking of what it means to call a manuscript complete and now look at all the other projects I’ve made notes about in secret spots on my phone. I’m mad, even, at myself, because I had a plan. I knew what I was going to focus on next (and after that, and after that), and this new Possible Novel just came at me with the unmistakable force of a dog with its teeth clamped around my ankle. Only when I accepted that this might be the way things are right now did the little ankle-biter ease its painful grip, just slightly.

This isn’t to say my collection isn’t happening (it is, and I’m halfway through a full draft!), but it is to revel for a moment in the process of starting on a half-formed, wild idea because you have to. Recently, I met up with someone who mentioned that they are getting a lot of anxiety about writing because they know too much about the industry. Their mind is thinking about blurbs and marketing plans instead of working through the book itself. I’m in the same mental space, except instead of industry-specific worries, I have revision ones.

I know how much it takes to make a book now that I’ve “finished” mine. I know the hours of worrying on walks and in the shower, trying to find the magic threads that would pull the manuscript together. I remember the painstaking reads as I reshuffled sentences into something with meaning. I remember, most importantly, what a loss I felt when the book flew out of my heart and into the world. A few people have read it, and even if that means nothing from a business perspective, it means everything from an artistic one. Half of the process of writing is accepting how little is in our control.

Do I feel like this baby, wading through flowers? Maybe. Maybe those flowers are all the beautiful possibilities, but also maybe they’re making me sneeze due to my rhinitis.

If I had words of wisdom, I wouldn’t be writing this installment of this newsletter. Or maybe I would, but I’d be asking less questions and giving you more concrete techniques on how to handle a blank page. I think the one thing I can say is that I suspect this agony is all a part of it though. In all honesty, I kind of like not being in control, as much as I seek having it in my day to day life. (My therapist and I have discussed how much I thrive in chaos, despite fearing it.) I love the secrecy of a new project, and how it spills out of a writer without reason. I love how it goes into spaces it wasn’t supposed to. I love how it would be so easy to fail, but somehow it never does—because how can you really fail when you’re just doing what you’re supposed to? You’re just experimenting. This is the same thing I told myself back at the start, when I was looking at that first blank page, totally unsure.

I had hoped after “finishing” my manuscript I would feel a little bit older, a little bit wiser. Sort of like the girl who, on their 13th birthday is asked, “Does it feel different now?” Sort like the woman, who after getting married, is asked, “Does this change anything for you?” I don’t feel different, but I know I could be. I suspect I’ll find out more about how somewhere in the middle of all my chaos. Or maybe I won’t. There is some joy in being unsure, right at the start, isn’t there?

xx, Eshani