I’m a tinkerer by temperament. My most frequent nerdy joke with my writing students is that if you sat me down at a computer every day for a year when I was 22 and let me have at it, a year later I’d have come up with Pound’s two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro,” only it’d be shorter. So in my process in writing longer, in writing novels, I’ve had to trick myself out of tinkering. It’s led to a process that sounds batshit crazy when I describe it to people, but I’m deep into working on my fourth book so I guess it’s at least worked for a time.
At the beginning of each project, I take the Word file I’m working on and put the point size at 72. I select the percentage view at top and put it at 500 percent. This makes it so that I can only see a couple of letters onscreen, like this:
Now look, I get it. This sounds nutso. I’ll confess that I often can only last a month or so before I have to go back, put my file back to 12-point font (Baskerville, obvi) and 150 percent view. But while I’m working, this process somehow games a whole bunch of the hardest aspects of writing a novel: it gets me to stop tinkering. It keeps me from worrying about the quality of what’s come before (I can’t even see what’s come before!) and allows me just to forge ahead. Forging ahead means accruing words. And perhaps the only definition we can hold the novel to is that it is a drastic, almost unnatural, accrual of words.
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