My First Manuscript: Avoidance and Confrontation

I’ve started writing my first manuscript. For years I’ve thought about a manuscript, why I should or shouldn’t write one, why it would or wouldn’t be published, who would or wouldn’t engage with it. I’ve thought about the stories I’d tell and which characters I’d include and whether or not I’d be able to do my own experience and imagination justice. I’ve laid awake thinking about how everyone would read it, and hate me, or love me, and want more of something I’d never be able to deliver. I’ve journaled extensively about my magnum opus, about a book of essays that would vibrate through my fingertips and out onto a page and how final or completely obsolete it would be. It was always a black and white, polarizing and dramatic experience that would make me a real writer.

I’d be like Kate Braverman, Didion and Plath before her, part of a lineage of manic depressive women who actually did something before they killed themselves or were found dead in their homes with unpublished work piled up in their kitchens next to an ash tray full of half smoked cigarettes. I’d be finally talented, cemented, finally someone who had something to show for years of thinking. A bad wife, a horrible mother, but a prolific author, which is all that has ever mattered.

Unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, books don’t write themselves. They don’t flow out of you, you don’t vomit them up after they’d been festering like poison inside of you. They don’t vibrate from fingers and out onto pages that melt from your hot stroke of genius. Unfortunately, books are a result of structure and care, something I’ve never quite managed to master. A manuscript that matters requires me to see my characters as sons and daughters. Writing not for myself, but to consider someone else, a reader. To ask a writer to stop writing selfishly, a group of notoriously narcissistic people, feels like an impossible task.

I’m writing my first manuscript and the first thing I did was clean my room. It felt disgusting and thick with distraction. Braverman wrote her first book in her kitchen, addicted to intravenous cocaine, because blood was easy to clean off of linoleum. She didn’t share her work, read the paper or listen to music out of fear of her work being influenced by external forces. She fiercely protected herself, her legacy, and the contents of her purple notebooks. I am not Kate Braverman, but I resonate with her. I felt cluttered mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I did my week old laundry and wiped down dusty surfaces, I made my environment conducive. I’d felt harassed by the manuscript I hadn’t even started. It was invading my day-to-day life, I felt constipated with it. Really, I cleaned my room because I was avoiding my laptop.

When there was no more cleaning or thinking or journalling I could do, when I had exhausted my imagination and tired of thinking about what would happen after the manuscript was finished, I sat outside and wrote my outline. I picked a story that I could see clearly, with characters I could do justice, with experiences I knew I could relay earnestly, and I started writing my fucking manuscript. I started with the image I couldn’t get rid of, like Joan Didion advised. I opened my manuscript up with an emaciated young woman waking up naked to find that she had a black eye, the origin of which she couldn’t recall. I wrote her vividly, with care, she is someone’s daughter; my mother’s daughter. I’d have to see her, like her, or at the very least tolerate her if I’d be carrying her through the next 80,000 words. I knew if I didn’t start writing my manuscript, all I’d ever be is someone who thought about writing a manuscript.