Learning to love your own work--it's a struggle for a lot of writers I know. You get a burst of first-draft energy, blast out a few pages, print them and walk away smiling. And then after the celebratory beer, or a restful night of sleep, you go back and look at what you've written, and you question what the f@#* you were thinking. The prose seems lifeless, or cliché, or confusing. Characters who were so alive in your mind are inert on the page. The euphoria of composition flattens out under the weighty need for revision. So you get to work again, but the deeper you get into it, the less sure you are of yourself. In your uncertainty, you turn against the writing--or rather, you feel that it has turned against you. Instead of a beautiful bloom you've planted, it's a poisonous plant that will kill you if you get too close. Maybe you abandon the whole thing to a folder on your desktop. Maybe you keep at it, draft after draft, remembering the delight you took in that initial blossoming but, as in a relationship whose passion has wilted, wondering if you'll ever feel the early excitement again.
During the four years I spent writing Robin and Ruby, I suffered this in a big way. I started the book as a kind of challenge to myself: to write from Ruby MacKenzie's point of view, rescuing her from her "supporting" status in The World of Normal Boys, giving her the star treatment I always thought she deserved. I loved the idea of writing from a young woman's point of view, something I hadn't done much of before. I liked the idea of taking a break from the "gay fiction" of my previous two novels. And I was excited to set a story in the mid-1980s, amid New Wave music and Reagan-era politics and all that uptight fashion.
But somewhere along the way, I lost my trust in the story. What I thought would be a short novel was growing into something full-length. In order to tell Ruby's story, I needed her brother Robin, and suddenly he was taking over (it seemed I had a gay male protagonist, after all). The '80s turned out to be pretty complicated, too: I had to go back to the terrors of AIDS, to the confusions of emerging identity politics, to places in my own youth that weren't comfortable.
Worst of all, writing a sequel was hard work. Though I wasn't making up characters from scratch, I did have a lot of back-story to fill in (the two books take place eight years apart). In letting the characters grow up, I questioned if I was being true to them. Would readers of the first book--many of whom had written to me over the years, asking for a sequel--connect with this story? Would I let them down? The pressure of expectations started to overshadow the writing of the story, and I lost track of what I wanted to say and why I was even bothering. I fell out of love with Ruby and with Robin, and in the darkest hours, I lost faith in myself as a writer.
The key was perseverance--and the support of some of my close friends, who read the early drafts and encouraged me even when I was resistant to believing them. Along the way, it was important to take some time away from the manuscript, letting it solidify away from my judgmental editorial eye. There's really no better way to see your own work clearly than to leave it alone for a while. It's much easier to revise a chapter if the memory of having spent an entire weekend working on it isn't so immediate.
Last week I received the typeset page-proofs of Robin and Ruby (title page pictured above). It's finally starting to look like a novel. I can see how all that struggle, support and perseverance has created something concrete. The story is much bigger than I imagined it would be--and also more emotionally intimate. I think I might even be falling back in love with it again.